In disgust he pulled open the door, flinched before the blast of wind
and snow which smote him full in the face and blinded him, and went out
again into the storm. The hotel porch was a bleak place, with snow six
inches deep and icy boards upon which a man might easily slip and break
a bone or two, and with a whine overhead as the wind sucked under the
roof. Ford stood there so long that his feet began to tingle. He was not
thinking; he was merely feeling the feeble struggles of a newborn
desire to be something and do something worth while--a desire which
manifested itself chiefly in bitterness against himself as he was, and
in a mental nausea against the life he had been content to live.

The mystery of his marriage was growing from a mere untoward incident of
a night's carouse into a baffling thing which hung over him like an
impending doom. He was not the sort of man who marries easily. It seemed
incredible that he could really have done it; more incredible that he
could have done it and then have wiped the slate of his memory clean;
with the crowning impossibility that a strange young woman could come
into town, marry him, and afterward depart and no man know who she was,
whence she had come, or where she had gone. Ford stepped suddenly off
the porch and bored his way through the blizzard toward the depot. The
station agent would be able to answer the last question, at any rate.

The agent, however, proved disappointingly ignorant of the matter. He
reminded Ford that there had not been time to buy a ticket, and that the
girl had been compelled to run down the platform to reach the train
before it started, and that the wheels began to turn before she was up
the steps of the day coach.

"And don't you remember turning around and saying to me: 'I'm a poor