Still he labored along. They were bitter thoughts now in Mr. Dunmore’s mind. He must keep going. Helena would never know--Helena would always think--and he so young, so well, so strong, to die like a dog of the cold--like a beast on the plains. If he could only find himself on level ground once more; if only the storm would cease roaring; if a friendly light would shine out anywhere! How trivial here seemed all the concerns about which he had vexed himself! What mere dust and ashes! It wasn’t possible he was the man that had those undignified, those cruel, words with his wife this morning! This morning? Oh, it seemed a year ago! If he ever reached home again, it would be another man; he would not suffer the winds of heaven to visit her too roughly. Then the beads of cold sweat broke out on him an instant to think that possibly now he should never reach it. His knees trembled; his feet were like balls of ice; he moved them as if they belonged to somebody else. Every few steps he stumbled--he fell--and every time it was harder to rise. At last, utterly helpless, he lay there, numb, freezing, breathless, hardly conscious, the storm whistling and screaming over him, the drift covering him. A dull red light swam across his sight; yes, he thought vaguely, the glow before his eyes of the blood bursting upon his brain. And yet, he thought again presently, life reviving within him, was that the way death by freezing came? This red glow, was it not possibly some lantern, some lamp, with its little blaze magnified by the driving of the snow? If he could halloo and make any one hear him--He tried again and again, and yet again; but his voice fainted, and he fell back, slowly losing consciousness of all things but that red glow, as it shone and broke and formed again under the shifting clouds of flying flakes. How soft and rich its ruby warmth, like the heart of some great flower--of some great poppy! And then the truth smote the wretched man, smote him with a crueler blow than any smiting of the storm. He was doomed, he was dying, he was freezing to death, two rods from his own door!

* * * * *

Tired out with her temper and her tears, Mrs. Helena slept for several hours the sleep of those whose cause is just, her head buried in the down, deaf to all the noises of the outside world. When she woke at last it was some stronger thrust of the turmoil of the tempest that made her suddenly sit up on the bed and shiver with an indefinable terror. She hurriedly bathed her face and smoothed her hair, and ran down-stairs where the maids were, and the cats, and the great St. Bernard dog, a need of some sort of companionship overpowering her in this war of the elements.

But the maids were busy, and Sauveur was asleep, and the cat sat on the window-sill watching the eddying snow in an uncanny way, and the only thing to reassure her was the portrait of her husband over the fireplace, the handsome, smiling, loving face, the eager, tender eyes that seemed to follow her. She looked away angrily, and then she looked back in spite of herself, and then she fell into her own low chair, and covered her face with her hands, and tears began to trickle through her fingers--tears of lonesomeness, of down-heartedness, of--yes, of repentance, repentance that she could ever have said what she had said that morning to her husband. How kind he had always been to her! how indulgent! how fond! And just because he had felt a little captious and irritated she had insulted and outraged him, and abused him in her thoughts afterwards, and had let him go off in the storm, thinking she never wanted to see his face again. She had said--yes, she had said--she never wanted to see his face again. Oh, what if Fate took her at her word, and she never did? What sort of a thing would life be to her without him? What-- But she could not let herself think such a thought. She ran up-stairs and put on her pretty green gown, and brushed a fresh curl into her yellow locks, and picked some of her geraniums to lay on the luncheon-table, and had the fire brightened, and went to the piano and began to play his favorite love-songs, and when she ceased the luncheon-time had long passed, and yet her husband had not come.

It was later than she had thought; it was wearing into the afternoon; the gale was increasing. If it was like this up here among the hills, what must it be down on the sea-coast, with the sailors clinging to the icy shrouds? Ah, what must it be here to any one out on the hills alone in these blowing clouds of sleet and snow? Her heart stood still with the thought. Was Mark out yet? No; he had only gone off in a pet; he had stayed out just to frighten her. Was it possible that he could do so? For a pause her anger flashed up again; and then with a wild, stifled cry she began to walk the floor like a wild woman. No; it was not possible. Mark had always tried to save her from all worriment and vexation. He would have come back if he had not been hindered. He never stayed angry an hour. He had gone up the mountain to the shepherds, and he had become bewildered and had lost his way.

