It was the snowiest part of the season that Katherine and Peggy rode back into when they returned from their Christmas vacation in the Middle West.

The school grounds shone and blazed under a triumphant sun, and out around them as far as they could see was a great white world. One of the most important gifts of the Foster family to the two girls had been two pairs of snow-shoes: not the poorly constructed, make-believe affairs that are sometimes on sale in cities where there is never enough snow to use them, but real Indian-made shoes for which Mrs. Foster had sent to Canada.

Naturally, they wanted more than anything else to try them. So the first day that Mrs. Forest gave them permission they went out on the porch of the Andrews dormitory, comfortably dressed in white sweaters and white tam-o’-shanters, with moccasins on their feet and their beloved snow-shoes ready to strap on in their hands. After some grunting and much tugging the shoes were adjusted, and then the two expected to fairly sail over the white world, away, away, like ice-boats, as fast as the wind. But, oh, for the things that look so easy! There was a good crust over the snow, but at the first step—well, Katherine seemed to be trying to walk on her head instead of her feet, that was all. In trying to pick her up Peggy herself fell headlong, and there they lay, ignominiously waving their snow-shoes in the air, shrieking with laughter and so limp from their merriment that they could not get up again.

It was only after many attempts that they stood erect once more, powdered over and caked with snow where they had plunged through the crust, and very red in the face and still shaking with laughter.

“I put my toe down first,” gasped Katherine between spasms, “just as I would if I was walking ordinarily. I forgot that father said the foot must come down flat. I’ve seen people snow-shoe, but I never—t-tried it—oh, dear me, I’m almost exhausted to start out with.”

Then once again, with the utmost gravity, the two made the attempt, and Peggy almost at once got the wonderful swinging motion of the far northerners that makes snow-shoeing one of the most delightful and exhilarating sports in the world. To be warm in the midst of cold, to glow from forehead to feet with life and heat and happiness, all this glorious new experience she was feeling for the first time. But Katherine could not put her foot down correctly and failed to get into the rhythm of the thing at all. And as sure as they came to a hillock over she went helplessly, and remained deep in the snow until Peggy pulled her out, with scant sympathy, but with much merry appreciation of her snow-powdered face and its look of wondering appeal.

Nevertheless, in spite of difficulties and delays, they had covered two meadows and a large open field without more stress of adventure than they found pleasant. All of a sudden Peggy pointed ahead. There, gleaming on before them, straight ahead and over the crest of a bit of rising ground, were the glistening snow-shoe marks of another explorer who had recently gone that way before them. The sun shone into the criss-cross pattern of the steps, which seemed to the girls to be both invitation and challenge.

Katherine adapted the quotation, laughing. “If I could leave behind me any such even tracks as that it might be worth while going on, but when you can’t get the swing of it, Peggy, you can’t keep warm, and while I want to learn, sometime, I think it wasn’t born in me as it was in you, and it will need several practice attempts before I can be in your class at all. So I’m going back—for now—do you want to come, or are you going on—?”

Peggy looked back toward the familiar roofs of Andrews, and then she looked away out over the barren fields in their whiteness, new and untouched save for the gleaming snow-shoe tracks that called and called to her to be as adventurous as they.

“I guess I’ll go on,” she said, a hint of abandon in her voice.

“Well, good-by, hon,” said Katherine, meekly taking her leave. “I will get about as much more of this as I want going back, but I hope you have a nice time—and—and end up at tea somewhere just as we were going to.”

“Tea by myself would be horrid,” Peggy called after her. “I won’t be long, but I just must have some more, I love it so.”

Then she turned her face to the snow-shoe tracks, and with a little gay song on her lips took up their trail.

“I’m Robinson Crusoe,” she told herself blithely, “and these tracks are the good man Friday’s. And we are the only two people that there are at all, and both of us have been finding it so lonely by ourselves.”

Several of the Andrews girls had snow-shoes and Peggy wondered which one the maker of these tracks might be.

“I’ll try to walk right in her steps,” Peggy decided, “and then I’ll get just the right method—but, oh, my goodness, what a tall girl she must be! These footprints are so far apart I can’t possibly take such long steps. She must be a wonderful snow-shoeist—maybe she won’t want to walk with me even when I do catch up to her, since she’s apparently so much more expert.”

With ludicrous attempts to fit her steps into those of Friday, she pursued her way until at last she had climbed the hill where the tracks had at first been lost, and there they were continuing, forever, it seemed.

