uzzing in my ears--I can't hear at all."

Miss Schuyler listened for what appeared an interminable time, and
wondered afterwards that she had borne the tension without a sign. The
great stillness grew overwhelming now the team had stopped, and there was
that in the utter cold and sense of desolation that weighed her courage
down. She felt her insignificance in the face of that vast emptiness and
destroying frost, and wondered at the rashness of herself and Hetty and
Larry Grant who had ventured to believe they could make any change in the
great inexorable scheme of which everything that was to be was part. Miss
Schuyler was not fanciful, but during the last hour she had borne a heavy
strain, and the deathly stillness of the northwestern waste under the
Arctic frost is apt to leave its impress on the most unimaginative.

Suddenly very faint and far off, a rhythmic throbbing crept out of the
darkness, and Flora Schuyler, who, fearing her ears had deceived her at
first, dared not speak, felt her chilled blood stir when Hetty flung back
her head.

"Flo--can't you hear it? Tell me!"

Miss Schuyler nodded, for she could not trust her voice just then; but the
sound had grown louder while she listened and now it seemed flung back by
the rise. Then, she lost it altogether as Hetty shook the reins and the
sleigh went on again. In a few minutes, however, there was an answer to
the thud of hoofs, and another soft drumming that came quivering through
it sank and swelled again. By and by a clear, musical jingling broke in,
and at last, when a moving object swung round a bend of the rise, a voice
that rang harsh and commanding reached them.

"Pull right up there, and wait until we see who you are," it said.

"Larry!" cried Hetty; and the second time her strained voice broke and
died away. "Larry!"

It was less than a minute later when a sleigh stopped close in front of
them, and, leaving one man in it, Grant sprang stiffly down. It took Hetty
a minute or two more to make her warning plain, and Miss Schuyler found it
necessary to put in a word of amplification occasionally. Then, Grant
signed to the other man.

"Will you drive Miss Schuyler slowly in the direction she was going,
Breckenridge?" he said. "Hetty, I want to talk to you, and can't keep you
here."

Hetty was too cold to reflect, and, almost before she knew how he had
accomplished it, found herself in Grant's sleigh and the man piling the
robes about her. When he wh