“Don’t you remember them?” she asked. “Have you forgotten your way?”
He got the teasing note in her tone. “That’s all right,” he said, “but it has been many years since I came this way; and roadsides have a way of changing, even in Vermont; and with this storm coming along worse every minute, I am not anxious to negotiate them by dark.”
“’Fraid cat,” she laughed, and then cried: “Oh, see! The snow is coming! It’s coming, coming, coming!”
It had come, indeed, on the wings of a quick, wild gust; its particles cut like bits of ice, and presently flew in swirling eddies beside the car and in front of it, and, for all their speed, built itself into little drifts wherever a curve or crevice or corner made a possible lodging-place. It pierced their barrier of windshield and curtains, and heaped itself on their fur wrappings, until swept away again by a new fierce breath of the storm. Then it was that Christine’s cheeks flamed, but she bent forward to meet the force of the wind, and now and again turned to call up to Norwood that she loved it.
Night fell almost with the swiftness of a stage curtain, blotting out the distant hills, the pastures, the fields, and scattered houses; blotting out at last even the roadsides, its blackness emphasized by the ever-swirling, steadily descending snow. Once or twice Norwood stopped the car and got out to reconnoiter. Christine felt his uneasiness by means of that sixth sense of wifehood; yet all the while, by another of wifehood’s endowments, she rested secure, serene in the feeling that all was well and must continue well with her man at the wheel; while side by side with his own feeling of uneasiness, Norwood was proud of his wife’s courageous serenity, unaware in his masculine simplicity that her courage had its fount of being in himself.
Nobly the big car responded to their demand upon it, yet they had gone not more than a few miles beyond the last recognized sign-post when it began to show symptoms of reluctance, of distress. Norwood muttered under his breath, and once more Christine turned a laughing face toward him.
“It’s a real adventure,” she cried. “I do believe you are lost!”
Norwood’s answering laugh held no merriment. “You are not so bad at guessing,” he remarked, dryly. “Suppose you try to guess the way!”
Her keen eyes were peering forward through the veil of snow. “Here we come! I think I see a house ahead of us,” she said. “We can ask our way of the people who live there.”
“They won’t know,” said Norwood, with a man’s pessimism. “Probably foreigners. Half the old places around here are bought up by people who can’t speak English and don’t know anything when they can.”