t and advanced to
meet her.

CHAPTER V

BEAUTY IN DISTRESS

"Can you tell me where I can get some ice? Can you sell me some ice?"
cried the lady excitedly, when she was still some yards distant from
Cleggett.

"Ice?" The request was so unusual that Cleggett was not certain that
he had understood.

"Yes, ice! Ice!" There was no mistaking the genuine character of her
eagerness; if she had been begging for her life she could not have been
more in earnest. "Don't tell me that you have none on your boat.
Don't tell me that! Don't tell me that!"

And suddenly, like a woman who has borne all that she can bear, she
burst undisguisedly into a paroxysm of weeping. Cleggett, stirred by
her beauty and her trouble, stepped nearer to her, for she swayed with
her emotion as if she were about to fall. Impulsively she put a hand on
his arm, and the Pomeranian, dropped unceremoniously to the ground,
sprang at Cleggett snarling and snapping as if sure he were the author
of the lady's misfortunes.

"You will think I am mad," said the lady, endeavoring to control her
tears, "but I MUST have ice. Don't tell me that you have no ice!"

"My dear lady," said Cleggett, unconsciously clasping, in his anxiety
to reassure her, the hand that she had laid upon his arm, "I have
ice--you shall have all the ice you want!"

"Oh," she murmured, leaning towards him, "you cannot know----"

But the rest was lost in an incoherent babble, and with a deep sigh she
fell lax into Cleggett's arms. The reaction from despair had been too
much for her; it had come too suddenly; at the first word of
reassurance, at the first ray of dawning hope, she had fainted.
High-strung natures, intrepid in the face of danger, are apt to such
collapses in the moment of deliverance; and, whatever the nature of the
lady's trouble, Cleggett gained from her swoon a sharp sense of its
intensity.

Cleggett was not used to having beautiful women faint and fall into his
arms, and he was too much of a gentleman to hold one there a single
moment longer than was absolutely necessary. He turned his head rather
helplessly towards the vehicle in which the lady had arrived. To his
consternation and surprise it had turned around and the chauffeur was
in the act of starting back towards Fairport. But he had left behind
him a large zinc bucket with a cover on it, a long unpainted, oblong
box, and two steamer trunks; on the oblong box sat a short, squat young
man in an