He had risen.  He had blushed.  He had stammered.  He had contrived to whisper:  “It was the Schooner Hesperus.”  And then, in a corner of the room, a little girl, for no properly explained reason, had burst out crying.  She had yelled, she had bellowed, and would not be comforted; and in the ensuing confusion Ashe had escaped to the woodpile at the bottom of the garden, saved by a miracle.

All his life he had remembered the gratitude he had felt for that little timely girl, and never until now had he experienced any other similar spasm.  But as he looked at Joan he found himself renewing that emotion of fifteen years ago.

She was about to speak.  In a sort of trance he watched her lips part.  He waited almost reverently for the first words she should speak to him in her new role of the only authentic goddess.

“Isn’t it a shame?” she said.  “I’ve just put a penny in the chocolate slot machine—­and it’s empty!  I’ve a good mind to write to the company.”

Ashe felt as though he were listening to the strains of some grand sweet anthem.

The small but sturdy porter, weary of his work among the milk cans, or perhaps—­let us not do him an injustice even in thought—­having finished it, approached them.

“The cart from the castle’s here.”

In the gloom beyond him there gleamed a light which had not been there before.  The meditative snort of a horse supported his statement.  He began to deal as authoritatively with Mr. Peters’ steamer trunk as he had dealt with the milk cans.

“At last!” said Joan.  “I hope it’s a covered cart.  I’m frozen.  Let’s go and see.”

Ashe followed her with the gait of an automaton.

* * *

Cold is the ogre that drives all beautiful things into hiding.  Below the surface of a frost-bound garden there lurk hidden bulbs, which are only biding their time to burst forth in a riot of laughing color; but shivering Nature dare not put forth her flowers until the ogre has gone.  Not otherwise does cold suppress love.  A man in an open cart on an English Spring night may continue to be in love; but love is not the emotion uppermost in his bosom.  It shrinks within him and waits for better times.

The cart was not a covered cart.  It was open to the four winds of heaven, of which the one at present active proceeded from the bleak east.  To this fact may be attributed Ashe’s swift recovery from the exalted mood into which Joan’s smile had thrown him, his almost instant emergence from the trance.  Deep down in him he was aware that his attitude toward Joan had not changed, but his conscious self was too fully occupied with the almost hopeless task of keeping his blood circulating, to permit of thoughts of love.  Before the cart had traveled twenty yards he was a mere chunk of frozen misery.