“Who is it? Anybody in this town?” quickly questioned Kate.
“There is a reason why I can’t tell you who it is; but if the time comes, you remember—”
“I will, Harry,” promised Kate; and on the Point side of the marsh they parted.
Before Christmas the snow came down for three days in succession. It became doubtful whether or not sufficient laurel, pine and hemlock could be unsnowed from the forests and river hills to afford the usual Christmas furnishings for the churches. The marsh bridge was buried deep from sight, and one vast gleam of white extended from the house on the Point to the house in the Lane, broken only by the bit of forest that lay between, whilst a round of snow showed where the stone fences lay.
The ice began to grow in the harbor and stretch downward and outward into the bay. Every morning more and more of the Sound was frozen over. It was a cold, cold time, the coldest that had been known in many years. Harry Cornwall was compelled to assist Josh in bringing in the wood, for that industrious dog could not fetch it fast enough to supply the fires it became necessary to build to keep everything from freezing up.
The Lane, from Mrs. Dobson’s, seaward, had not been broken, when, a few days before the twenty-fifth of December, Neptune appeared, shaking his merrybells adown the snowclad way. Not a dozen sleighs had been before him since the snow fell. It was Kate and her mother whom he was taking to pay Mrs. Dobson a little visit.
“Mamma, what if it shouldn’t be?” ejaculated Kate, as they reached the house, adding immediately, “I wonder that Harry didn’t hear us coming,” for Harry did not appear.
“Now, Kate,” added Mrs. Hallock, “I warn you once more not to say anything to spoil it all.”
“You may trust me, mamma,” returned Kate, tossing the blanket over Neptune and carefully adjusting it; “only I do so want it to be really and awfully true.”
To be very brief, the apparent object of this visit was to invite Mrs. Dobson and Harry to spend Christmas at the Point; the real object was to ask certain questions regarding the young captain who went to sea so many years ago. Not that he had been heard from, but there had appeared a man, unearthed as it were from an asylum for the insane, in a distant state, about whom a number of persons had become curious to learn more. After thirty years of insanity he had begun to show signs of a restored intellect and claimed to be—well, no less a person than the Captain Dobson who was master of the Snow.