If Neale O’Neil was not a good prophet, he certainly was a sure prophet, and Agnes Kenway admitted it. When the time came to leave the Poole party it did everything that the young fellow had said it would. It was as nasty and as cold a night as the two sisters ever remembered being out in.
Worst of all, in spite of the antiskid chains that Neale had spent a good hour from the party in adjusting to the rear wheels, something else went wrong, as he expressed it, and for fifteen long minutes they were stalled on the wind-swept Buckshot Road.
The icy fingers of that wind, if not the snow and sleet itself, sought the girls out, through every cranny of the automobile top. Ruth murmured an admission that her sister was right. They should have a closed car for winter.
By and by, when Neale managed to coax the engine to start again, the girls were clinging together for warmth and their teeth were chattering. Neale insisted on putting his robe about them in addition to their own, and drove barelapped himself for the rest of the journey.
Mrs. MacCall never went to bed when any of the flock were out in the evening, especially on a stormy night. On this night, Linda, the Finnish girl, had fallen out of her chair asleep before the kitchen stove and had been driven up to her room in a sleep-walking trance by the good housekeeper two hours before the arrival of Ruth and Agnes.
Tom Jonah, the faithful old watch dog, rose yawning from his place behind the stove as the girls stumbled into the kitchen. He went out with Neale to see if it really was as bad a night as it sounded.
“Ye puir bairns!” gasped Mrs. MacCall when she saw them. “Ye’re blue with the cold and perished of the snaw. Hech! Hech! What will Mr. Howbridge say to this, I want to know?”
“You ask him, Mrs. Mac,” faintly said the younger girl. “Oh!” and she began to cough.
“Hot drinks, Mrs. Mac, please,” said Ruth, trying to speak cheerfully. “I fear we have been very foolish. I fear we have.”
For once Mrs. MacCall did not scold when chances had been taken with her charges’ health. In fact the housekeeper considered the matter too serious. When she had hurried the sisters up to their rooms, she proceeded to telephone to Dr. Forsyth.