He carefully drove the horses into stalls.

Her toes were coals of pain.  “Let’s run for the house,” she said.

“Can’t.  Not yet.  Might never find it.  Might get lost ten feet away from it.  Sit over in this stall, near the horses.  We’ll rush for the house when the blizzard lifts.”

“I’m so stiff!  I can’t walk!”

He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and boots, stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled at her laces.  He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the buffalo robe and horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box.  She was drowsy, hemmed in by the storm.  She sighed: 

“You’re so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of blood or storm or——­”

“Used to it.  Only thing that’s bothered me was the chance the ether fumes might explode, last night.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloroform like I told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty inflammable, especially with that lamp right by the table.  But I had to operate, of course—­wound chuck-full of barnyard filth that way.”

“You knew all the time that——­Both you and I might have been blown up?  You knew it while you were operating?”

“Sure.  Didn’t you?  Why, what’s the matter?”

CHAPTER XVI

Kennicott was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her a diamond bar-pin.  But she could not persuade herself that he was much interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated, the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden messages.  He said only: 

“Nice way to fix things, all right.  What do you say we go down to Jack Elder’s and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?”

She remembered her father’s Christmas fantasies:  the sacred old rag doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the judge opened the children’s scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus.  She remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota.  She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled——­

She muttered unsteadily, “Must run up and put on my shoes—­slippers so cold.”  In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat on the slippery edge of the tub and wept.

II

Kennicott had five hobbies:  medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting.  It is not certain in what order he preferred them.  Solid though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine—­his admiration of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus—­none of these beatified him as did motoring.