“I wish to heaven I’d wake up and find all this a dream,” I called back over my shoulder.  But they were busy with costumes and getting some folks they knew from town to take the different parts and they never even heard me.  The last few yards they snowballed each other and me.  I tell you I felt a hundred years old.

We got into the shelter-house by my crawling through a window, and when we had lighted the fire and hung up the lantern, it didn’t seem so bad.  The place had been closed since summer, and it seemed colder than outside, but those two did the barn dance then and there.  There were two rooms, and Mr. Dick had always used the back one to hide in.  It’s a good thing Mrs. Dick was not a suspicious person.  Many a woman would have wondered when she saw him lift a board in the floor and take out a rusty tin basin, a cake of soap, a moldy towel, a can of sardines, a tooth-brush and a rubber carriage robe to lay over the rafters under the hole in the roof.  But it’s been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.

It was about four when I left them, sitting on a soap box in front of the fire toasting sardines on the end of Mr. Dick’s walking-stick.  Mrs. Dick made me put on her sealskin coat, and I took the lantern, leaving them in the firelight.  They’d gone back to the captive balloon idea and were wondering if they couldn’t get it copyrighted!

I took a short cut home, crawling through the barbed-wire fence and going through the deer park.  I was too tired and cold to think.  I stumbled down the hill to the house, and just before I got to the corner I heard voices, and the shuffling of feet through the snow.  The next instant a lantern came around the corner of the house.  Mr. Thoburn was carrying it, and behind him were the bishop, Mike the bath man, and Mr. Pierce.

“It’s like that man Moody,” the bishop was saying angrily, “to send the girl—­”

“Piffle!” snarled Mr. Thoburn.  “If ever a woman was able to take care of herself—­” And then they saw me, and they all stopped and stared.

“Good gracious, girl!” said the bishop, with his dressing-gown blowing out straight behind him in the wind.  “We thought you’d been buried in a drift!”

“I don’t see why!” I retorted defiantly.  “Can’t I go out to my own spring-house without having a posse after me to bring me back?”

“Ordinarily,” said Mr. Thoburn, with his snaky eyes on me, “I think I may say that you might go almost anywhere without my turning out to recover you.  But Mrs. Moody is having hysterics.”

Mrs. Moody!  I’d forgotten the Moodys!

“She is convinced that you have drowned yourself, head down, in the spring,” Mr. Pierce said in his pleasant way.  “You’ve been gone two hours, you know.”

He took my arm and turned me toward the house.  I was dazed.

“In answer to your urgent inquiry,” Mr. Thoburn called after me, disagreeably, “Mr. Moody has not died.  He is asleep.  But, by the way, where’s the spring water?”