“Come along!  Get in quick!  It’s as slippery as thunder on this turn,” he cried, leaning over to reach out a hand to her.

She laughed back at him:  “Good-night!  I’m not getting in.”

By this time they had passed beyond Frome’s earshot and he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes as they continued to move along the crest of the slope above him.  He saw Eady, after a moment, jump from the cutter and go toward the girl with the reins over one arm.  The other he tried to slip through hers; but she eluded him nimbly, and Frome’s heart, which had swung out over a black void, trembled back to safety.  A moment later he heard the jingle of departing sleigh bells and discerned a figure advancing alone toward the empty expanse of snow before the church.

In the black shade of the Varnum spruces he caught up with her and she turned with a quick “Oh!”

“Think I’d forgotten you, Matt?” he asked with sheepish glee.

She answered seriously:  “I thought maybe you couldn’t come back for me.”

“Couldn’t?  What on earth could stop me?”

“I knew Zeena wasn’t feeling any too good to-day.”

“Oh, she’s in bed long ago.”  He paused, a question struggling in him.  “Then you meant to walk home all alone?”

“Oh, I ain’t afraid!” she laughed.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and grey under the stars.  He brought his question out.

“If you thought I hadn’t come, why didn’t you ride back with Denis Eady?”

“Why, where were you?  How did you know?  I never saw you!”

Her wonder and his laughter ran together like spring rills in a thaw.  Ethan had the sense of having done something arch and ingenious.  To prolong the effect he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out, in a growl of rapture:  “Come along.”

He slipped an arm through hers, as Eady had done, and fancied it was faintly pressed against her side. but neither of them moved.  It was so dark under the spruces that he could barely see the shape of her head beside his shoulder.  He longed to stoop his cheek and rub it against her scarf.  He would have liked to stand there with her all night in the blackness.  She moved forward a step or two and then paused again above the dip of the Corbury road.  Its icy slope, scored by innumerable runners, looked like a mirror scratched by travellers at an inn.

“There was a whole lot of them coasting before the moon set,” she said.

“Would you like to come in and coast with them some night?” he asked.

“Oh, would you, Ethan?  It would be lovely!”

“We’ll come to-morrow if there’s a moon.”

She lingered, pressing closer to his side.  “Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum came just as near running into the big elm at the bottom.  We were all sure they were killed.”  Her shiver ran down his arm.  “Wouldn’t it have been too awful?  They’re so happy!”