ither side of my waist--and swung me back into my place again.

"Little wretch!" he exclaimed. "How dare you disobey me?"

Then I was vexed, for it was ignominious to be treated as a child, when
I had wanted to aid him like a comrade.

"You are very unkind--very rude," I said. "You wouldn't dare to do that,
or speak like that to _Her_."

He laughed loudly. "What--haven't you forgotten 'Her?'" (As if I ever
could!) "Well, I may tell you, it's just because I did dare to 'speak
like that' to a woman, that I'm a chauffeur stuck in the snow with
another man's car, and the--"

"The rest is another epithet which concerns me, I suppose," I remarked
with dignity, though suddenly I felt the chill of the icy air far, far
more cruelly than I had felt it yet. I was so cold, in this white
desolation, that it seemed I must die soon. And it wouldn't matter at
all if I were buried under the drifts, to be found in the late spring
with violets growing out of the places where my eyes once had been.

"Yes," said he, in that cool way he has, which can be as irritating as a
chilblain. "It was an epithet concerning you, but luckily for me I
stopped to think before I spoke--an accomplishment I'm only just
beginning to learn."

I swallowed something much harder and bigger than a cannon ball, and
said nothing.

"Of course you're covered with snow up to your knees, foolish child!" He
was glaring ferociously at me.

"It doesn't matter."

"It does matter most infernally. Don't you know that you make no more
than a featherweight of difference to the car?"

"I feel as if I weighed a thousand pounds, now."

"It's that snow!"

"No. It's you. Your crossness. I _can't_ have people cross to me, on
lonely mountains, just when I'm trying to help them."

His glare of rage turned to a stare of surprise. "Cross? Do you think I
was cross to you?"

"Yes. And you just stopped in time, or you would have been worse."

"Oh, I see," he said. "You thought that the 'epithet' was going to be
invidious, did you?"

"Naturally."

"Well, it wasn't. I--no, I _won't_ say it! That would be the last folly.
But--I wasn't going to be cross. I can't have you think that, whatever
happens. Now sit still and be good, while I push again."

I weighed no more than half the thousand pounds now, and the cannon ball
had dissolved like a chocolate cream; but the car stood like a rock,
fixed, immutable.

"There ought to be half a dozen of me," said the chauffeur. "Lo