XXV. THE FELL FROST

XXVI. PEACE TO THIS HOUSE




I


A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS

It was an evening of sudden mildness following a dry October gale. The
colonel had miscalculated the temperature by one log--only one, he
declared, but that had proved a pitchy one, and the chimney bellowed with
flame. From end to end the room was alight with it, as if the stored-up
energies of a whole pine-tree had been sacrificed in the consumption of
that four-foot stick.

The young persons of the house had escaped, laughing, into the fresh night
air, but the colonel was hemmed in on every side; deserted by his
daughter, mocked by the work of his own hands, and torn between the duties
of a host and the host's helpless craving for his after-dinner cigar.

Across the hearth, filling with her silks all the visible room in his own
favorite settle corner, sat the one woman on earth it most behooved him to
be civil to,--the future mother-in-law of his only child. That Moya was a
willing, nay, a reckless hostage, did not lessen her father's awe of the
situation.