tion of taking Miss Ardea out to see the devastation which, by
this time, was beginning to be apparent on all sides.

There was a protest, as a matter of course, quite shrill on the part of
Miss Euphrasia, but not absolutely prohibitory on the Major's. Morelock
saw to it that his charge was well wrapped; in her haste and agitation
Ardea would have overlooked the common precautions. They used the side
door for a sally-port, and were soon slipping and sliding almost
helplessly across the lawn. Walking was next to impossible, and the
crashes of falling branches and trees came like the detonations of
quick-firing guns. The minister locked arms with the determined young
woman at his side and picked the way for her as he could.

"This is something awful for you," he said, when they had covered half
the distance to the nearest pasture wall. "Does the necessity warrant
it?"

"It does," she rejoined; and they pressed on in awe-inspired silence to
the gate which opened on the pasture grove.

The quarter of a mile intervening between the gate and that side of the
inclosure bounded by the lower slope of the mountain was truly a passage
perilous. A dozen times in the crossing Ardea fell, and so far from
being able to save her, Morelock could do no more than fall with her.
Once a great limb of a spreading oak split off with a clashing of ice
and came sweeping down to give them the narrowest of escapes; and after
that they kept the open where they might.

At a rude rock stile over the limestone boundary wall at the mountain's
foot they paused to take breath.

"Is there much more of it?" asked the escort, regretting for the first
time in his life, perhaps, that he had so studiously ignored the
athletic side of his seminary training.

"The distance is nothing," she panted. "But we must take the path for a
little way up the mountain. No, don't tell me it can't be done; it
_must_ be done,"--this in answer to his dubious scanning of the glassy
ascent.

Again his good breeding asserted itself.

"Certainly it can be done, if you so desire." And he picked up a stone
and patiently hammered the ice from the steps of the stile so she could
cross in safety.

It was no more than a three-hundred-yard dash up the slope to the
dog-keeper's cabin in the little glen, but it was a fight for inches.
Every stone, every hand-hold of bush or shrub or tuft of dried grass was
an icy treachery. Ardea knew the mountain and the path, and was less
he