Without hesitation Peggy followed. Lost to all but the exhilaration of a brand new exercise, and the stimulus of the cold wind that yet never chilled her glowing face, she kept on until Andrews was a thing of the past, and she could not have found her way back except for the tracks she was making now. And then all of a sudden she noticed something was different. The footprints no longer gleamed in her eyes, and the beautiful dazzle of the snow was blotted out. In an instant more a whirling mass of moist snow flakes was falling about her, obscuring everything but their own fantastic, falling selves.

“Well,” decided she promptly, “I guess I’ll be getting back.”

But when she turned back the wind came rushing in her face and took her breath and nearly blew her down.

“Well,” she changed her mind. “I guess I won’t. Friday, where are you—you must be somewhere out in this sudden storm, too. And if I could only find you I wouldn’t feel as lost and shaky as I do now. Misery loves company—not that I’m miserable—but something”—she choked back a sob, “something seems to be gloomy in my heart.”

Since she could not go back, and since the thought of coming up with Friday was a very comforting one, she plodded on, winking the snow out of her eyes and shaking it off of her cap and out of her hair.

She could scarcely see the tracks ahead of her now, as the new snow was fast obliterating them, and her own steps were made with increasing difficulty. Anyone who has ever tried to snow-shoe over soft, new-fallen snow knows the hardship of Peggy’s predicament.

All at once she discovered that she could not lift her left foot at all. Try as she would, it would not rise and swing forward to its next step.—Paralyzed! The horror of her situation, there all alone in the cold and snow, out of sight of everybody, slowly being paralyzed with no one to know or care, filled her with momentary hopelessness.

“Oh, Friday,” she thought, “I don’t see how you could have snow-shoed so far ahead of me as not to have been caught up with by now. Dear, dear, if I could only find that girl, maybe she would try to drag me to some farm house, or something. If she’s one of the Andrews girls she wouldn’t want me to freeze to death out here all by myself. Maybe if I called very loud she’d hear and come back—”

“Hello!” she shouted forth into the snow-filled world. But there was no answer and the sound of her own voice, so hollow and lonely, did anything but cheer her up, so she did not try again.

With one last great effort of will she tried to move the stubborn left foot. It was useless,—stuck in the snow and helpless it remained.

“Oh,” she murmured, the tears beginning to run down her cheeks to mingle with the wet snow flakes melting there.

All of a sudden a dark form loomed up out of the blinding snow immediately ahead. There was the jar of a collision. Peggy clutched her hands together, not knowing whether to be glad or terrified.

And then she saw that the figure was that of a very red-faced young man, who was also wearing snow-shoes.

“Friday!” Peggy cried out, realizing in one illuminating instant that this was the track-maker she had been following as Crusoe.

“No, it’s Saturday,” replied the young man, somewhat puzzled, “but I don’t see what that has to do with it. I’m awfully afraid I hurt you, bumping into you like that, but I never dreamed there was anyone about in a storm like this. Have you seen anything of a little dog? I lost him a while back.”

“No,” shivered Peggy. “I’m afraid there isn’t much use looking for him if he’s very little. Here am I a perfectly strong girl and yet even I can’t go any farther. I—can’t—go—another—step—” Sobs fought with her words, and the young good-looking face grew redder than ever.

“Tired?” he asked, “so tired that you can’t walk? Well, then, I’m mighty glad I came. Wait just a minute till I get a deep breath and I’ll carry you. The extra weight will make us sink in a lot in this soft snow, but if you don’t mind the joggly walking I can easily manage—”

Peggy shook her head. “No, you’d better go on by yourself,” she insisted. “I think a person would be awfully hard to carry in snow-shoes, they’d hang down and flop about so. And I’m sorry about your poor little dog, but I think it isn’t any use your waiting for him. You’d much better save yourself,” she advised.

“Now,—come,” said the other.

“Listen, I’m paralyzed,” Peggy confessed. “My left foot just won’t—won’t work, you know, I can’t get it to snow-shoe another step. It just stays still. It’s paralyzed—”

What was that—could she believe her eyes? The young man had glanced down sympathetically enough toward the paralyzed foot but was it any subject for such wild fits of mirth as he immediately went into? Was it right that he should laugh and laugh and point, speechless, and then clap his hand over his mouth and go off again?

“You are very cruel and perfectly horrid,” cried Peggy sharply, “and I hate, I hate you!”

