as straight and handsome as Lohengrin, but was tutoring like a pedagogue.

And let her smile while yet she could, for the day grew grayer and graver, each hour seeming to open a new door at the north pole and let in a stronger current of cool air.

"Brrrr!" shiveringly snorted The McAllister after lunch, looking around him as impotently and severely as Little Eva when she accused somebody, somewhere, of making her uncomfortable. "Is it possible that I feel cold, Annie Laurie?"

"Very possible, grandpa," she answered, assuming great light-heartedness. "We can actually have a fire in your bedroom grate-won't that be lovely? The thermometer says fifty. I'll keep glorious fires in the sitting room and kitchen. We'll be too cozy for words."

The pleasant novelty of toasting himself before a crackling open blaze cheered the old gentleman immensely, and gave him a great many weird things to do with a poker.

But what comfort could the lonely little lady of the house take in a warmth that was on one side of the wall only? Outside, the mercury fell steadily, going down one relentless point after another. With the coming of night it had dropped to forty.

The chilled frizzly chickens very sensibly tried to go to roost on the edge of the wood-box in the kitchen, and they clucked and queed most irritably when she tucked them under her arms, two at a time, and carried them back to the henhouse. This being a summery, slatted place, she had to cover it with sacking and bits of old carpet.

By now the cold was hopelessly in her own bones and she was constantly a-tremble, for when fear, rather

than freeze, sets the teeth to chattering winter coats are not particularly warming.

"I intend to retire," The McAllister stated majesti cally at about eight o'clock. "Florida is disappointing me. I am-am astonished at it. You being a sensible child, my darling, I know you will retire also."

She covered over her lack of assent by bustlingly rebuilding his fire and piling his bed high with blankets. Then she brought him hot cocoa by way of a sleeping potion.

"I shall wrap up my head and ears and sleep like a top," he informed her drowsily. "Good night and happy dreams to you, my dear! Like a top!"

She kissed him and closed his door upon him, glad not to have to listen any longer to his cheerful chatter, for her heart was like lead, and with good cause the thermometer when last read had stood at thirty-nine.

She crept out again to the windy dark porch, scratched a match, and took another look at the silver tube-thirty-eight.

She went back into the sitting-room and tried to read, but could not keep her mind on the print, nor her eyes. The very warmth of the room sent her thoughts wandering outside where it was cold, cold, cold. Now and then Little Eva would give a questioning "Purr?" that would send her into a clammy perspiration of dread, showing her that fear was close indeed to her heels, the least sound seeming to say "the end is here.” Again and again she crept out to watch the mocking mercury.

At half-past ten it stood at thirty-four. Then, so desperate with anxiety that she preferred to watch the thing fall before her eyes rather than sit in a warm room and vainly wait for it to go up, she bundled her

self in ulster and cap, went out and huddled down on the porch steps.

Then followed a vigil of awful loneliness. The chill and stillness of the night appalled her. Above, the stars glittered more coldly than points of spears. Sudden ghostly and icy gusts of wind kept rushing in silently from somewhere and dying down, leaving behind it a sinister frozen calm. The "swash" of the unseen black lake sounded colder than the crack of ice.

A slow hour shuddered away, and as the middle of the long night approached it brought with it frightening noises of unfamiliar nature, not to be explained by similar sounds of day. There were mysterious footfalls as if animals were a-prowl and rustling in the underbrush, and movements of branches even when the wind was quiet as death. And constantly came the nickering scream of owls, exactly like the last strangling shriek of a person being murdered.

Midnight came, bringing with it the mental depression and added fear that it always brings to the lonely watcher. Watching was bad enough in the light; it was dreadful in the complete dark, with no glimmer near or far that was made by human hands, no sociable beacon of any kind to take away the desolate feeling that one is completely isolated in a world of trouble.

And a person who waits for a calamitous stroke from the careless whim of Nature must do so without the faintest hope of being able to prevent it. If Nature wants to drown out a field with too much rain, or fry it to a cinder with too little, there is nothing to be done but to let her go ahead.

The delight taken by this Spartan Mother in destroying in an hour the work that has taken her patient children years, is one of those mysteries on which the bulle

tins of the agricultural department are particularly silent.

Parched with fears, Laurie stole to the pump for a drink, and when there forgot her thirst, for over the water pail she found that a thin film of ice had formed. She ran back to the thermometer-twenty-nine.

"In danger at twenty-nine; done for at twenty-six,” he had said.

Obeying a mechanical impulse, she took the box of matches in her hand and made a step towards the nearest pile of grove-wood, then stopped, helpless. She could never light them all in time, and the frozen avenues of the grove were impenetrably dark. She turned and looked in the direction of the lake; there it was pitch black too. What hope had she that Roycroft had stayed up the night long on the mere chance that she might need him? Even as she stood trying to convince herself that she would never send for him, she drew the revolver from her pocket and fired the two crashing shots of the signal.

"Oh, Mr. Roycroft, won't you please come?" she heard herself praying aloud.

She strained her eyes through the darkness to the place where the lake lay coldly splashing. Next, "God bless you, honey," she whispered in hysterical relief, for a speck of lantern-light moved swiftly across the opposite shore.

An eternity seemed to pass as she watched that little light grow stronger as it forged steadily towards her over the water. Entirely forgetting the perhaps mythical frogs and snakes of the lake region—a fearfully remote region by night—she ran pell-mell down to the dock, reaching it just as the little boat was being tied. "Well, Miss Laurie, the freeze is here!" sang out

Roycroft very cheerfully, taking the landing at a jump. "The last minute is up. Our business now is to fight. I would have been with you long before, but I have a coldish corner in my grove where I have the fire pots and I had to light them. This was the one evening of the year, of course, when Peter had to attend a conference."

While cheerily talking, he had put his arm under hers and was steering her back to the house and the grove, steadying her over the rough and stumbling places, seeming to know by instinct where they would be, though it was not his hard road that he was traveling.

"I got so frightened I had to send for you," she said simply, wondering a little where the worst of the fright had it had. gone; for

gone

She had been called upon to meet many troubles in her short life, and to meet them by herself. This was the first crisis in which she had ever felt the warm, reassuring contact of a man's courageous muscles ready to work with her and for her. The sensation was a radiant revelation, making miracles possible. The arm which he supported in comforting, hugging, brotherly fashion became an electrical supply station to her whole body, recharging her with vigor of hope. Night might still be around her and ruin ahead, but both had lost their worst terrors.

Even the thermometer seemed to be his concern more than hers, for it was he who struck the match and read it. She saw the record and spoke it like a cry, "Twentyeight!"

"Get busy without loss of a second," he ordered, dropping his leisurely tone. "You fire this row, I the next, then we meet and come up the next two. Understand?"