When he awoke, his first faint impressions were that the Hygeia had drifted out to sea, and then that a dense fog had drifted in and enveloped it.  But this illusion was speedily dispelled.  The window-ledge was piled high with snow.  Snow filled the air, whirled about by a gale that was banging the window-shutters and raging exactly like a Northern tempest.

It swirled the snow about in waves and dark masses interspersed with rifts of light, dark here and luminous there.  The Rip-Raps were lost to view.  Out at sea black clouds hung in the horizon, heavy reinforcements for the attacking storm.  The ground was heaped with the still fast-falling snow—­ten inches deep he heard it said when he descended.  The Baltimore boat had not arrived, and could not get in.  The waves at the wharf rolled in, black and heavy, with a sullen beat, and the sky shut down close to the water, except when a sudden stronger gust of wind cleared a luminous space for an instant.  Stormbound:  that is what the Hygeia was—­a winter resort without any doubt.

The hotel was put to a test of its qualities.  There was no getting abroad in such a storm.  But the Hygeia appeared at its best in this emergency.  The long glass corridors, where no one could venture in the arctic temperature, gave, nevertheless, an air of brightness and cheerfulness to the interior, where big fires blazed, and the company were exalted into good-fellowship and gayety—­a decorous Sunday gayety —­by the elemental war from which they were securely housed.

If the defenders of their country in the fortress mounted guard that morning, the guests at the Hygeia did not see them, but a good many of them mounted guard later at the hotel, and offered to the young ladies there that protection which the brave like to give the fair.  Notwithstanding this, Mr. Stanhope King could not say the day was dull.  After a morning presumably spent over works of a religious character, some of the young ladies, who had been the life of the excursion the day before, showed their versatility by devising serious amusements befitting the day, such as twenty questions on Scriptural subjects, palmistry, which on another day is an aid to mild flirtation, and an exhibition of mind-reading, not public—­oh, dear, no—­but with a favored group in a private parlor.  In none of these groups, however, did Mr. King find Miss Benson, and when he encountered her after dinner in the reading-room, she confessed that she had declined an invitation to assist at the mind-reading, partly from a lack of interest, and partly from a reluctance to dabble in such things.

“Surely you are not uninterested in what is now called psychical research?” he asked.

“That depends,” said Irene.  “If I were a physician, I should like to watch the operation of the minds of ‘sensitives’ as a pathological study.  But the experiments I have seen are merely exciting and unsettling, without the least good result, with a haunting notion that you are being tricked or deluded.  It is as much as I can do to try and know my own mind, without reading the minds of others.”