o of me whatever you do, and
oh, keep awake."

"Serene," said Senior, closing his eyes again peacefully.

With a sob of horror and despair, Acton lurched down the hill, dragging
his companion with him. He kept repeating, as though it were a formula:
"Down the slope and bear to the left" again and again.

What the next half-hour held of misery, horror, and utter despair, Acton
cannot, even now, recall without a shudder. They stumbled and staggered
downwards like drunken men. The snow blinded him, and the dragging
weight of Senior on his arm was an aching agony, from which, above all
things, he must not free himself.

Then, as the very climax to hopeless despair, Senior rolled heavily
forward and lay prone, as helpless as a log, his face buried in the
snow! His cap had fallen off, and Acton watched the black curls
whitening in the storm.

How long he remained there, crouched before the motionless body, he does
not know; only that he tried many times to shake the dying youth from
the terrible torpor in vain. Senior breathed heavily, and that was all.

All hope had died in Acton's breast. He threw himself forward beside
his friend, and sobbed, with his face in the snow.

A sound reached Acton's ears which brought him to his feet with a bound.
He placed his hand to his ear, and sent his very soul to the effort to
fix the sound again, above the roar of the wind. It was the deep, but
not distant, low of cattle.

A third time did the low boom through the storm.

Almost frantic with a living hope, Acton turned to Senior. He raised the
unconscious youth, and, by a mighty effort, got him upon his shoulders,
and then staggered off in the direction of the sound. He has a faint
recollection that he rolled over into the snow twice, that he waded
across a river, with the water up to his arm-pits, and always that there
was a weight on his neck that almost throttled him.... He felt that he
was going mad. Then at last--it seemed many hours--a building, wreathed
in white, seemed to spring up out of the storm. Delirious with joy,
Acton staggered towards it with his burden. Some figures moved towards
him, and Acton shouted for help as he pitched forward for the last time
into the snow. He dimly remembers strong hands raising him up and
helping him through a farmyard, which seemed somehow to tremble with the
low of cattle, and then he was in a chair, and a fire in front of him.

* * * * *

An hour o