Her heart was beating fast and thick as she halted her ponies. The driver of the carriage jumped down and held the door for Ferriss, and the chief engineer stepped quickly toward her.
So it was they met after four years—and such years—unexpectedly, without warning or preparation, and not at all as she had expected. What they said to each other in those first few moments Lloyd could never afterward clearly remember. One incident alone detached itself vividly from the blur.
"I have just come from the square," Ferriss had explained, "and they told me that you had left for a drive out here only the moment before, so there was nothing for it but to come after you."
"Shan't we walk a little?" she remembered she had asked after a while. "We can have the carriages wait; or do you feel strong enough? I forgot—"
But he interrupted her, protesting his fitness.
"The doctor merely sent me out to get the air, and it's humiliating to be wheeled about like an old woman."
Lloyd passed the reins back of her to Lewis, and, gathering her skirts about her, started to descend from the phaeton. The step was rather high from the ground. Ferriss stood close by. Why did he not help her? Why did he stand there, his hands in his pockets, so listless and unconscious of her difficulty. A little glow of irritation deepened the dull crimson of her cheeks. Even returned Arctic explorers could not afford to ignore entirely life's little courtesies—and he of all men.
"Well," she said, expectantly hesitating before attempting to descend.
Then she caught Ferriss's eyes fixed upon her. He was smiling a little, but the dull, stupefied expression of his face seemed for a brief instant to give place to one of great sadness. He raised a shoulder resignedly, and Lloyd, with the suddenness of a blow, remembered that Ferriss had no hands.
She dropped back in the seat of the phaeton, covering her eyes, shaken and unnerved for the moment with a great thrill of infinite pity—of shame at her own awkwardness, and of horror as for one brief instant the smiling summer park, the afternoon's warmth, the avenue of green, over-arching trees, the trim, lacquered vehicles and glossy-brown horses were struck from her mind, and she had a swift vision of the Ice, the darkness of the winter night, the lacerating, merciless cold, the blinding, whirling, dust-like snow.