Never before had she undressed so swiftly nor felt grateful for thick woollen blankets on a hard bed.  Gradually she grew warm.  The blackness, too, seemed rather comforting.

“I’m only twenty miles from Glenn,” she whispered.  “How strange!  I wonder will he be glad.”  She felt a sweet, glowing assurance of that.  Sleep did not come readily.  Excitement had laid hold of her nerves, and for a long time she lay awake.  After a while the chug of motor cars, the click of pool balls, the murmur of low voices all ceased.  Then she heard a sound of wind outside, an intermittent, low moaning, new to her ears, and somehow pleasant.  Another sound greeted her—­the musical clanging of a clock that struck the quarters of the hour.  Some time late sleep claimed her.

Upon awakening she found she had overslept, necessitating haste upon her part.  As to that, the temperature of the room did not admit of leisurely dressing.  She had no adequate name for the feeling of the water.  And her fingers grew so numb that she made what she considered a disgraceful matter of her attire.

Downstairs in the lobby another cheerful red fire burned in the grate.  How perfectly satisfying was an open fireplace!  She thrust her numb hands almost into the blaze, and simply shook with the tingling pain that slowly warmed out of them.  The lobby was deserted.  A sign directed her to a dining room in the basement, where of the ham and eggs and strong coffee she managed to partake a little.  Then she went upstairs into the lobby and out into the street.

A cold, piercing air seemed to blow right through her.  Walking to the near corner, she paused to look around.  Down the main street flowed a leisurely stream of pedestrians, horses, cars, extending between two blocks of low buildings.  Across from where she stood lay a vacant lot, beyond which began a line of neat, oddly constructed houses, evidently residences of the town.  And then lifting her gaze, instinctively drawn by something obstructing the sky line, she was suddenly struck with surprise and delight.

“Oh! how perfectly splendid!” she burst out.

Two magnificent mountains loomed right over her, sloping up with majestic sweep of green and black timber, to a ragged tree-fringed snow area that swept up cleaner and whiter, at last to lift pure glistening peaks, noble and sharp, and sunrise-flushed against the blue.

Carley had climbed Mont Blanc and she had seen the Matterhorn, but they had never struck such amaze and admiration from her as these twin peaks of her native land.

“What mountains are those?” she asked a passer-by.

“San Francisco Peaks, ma’am,” replied the man.

“Why, they can’t be over a mile away!” she said.

“Eighteen miles, ma’am,” he returned, with a grin.  “Shore this Arizonie air is deceivin’.”

“How strange,” murmured Carley.  “It’s not that way in the Adirondacks.”