“Every time I was awake you were asleep, ’cause I heard you talking silly things,” said Dorothy indignantly.
[16]
]“Every time I was awake you had your eyes screwed up fast, so you must have been asleep,” contended Phyl.
Dorothy was summoning a fresh argument, but Phyl’s tender thoughts fled out into the snow.
“Think how they’ll be shivering!” she said. “Come on, Dolly.”
They dragged the eider-down quilt off the bed, doubled it, and wrapped it round the shoulders of both of them, for they were quite alive to the cold. Then they stumbled off softly and awkwardly, thus pinioned together, along the passage, down the dark, still stairs, and to the side-door in the hall.
It was Phyl’s cold little hand that softly undid the bolt, while Dorothy, with impartial justice, held the wrap round the two pairs of shoulders. They crept down the steps, their loose shoes crushing the fresh-fallen snow in a way that alarmed them for a moment lest the house should be aroused. But then the keen mysterious terrors of the white-patched darkness assailed them and made them callous to all other fears.
What was that eerie-looking thing crouched there by the porch? Phyl whispered, in a would-be stout voice, that it was only a great heap of leaves old John had swept up; but both of them felt in their hearts it was pregnant with horrible spirit life. And that mournful sigh and whistle that came from among the bare-armed trees of the shrubbery? Dorothy said it [17] ]was only the wind, but the saying in no wise reassured either of them. They stopped and clung in terror to each other half-a-dozen times before they reached the spot for which they were bound—the bottom of the kitchen garden. Light feathery flakes lay on their hair, their breath congealed as it came from their blue lips, their teeth chattered loosely.
And yet none of these things quite killed the romance for them. Phyl even stood still one dreadful half-second.
“This really ought to have been part of their adventure; we oughtn’t to rescue them so soon,” she said gloomily, “it would have been an experience.”
But Dolly’s heart was bleeding, and she dragged on so determinedly that the other half of the quilt was forced to follow.