"The distance is nothing," she panted. "But we must take the path for a little way up the mountain. No, don't tell me it can't be done; it must be done,"—this in answer to his dubious scanning of the glassy ascent.
Again his good breeding asserted itself.
"Certainly it can be done, if you so desire." And he picked up a stone and patiently hammered the ice from the steps of the stile so she could cross in safety.
It was no more than a three-hundred-yard dash up the slope to the dog-keeper's cabin in the little glen, but it was a fight for inches. Every stone, every hand-hold of bush or shrub or tuft of dried grass was an icy treachery. Ardea knew the mountain and the path, and was less helpless than she would otherwise have been; yet she was willing to confess that she could never have done it alone. With all their care and caution they were exhausted and breathless when they topped the acclivity and Morelock saw the cabin in the pocket cove, with the great tulip-tree in the dooryard bending and distorted and groaning like a living thing in agony.
"Isn't it terrible!" he said; but Ardea's glance had gone beyond the tortured tree to the shuttered windows and smokeless chimney of the cabin.
"Oh, let us hurry!" she gasped; but at the gate of the tiny dooryard she stopped in sudden embarrassment. "I can't take you into the house, Mr. Morelock. Will you wait for me here—just a moment?"
He said "Certainly," as he had been saying it from the first. But it was quite without prejudice to a healthy and growing curiosity. The small adventure was taking on an air of mystery which thickened momently, demanding insistently a complete rearrangement of his preconceived notions of Miss Ardea Dabney.
She left him at once and made her way cautiously to the ice-encrusted door-stone. What she saw, when she lifted the wooden latch and entered, was what she had been praying she might not see.
On the small hearth was a heap of white ashes, dead and cold, and the tomb-like chill of the tightly-closed room was benumbing. Asleep in the fireplace corner, his little knees drawn up to his chin and his face streaked with the dried tears, was the three-year-old baby who bore Tom Gordon's name. And on the bed in the recess at the back of the room, her hands clenched and her passionate face a mask of long-continued agony, lay the mother.
Ardea was white to the lips and trembling when she retreated to the door-stone and beckoned to her companion.