“O—oh, pardon me, little Hot-Temper, but look back at your snow-shoe, please,” and the laugh distorted his face once more.

Painfully and indignantly Peggy screwed her cold face over her left shoulder and looked down.

“Why—why,” she gasped all out of breath, with astonishment, “how did it get there?”

For there, comfortably ensconced on the back of her snow-shoe, waiting for a free ride, sat, as perky as you please a plump puppy, his head cocked interestedly on one side, and his wide mouth open in an inquiring fashion as if he would like to know what she was going to do about it now that she had found him out.

“The—the—smart little thing!” Peggy couldn’t help exclaiming. “There he was, being a parasite, while I was supposed to do the walking.—Only it’s a good joke on him, as I couldn’t.”

“As soon as the soft snow fell, I suppose the little fellow sank in pretty deep every step,” the young man grinned, stooping and sweeping the quivering, frisking body into his arms. “And the rascal was going to take it easy as soon as he saw your snow-shoes coming along. Lucky I missed him when I did,—and you’re not paralyzed now, are you?”

“No,” laughed Peggy, “it seems I’m not. Oh, wasn’t that funny? There I was dying all by myself a minute ago of something that I didn’t have at all.”

“I say, what we ought to do, though—there is a tea house somewhere near here where we can get something hot and then you’ll feel a lot better and I don’t mind saying that I will too. Come on, I know the way, and I’ll walk on the windy side of you like this and—why, it’s going fine, we’ll be there in no time.”

With courage and interest and even happiness surging back into her heart now that this big handsome boy was striding along by her side and cheering her with laughing remarks that ignored the wild storm about them, Peggy found snow-shoeing exhilarating once more, and they made good time, and were soon stamping in to the little tea house.

In the neighborhood of Andrews were a number of tea rooms and dainty restaurants, for it was a rich school, and a good share of the girls’ pocket-money went for good things to eat. Peggy was familiar with many of them, but she had never happened to come here before. So she knew that they must be a greater distance from the school than she had supposed. Also, most of the people seated around the adorable little tables were boys instead of girls, and they all looked up with interest at the entrance of the snowy pair.

“Why, hello, Jim,” one of the boys called out to Peggy’s companion. “Playing Santa Claus?”

Jim merely smiled and bowed, and guided Peggy to a table by a roaring open fire. Then he took her sweater and cap and flung them across a chair to dry.

“Where do all these boys come from?” inquired Peggy. “It looks like a perfect wilderness around here.”

“We are near Anderwood, the boys’ prep school,” explained her companion. “I used to go there—just last year, in fact—and I was over visiting some of my friends to-day. Most of the fellows are having exams right now, you know, and there were two hours this afternoon when every fellow I knew was booked for something, so I borrowed a pair of snow-shoes and a dog and—took a stroll.”

“And you strolled right over to a girls’ school,” laughed Peggy.

“As fast as I could go,” the young man answered without embarrassment. “I’ll tell you just what I was going to do, too. I don’t know a soul at Andrews—or didn’t until I almost ran over you in the storm. But I was just going to look at a certain window. Now, I bet you’d hate to tell me what you think of me.”

“A certain window,” mused Peggy. “Are you a carpenter and did you want to see how it was made?”

Her mischievous taunt brought an explanation.

“I’m an Amherst man,” he began, and Peggy leaned her elbows on the table, forgetful of the steaming soup that had just been set before her. “And I had finished my exams, so I took a vacation to this part of the country, where I used to go to school. The last time I was around here I came up for the game, early in the fall. And—well, you know how it is with glee club fellows, they sing their heads off when their team has won, and I guess we serenaded every corner of the Andrews dorms until midnight. Do you remember—did you happen to be awake and hear us?”

“Oh, yes,” breathed Peggy ecstatically, and then a furious flush went over her face. Was her awful adventure of that evening to be recalled now—would he guess that she—she, whom he had saved from the storm was the very one who had toppled the terrible rose-tree in its heavy jardiniÈre down onto his head as if she were firing on him from a Zeppelin? So he was one of the young men she had nearly killed! What a mercy that he had not died, after all. With a crushing wave of memory, the whole moonlit scene flashed back to her, and once more the ache of uncertainty and remorse were poignant in her heart. She recalled Katherine’s joyous shout that they were unharmed, and then—and then her own rush back to the window and the song they had sung just for her!

“You heard?” he was asking in pleasant interest. “Which house are you in?”

“Oh,” cried Peggy in consternation. “The other one.”