In a heart-beat now, Mrs. Dunmore had the house alarmed, and the servants sent out in all directions, only to return reporting that it was out of the question to catch the breath in the wind and snow, and that Mr. Dunmore must long since have taken shelter somewhere, for no man alive could undertake to weather such a gale as this. No man alive, Mrs. Dunmore kept repeating then. Perhaps he was not alive; perhaps he had gone down under the stress of the mighty blast, and the drifts had deepened over him--her husband, her darling, her Mark! She sat a little while looking into the fire stupidly, while a thousand scenes of their younger days started up before her eyes--summer mornings in the boat upon the narrow, shadowy river; winter evenings in each other’s arms; long, slow drives about the flowery country lanes; strolls on starry nights; the love, the hope, the joy, in those days when they were all in all to one another, and wanted nothing more; and then she started and ran to the window and searched the storm, so thick and white as to be impenetrable; and suddenly now so gray, so dark, in the quick falling of the night, as to be full of horror.

Oh, to think that she, with her sharp tongue, her evil temper, had shut her husband out into such a wild night as this! How wicked! how infamous! If he did not come soon her heart would break. If she could only put her arms round him once again and beg him to forgive her!

Sauveur came and stood with her, gazing as wistfully into the storm, and whining softly. And the maid lighted the lamp with the red poppy shade upon it; and then she could see nothing but the flakes sweeping by the pane, like sparks of fire; and she sank on her knees by the window, the dog beside her, and knew and felt nothing but blackness.

Suddenly she felt the dog trembling through all his great shaggy frame; he sat up, his ears pricked and alert, and then all at once he sprang to the door with a single bound and a sharp cry; and she sprang after him, calling the maids and the man, and threw wide the door and rushed out, regardless of all things but the one, the others behind her, floundering, falling, without breath, up again, on, till the dog’s glad cry told the story, and among them they had Mr. Dunmore’s shoulders up, and they dragged him inside the gate and the porch, and shut hard the door against the storm, and felt ready and willing to faint, but knew there was no time to do it in.

Mr. Dunmore had his breakfast in bed the next morning, languid, but uninjured by so much as a serious frost-bite, and feeling supremely blest among his pillows, with the fire crackling on the hearth, the flowers blooming in the window, and the storm still roaring on outside, while his wife fed him with daintiest morsels, and Sauveur now and then laid a caressing nose on the coverlid.

“To think,” she said, “that I ever could have spoken so to you, my darling! I must have been out of my head. Oh, I will never spend a cent again without consulting you first, Mark dear!”

“You never spent a cent too much in all your life, my precious!” he exclaimed. “Did I say you did? Some evil spirit took possession of me. It was never I--”

“Just think what you have suffered--oh, just think of it, dearest! And all for the sake of a red paper poppy! I will go and throw it into the fire this moment.”

“You will do nothing of the kind,” he cried. “I never in all the world saw anything so beautiful as that red paper poppy. It was a lucky day you bought it; it was my preserver and benefactor; it gave me strength to halloo and be heard. I mean to treasure it all my life, and have it buried with me at last.”

“And with me too,” she cried, falling on his neck, to the danger of the breakfast things; “for we will be buried in one grave.”

BEST-LAID SCHEMES

BEST-LAID SCHEMES

Certainly it was a charming home, that in which Mr. Pearmain had installed his young wife: a stone cottage with mullioned windows from floor to ceiling, with pointed gables and divers roofs and vanes, and with an infinitude of prairie-roses and Virginia-creepers planted beside the walls, to grow in the future till the house should be a bower. And inside it was what all good house-keepers called fairy-land. Here Mr. and Mrs. Pearmain had given full scope to their notions, whose name was legion; not a bit of paint in the house to be cleaned, no carpets to secrete poison, but hard-wood, inlaid floors and rugs, and then a conservatory and grapery on a tiny scale, and closets without counting; while as for the kitchen, the conveniences there were simply miraculous. And when all this was done and inspected and occupied and enjoyed, it was no wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Pearmain looked about for something else on which to expend their whims and vagaries. Their way of life was so good that it would have been selfishness not to wish others to share it. Little Harry Pearmain was exactly three years old when they had fully decided to convert to that way their next neighbor, but lately arrived, a school-mate of Mrs. Pearmain’s who had married a dear old friend of Mr. Pearmain’s--little Mrs. Morley, whose black eyes had a strange sharp snap in them when things displeased her. And it was one morning when Mrs. Morley had come over to profit by her friend’s experience in the matter of dainty needle-work that the campaign began.