The clear crystalline day began to be softly shadowed by twilight. Behind them lay the town, its roofs and spires robed in swan's-down, while on all sides the fallen logs and deep underbrush, the level stubbles and broad irregular hollows, and all the vast sweep of dark evergreen forest, melting away in immeasurable distance, was a dazzling white waste of snow. In the bright moonshine it sparkled as though studded with innumerable stars. Above them was a marvellously brilliant sky.
Suddenly, under a group of trees that stretched their ghostly arms across the roadway, the cavalcade came to a full stop; and Edward, who was driving, looked round with a face of gloomy foreboding at the merrymakers.
"What is the matter?" demanded half-a-dozen voices.
"We shall have to go back," announced the young man, with a look of forced resignation.
"Go back!" echoed the same voices an octave higher, "why, what has happened?"
"Nothing, except that Rose ought to take another look at herself in the hall mirror. There is something fatally wrong with her appearance."
"About which part of my appearance?" demanded the young lady, who was too well acquainted with her brother to be at all surprised or disturbed by anything he could say.
"I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps its the tout ensemble. Yes, that's just what it is."
"Do drive on, Edward, and don't be ridiculous. It's too cold to discuss even so important a subject as that."
"I am sure you must be suffering from the cold." It was Allan who spoke, turning round to her in a tone of quick, low tenderness.