t role in Sylvia's drama, she was
destined never to know his name.

The Colonel looked back over the sleighload, shouted out "All aboard!"
loosened the reins, and snapped his whip over the horses' heads. They
leaped forward with so violent a spring that the front runners of the
long sled were for an instant lifted into the air. Immediately all the
joyful shrieking and screaming which had gone on before, became as
essential silence compared to the delighted uproar which now rose from
the sleigh. The jerk had thrown most of the young people over backward
into each other's arms and laps, where, in a writhing, promiscuous
mass, they roared and squealed out their joy in the joke, and made
ineffectual and not very determined efforts to extricate themselves.
Sylvia had seen the jerk coming and saved herself by a clutch forward
at the dashboard. Glancing back, she saw that Jerry and Eleanor Hubert
still sat upright; although the gay young man beside them had let
himself go backward into the waving arms and legs, and, in a frenzy of
high spirits, was shouting and kicking and squirming with the others.
It was a joke after his own heart.

Colonel Fiske, so far from slackening his pace to help his young
guests out of their predicament, laughed loudly and cracked his whip
over the horses' ears. They went up the long, curving driveway like
a whirlwind, and drew up under the porte-cochere of a very large
brick-and-stone house with another abrupt jerk which upset those in
the sleigh who had succeeded in regaining their seats. Pandemonium
broke out again, in the midst of which Sylvia saw that Mrs. Fiske had
come to the doorway and stood in it with a timid smile. The Colonel
did not look at her, Jerry nodded carelessly to her as he passed in,
and of all the disheveled, flushed, and laughing young people who
crowded past her into the house, only Sylvia and Eleanor recognized
her existence. The others went past her without a glance, exclaimed at
the lateness of the hour, cried out that they must go and "fix up" for
lunch, and ran upstairs, filling the house with their voices. Sylvia
heard one girl cry to another, "_Oh_, I've had such a good time! I've
hollered till I'm hoarse!"

After luncheon, a meal at which more costly food was served than
Sylvia had ever before seen, Jerry suggested between puffs of the
cigarette he was lighting that they have a game of billiards. Most of
the young people trooped off after him into the billiard-room