hat the storm must have been going on all night,
and that the drifts were likely to be heavy in the open. I thought
it probable that my train would be delayed; but I had to be at the
power-house for an hour or two that afternoon, and I decided, if Frome
turned up, to push through to the Flats and wait there till my train
came in. I don't know why I put it in the conditional, however, for I
never doubted that Frome would appear. He was not the kind of man to be
turned from his business by any commotion of the elements; and at
the appointed hour his sleigh glided up through the snow like a
stage-apparition behind thickening veils of gauze.

I was getting to know him too well to express either wonder or gratitude
at his keeping his appointment; but I exclaimed in surprise as I saw him
turn his horse in a direction opposite to that of the Corbury road.

"The railroad's blocked by a freight-train that got stuck in a drift
below the Flats," he explained, as we jogged off into the stinging
whiteness.

"But look here--where are you taking me, then?"

"Straight to the Junction, by the shortest way," he answered, pointing
up School House Hill with his whip.

"To the Junction--in this storm? Why, it's a good ten miles!"

"The bay'll do it if you give him time. You said you had some business
there this afternoon. I'll see you get there."

He said it so quietly that I could only answer: "You're doing me the
biggest kind of a favour."

"That's all right," he rejoined.

Abreast of the schoolhouse the road forked, and we dipped down a lane
to the left, between hemlock boughs bent inward to their trunks by the
weight of the snow. I had often walked that way on Sundays, and knew
that the solitary roof showing through bare branches near the bottom of
the hill was that of Frome's saw-mill. It looked exanimate enough, with
its idle wheel looming above the black stream dashed with yellow-white
spume, and its cluster of sheds sagging under their white load. Frome
did not even turn his head as we drove by, and still in silence we began
to mount the next slope. About a mile farther, on a road I had never
travelled, we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over
a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow
like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard
lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the
fields, huddled against the white immensities of land an