“Yes, and we don’t know when to begin!  We can’t go on all night, you know,” said Jock; “and if we begin too soon, we may have no voice left just at the right time.”

“It is half-past seven now,” said Armine, looking at his watch.  “The food was to be at seven, so they must have missed us by this time.”

“They won’t think anything of it till it gets dark.”

“No.  Give them till half-past eight.  Somewhere about nine or half-past it may be worth while to yodel.”

“And how awfully cold it will be by that time.  And my foot is aching like fun!”

Armine offered to rub it, and there was some occupation in this and in watching the darkening of the evening, which was very gradual in the dense white fog that shut them in with a damp, cold, moist curtain of undeveloped snow.

The poor lads were thinly clad for a summer walk, Jock had left his plaid behind him, and they were beginning to feel only too vividly that it was past supper-time, when they could dimly see that it was past nine, and began to shout, but they soon found this severe and exhausting.

Armine suggested counting ten between each cry, which would husband their powers and give them time to listen for an answer.  Yet even thus there was an empty, feeble sound about their cries, so that Jock observed—-

“It’s very odd that when there’s no good in making a row, one can make it fast enough, and now when it would be of some use, one seems to have no more voice than a little sick mouse.”

“Not so much, I think,” said Armine.  “It is hunger partly.”

“Hark!  That sounded like something.”

Invigorated by hope they shouted again, but though several times they did hear a distant yodel, the hope that it was in answer to themselves soon faded, as the sound became more distant, and their own exertions ended soon in an utter breakdown—-into a hoarse squeak on Jock’s part and a weak, hungry cry on Armine’s.  Jock’s face was covered with tears, as much from the strain as from despair.

“There!” he sighed, “there’s our last chance gone!  We are in for a night of it.”

“It can’t be a very long night,” Armine said, through chattering teeth.  “It’s only a week to the longest day.”

“Much that will matter to us,” said Jock, impatiently.  “We shall be frozen long before morning.”

“We must keep ourselves awake.”

“You little ass,” said poor Jock, in the petulant inconsistency of his distress; “it is not come to that yet.”

Armine did not answer at once.  He was kneeling against the rock, and a strange thrill came over Jock, forbidding him again to say-—"It was not come to that,” but a shoot of aching pain in his ankle presently drew forth an exclamation.

Armine again offered to rub it for him, and the two arranged themselves for this purpose, the curtain of damp woolliness seeming to thicken on them.  There was a moon somewhere, and the darkness was not total, but the dreariness and isolation were the more felt from the absence of all outlines being manifest.  They even lost sight of their own hands if they stretched out their arms, and their light summer garments were already saturated with damp and would soon freeze.  No part of their bodies was free from that deadly chill save where they could press against one another.