And then she realized by his puzzled expression and his mouth twitching into a laugh that her reply didn’t make sense. “I mean I didn’t hear it,” she rushed headlong into the fib in her distress. “I didn’t and my rose-tree is still all safe in its jardiniÈre in my room, and—and—anyway you must realize that it was an accident!” she finished desperately.

The boy’s hand went swiftly into an inner pocket and drew out of a small envelope a tiny withered rose bud, quite browned and crumply. He held it silently over to her across the table, his eyes shining with delight.

She looked at it with an attempt at impersonal curiosity, and then the corners of her mouth crinkled up, and that flickering dimple came into play and she met his eyes with enjoyment as keen as his own.

“And you all sang to me,” she reminded, “and I never was so excited before.”

“Every one of us kept one of the flowers,” he told her. “We didn’t know who dropped them to us, we could only see just the fluff of your light hair—but we carry them just for luck. They are sort of insignia of adventure—”

“I was so afraid I’d killed you,” Peggy confessed, “and I thought the only thing I could do to atone would be to go and be a Red Cross nurse, and help those that other people tried to kill.”

The young man threw back his head and laughed until the boys at the other tables looked over and grinned in sympathy.

Peggy hastily turned her attention to her soup and ate in silence.

When they had finished their hot chocolate, too, she glanced out at the uninviting storm and sighed.

“It must be miles back to Andrews,” she said. “I suppose we’d better start. The storm makes it awfully dark, doesn’t it?”

The lights had been turned on in the little tea house and in contrast to their radiant cheer and that of the dancing flames in the fireplace, the outside world with its deep gray swirl of snow flakes looked very black and chill.

“It’s not so much the storm—or not that only,—it must be five o’clock, anyway, you know.”

Peggy jumped. “Oh, no, how could it be? We won’t get home in time, then.”

“In time?”

“Yes, every girl has to be in her room at five-thirty so as to have plenty of time to dress for dinner at six. And the rule is partly to make it certain that we’ll be in before it’s very dark, too, I suppose.”

“Well, we’ll make a dive for it,” he said. He drew out his watch, and then his face grew red with that same brilliant over-color that it had worn when she first saw him out there in the whipping winds. This time it was not the wind that had sent that flame over his forehead, chin and cheeks,—it was shame that his sense of responsibility should not have warned him of the passing time.

“It’s—half-past five now,” he was obliged to tell her.

Peggy looked into his poor, miserable face, full of self-accusation, and with an effort of will she drew her own lips into their best smile.

“Oh, well,” she said, “we’ve had a gorgeous time, and a few short hours ago I didn’t expect ever to see another half-past five in all this world. I guess having one’s life saved will be sufficient cause for delay to appease Mrs. Forest. I imagine even she can get the importance of that.”

But in her heart she knew just about how easy it was to explain things to Mrs. Forest—about as easy as moving a mountain. Once the principal decided in favor of punishment, not all the king’s horses or all the king’s men could change her mind. And, oddly enough, it was the small faults that she scored most heavily. Peggy sometimes felt that a girl might steal something and yet not arouse Mrs. Forest’s wrath as thoroughly as one who was late to dinner.

“You are to be trained in manners in my school,” she often said, and it was true that with her these seemed to come before everything else. She was not so strict in regard to chaperonage and all that as the New York finishing schools; she had no need to be. The school was situated in a small and desirable town, and among her pupils were none of the vapid little Miss Foolishnesses sometimes sent away to school because their parents or guardians can’t manage them at home. All her students were bright, eager, typical American girls like Peggy and Katherine and Florence, most of whom had a definite idea and plan for their lives after graduation, the majority trending collegeward. So, although Peggy was the youngest girl who would receive a diploma next June, it would not be on the score of lack of chaperonage in going to tea with a young Amherst friend that she would meet with Mrs. Forest’s objection, but merely on the technical ground of not returning at the exactly appointed time.

Hastily he shook out her sweater and held it for her, then flung into his own, and jammed his cap on his head, and catching up the puppy that all this while had been lying comfortably before the fire he held the door open for her. The storm blew in to meet them as they stood there, and with a shiver of determination they strapped on their snow-shoes and struck out. “We’ll just go over to the next corner, where we can get a street car—we’re only a little way from Andrews by car line,” the boy told her.

They were fortunate enough to catch a car at once, and all unconscious of the friendly stares of the passengers they congratulated each other on having left the tea room at exactly the right moment.

