even heard me. The last few yards they snowballed each other and me. I
tell you I felt a hundred years old.

We got into the shelter-house by my crawling through a window, and when
we had lighted the fire and hung up the lantern, it didn't seem so
bad. The place had been closed since summer, and it seemed colder than
outside, but those two did the barn dance then and there. There were two
rooms, and Mr. Dick had always used the back one to hide in. It's a good
thing Mrs. Dick was not a suspicious person. Many a woman would have
wondered when she saw him lift a board in the floor and take out a
rusty tin basin, a cake of soap, a moldy towel, a can of sardines, a
tooth-brush and a rubber carriage robe to lay over the rafters under the
hole in the roof. But it's been my experience that the first few days
of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that
because they have to be.

It was about four when I left them, sitting on a soap box in front of
the fire toasting sardines on the end of Mr. Dick's walking-stick. Mrs.
Dick made me put on her sealskin coat, and I took the lantern, leaving
them in the firelight. They'd gone back to the captive balloon idea and
were wondering if they couldn't get it copyrighted!

I took a short cut home, crawling through the barbed-wire fence and
going through the deer park. I was too tired and cold to think. I
stumbled down the hill to the house, and just before I got to the corner
I heard voices, and the shuffling of feet through the snow. The next
instant a lantern came around the corner of the house. Mr. Thoburn was
carrying it, and behind him were the bishop, Mike the bath man, and Mr.
Pierce.