Faxon’s obvious course was to struggle through the drifts to the village, and there rout out a sleigh to convey him to Weymore; but what if, on his arrival at Mrs. Culme’s, no one remembered to ask him what this devotion to duty had cost?  That, again, was one of the contingencies he had expensively learned to look out for, and the perspicacity so acquired told him it would be cheaper to spend the night at the Northridge inn, and advise Mrs. Culme of his presence there by telephone.  He had reached this decision, and was about to entrust his luggage to a vague man with a lantern who seemed to have some loose connection with the railway company, when his hopes were raised by the sound of sleigh bells.

Two vehicles were just dashing up to the station, and from the foremost there sprang a young man swathed in furs.

“Weymore?—­No, these are not the Weymore sleighs.”

The voice was that of the youth who had jumped to the platform—­a voice so agreeable that, in spite of the words, it fell reassuringly on Faxon’s ears.  At the same moment the wandering station-lantern, casting a transient light on the speaker, showed his features to be in the pleasantest harmony with his voice.  He was very fair and very young—­hardly in the twenties, Faxon thought—­but his face, though full of a morning freshness, was a trifle too thin and fine-drawn, as though a vivid spirit contended in him with a strain of physical weakness.  Faxon was perhaps the quicker to notice such delicacies of balance because his own temperament hung on lightly vibrating nerves, which yet, as he believed, would never quite swing him beyond the arc of a normal sensibility.

“You expected a sleigh from Weymore?” the youth continued, standing beside Faxon like a slender column of fur.

Mrs. Culme’s secretary explained his difficulty, and the newcomer brushed it aside with a contemptuous “Oh, Mrs. Culme!” that carried both speakers a long way toward reciprocal understanding.

“But then you must be—­” The youth broke off with a smile of interrogation.

“The new secretary?  Yes.  But apparently there are no notes to be answered this evening.”  Faxon’s laugh deepened the sense of solidarity which had so promptly established itself between the two.

The newcomer laughed also.  “Mrs. Culme,” he explained, “was lunching at my uncle’s today, and she said you were due this evening.  But seven hours is a long time for Mrs. Culme to remember anything.”

“Well,” said Faxon philosophically, “I suppose that’s one of the reasons why she needs a secretary.  And I’ve always the inn at Northridge,” he concluded.

The youth laughed again.  He was at the age when predicaments are food for gaiety.

“Oh, but you haven’t, though!  It burned down last week.”

“The deuce it did!” said Faxon; but the humor of the situation struck him also before its inconvenience.  His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement.