"A few hours! Good God, Esmée! Come out with me, and stand five minutes in this storm, if you can. And he had been on snow-shoes all day; he had come all the way up-hill from town. He had had no rest, and nothing to eat. And then to turn about, and take it worse than ever!"
"It is an impossible thing," she reiterated. "I am crazy when I think of it."
Tip lifted his head uneasily, rose, and tapped about the room, his long-nailed toes rattling on the uncarpeted floor. He paused, and licked up one of the pools of melted snow. "Stop that!" Jack commanded. There was dead silence. Then Tip began again his restless march about the room, pausing at the bedroom door to whine his questioning distress.
"Can't you make him stay in the kitchen?" Esmée suggested timidly.
"It is cold in the kitchen. Tip has earned his place by my fire as long as I shall have one," said Jack, emphatically.
Down fell some crashing object, and was shivered on the floor. The dog sprang up, and howled; Esmée trembled like a leaf.
"It's only your little looking-glass," she whispered. There was no mystery in its having fallen in such a wind from the projecting log where Esmée, with more confidence than judgment, had propped it.
In silence both recalled the light words that had passed when Jack had taken it down from its high nail, saying that the mirrors in his establishment had not been hung with reference to persons of her size; and Esmée could see the picture they had made, putting their heads together before it, Jack stooping, with his hands on her shoulders, to bring his face in line with hers. Those laughing faces! All smiles, all tremulous mirth in that house had vanished as the reflections in a shattered mirror.
Jack got up, and fetched a broom, and swept the clinking fragments into the fire. The frame he broke in two and tossed after them.
"Call me as soon as it is light enough to start," he said to Esmée.