ded with a smile: "You need
not feel obliged to wear your new sacque, sis; it's not very cold."

"Oh, you tease!" she replied, but the light in her eyes betrayed her
feelings.

It was a delightful day for a sleigh-ride, for every bush and tree was
covered with a white fleece of snow, and the morning sun added a tiny
sparkle to every crystal. A thicket of spruce was changed to a grove of
towering white cones and an alder swamp to a fantastic fairyland. It was
all new to Frank, and as he drove away with that bright and vivacious
girl for a companion it is needless to say he enjoyed it to the utmost.

"I had no idea your town was so hemmed in by mountains," he said after
they started and he had a chance to look around; "why, you are
completely shut in, and such grand ones, too! They are more beautiful
than the White Mountains and more graceful in shape."

"They are all of that," answered Alice, "and yet at times they make me
feel as if I was shut in, away from all the world. We who see them every
day forget their beauty and only feel their desolation, for a great
tree-clad mountain is desolate in winter, I think. At least it is apt to
reflect one's mood. I suppose you have travelled a great deal, Mr.
Nason?"

"Not nearly as much as I ought to," he answered, "for the reason that I
can't find any one I like to go with me. My mother and sisters go away
to some watering-place every summer and stay there, and father sticks to
business. I either dawdle around where the folks are summers, or stay in
town and hate myself, if I can't find some one to go off on my yacht
with me. The fact is, Miss Page," he added mournfully, "I have hard work
to kill time. I can get a little party to run to Newport or Bar Harbor
in the summer, and that is all. I should like to go to Florida or the
West Indies in the winter, or to Labrador or Greenland summers, but I
can't find company."

Alice was silent for a moment, for the picture of a young man
complaining because he had nothing to do but spend his time and money
was new to her.

"You are to be pitied," she said at last, with a tinge of sarcasm, "but
still, there are just a few who would envy you."

He made no reply, for he did not quite understand whether she meant to
be sarcastic or not. They rode along in silence for a time, and then
Alice pointed to a small square brown building just ahead, almost hid in
bushes, and said:

"Do you see that magnificent structure we are coming to, an