as so dangerous would appear to him in the
darkness.

When he awoke, his first faint impressions were that the Hygeia had
drifted out to sea, and then that a dense fog had drifted in and
enveloped it. But this illusion was speedily dispelled. The window-ledge
was piled high with snow. Snow filled the air, whirled about by a gale
that was banging the window-shutters and raging exactly like a Northern
tempest.

It swirled the snow about in waves and dark masses interspersed with
rifts of light, dark here and luminous there. The Rip-Raps were lost to
view. Out at sea black clouds hung in the horizon, heavy reinforcements
for the attacking storm. The ground was heaped with the still
fast-falling snow--ten inches deep he heard it said when he descended.
The Baltimore boat had not arrived, and could not get in. The waves at
the wharf rolled in, black and heavy, with a sullen beat, and the sky
shut down close to the water, except when a sudden stronger gust of wind
cleared a luminous space for an instant. Stormbound: that is what the
Hygeia was--a winter resort without any doubt.

The hotel was put to a test of its qualities. There was no getting
abroad in such a storm. But the Hygeia appeared at its best in this
emergency. The long glass corridors, where no one could venture in
the arctic temperature, gave, nevertheless, an air of brightness and
cheerfulness to the interior, where big fires blazed, and the company
were exalted into good-fellowship and gayety--a decorous Sunday
gayety--by the elemental war from which they were securely housed.

If the defenders of their country in the fortress mounted guard that
morning, the guests at the Hygeia did not see them, but a good many of
them mounted guard later at the hotel, and offered to the young
ladies there that protection which the brave like to give the fair.
Notwithstanding this, Mr. Stanhope King could not say the day was dull.
After a morning presumably spent over works of a religious character,
some of the young ladies, who had been the life of the excursion the
day before, showed their versatility by devising serious amusements
befitting the day, such as twenty questions on Scriptural subjects,
palmistry, which on another day is an aid to mild flirtation, and an
exhibition of mind-reading, not public--oh, dear, no--but with a favored
group in a private parlor. In none of these groups, however, did Mr.
King find Miss Benson, and when he encountered her after dinner