The car stopped directly in front of the Andrews gate. Their cheeks were aglow and their minds full of the afternoon’s adventures rather than with their consequences. On the wide porch Peggy turned to her friend and said, “You must go, now, and be introduced to Mrs. Forest at some other time. They’re at dinner now, and she’d kill me with her own hands if I call her away. So I’ll let you go and just say, ‘Thank you, and I’ve had a nice time’—”

She smiled up at him bravely, for presentiments of her meeting with the Forest were already beginning to creep into her heart.

“Good-by,” he said, and in a moment more he was swinging down the walk and Peggy softly opened the door and scurried upstairs to her room. As always happens at a time like that, the gay roar of voices in the dining-room died down as she came in, and to everyone and certainly to Mrs. Forest the slight sound of her moccasined feet on the stairs was plainly audible.

When she came down a few minutes later, glowing in a pink evening dress, Mrs. Forest’s stare was like a cluster of icicles.

“No supper for Miss Parsons,” she sent word by the maid, and after Peggy, mighty glad that she had just had plenty of hot soup and chocolate, had gone back to her room amid the sympathetic glances of the dining-room full of girls, the principal called that dread and clammily unpleasant thing known to boarding schools as a “house-meeting.”

She herself presided, and the meeting was seldom called for any good, you may believe. Its object was rather the punishment of someone with all the sickening stages of a public investigation into her conduct first. Mrs. Forest had a way of making the girls cry in a homesick fashion at these affairs and perhaps it is hardly doing her an injustice to say that she enjoyed it. At least the girls were all perfectly convinced that it was her sport in life, and they resented particularly that their idol, Peggy, should be the subject of this one.

A deputation of girls went clattering up after the victim and brought her down, showing no further marks of perturbation than a tiny little line of uncertainty in her forehead.

“Sit here, Miss Parsons,” commanded Mrs. Forest as soon as all the girls had gathered.

Peggy sank gracefully into a chair and thrust out her pink satin slippers daintily. Mrs. Forest could not know how those tired little feet ached inside those bright slippers.

“Young ladies, I have called this meeting in order that I may have it understood that in my school the rules are to be obeyed. Now I want to ask each one of you what you think the rules are for? Do you think they were made with the idea of having them obeyed? Miss Thomas, will you answer first?”

Florence felt like the most complete traitor to Peggy that she should even be questioned on such a subject when she knew the whole proceeding was aimed at her friend.

“I—don’t—know—” she said miserably.

“Don’t know,” Mrs. Forest smiled disagreeably, “I will ask Miss Parsons what she thinks.”

Peggy looked up from her contemplation of the carpet and gave a little gasp.

“Oh, I’m not in a frame of mind to think they’re very important one way or another,” she replied, with an entirely maddening smile of deprecation. Her dimple flashed in and out of her cheek and she met Mrs. Forest’s gaze with an unperturbed calm.

“Your penalty for feeling that way—and acting as you feel is that you shall not be taken to Annapolis in the spring when all the other girls are going!” Mrs. Forest exclaimed with heat. “Does that make a difference in your attitude?”

“No,” said Peggy, “for most of this afternoon I never expected to go to Annapolis anyway—or anywhere else in the world again.”

The girls caught the under note of earnestness in her voice and leaned forward interestedly, excitement beginning to shine in their questioning eyes.

“I was paralyzed back there in the snow when the storm came up,” she went on, a bit of the weariness that was in every limb showing forth in her voice, “I gave up expecting to come back. And then a man saved me. Never mind about Annapolis. I’m more than satisfied just as it is.”

“Were you in danger from the storm, Peggy?” asked Katherine. “I was scared to pieces when I saw it coming up, but I didn’t want to start a search party—and someway I thought you couldn’t really get lost—we know all the places around here so well.”

“But I couldn’t see them,” said Peggy, “and I got blown away every time I tried to turn in a new direction. A man saved me and—got me some hot chocolate, and—and I’ve been late to dinner before and all this fuss wasn’t made over it.”

“That’s just the point,” snapped Mrs. Forest, “you have been treated with too great lenience. If you had thought more of getting home on time you wouldn’t have stopped for the hot chocolate. At least that part wasn’t necessary.”

“Oh, but it rather was,” Peggy began, but looking at Mrs. Forest she wondered how she could be expected to understand. Could she ever have been a girl on snow-shoes, and have known the cold that gleamed in the frosty air and the hunger that comes after great exertion? No, what was the use of looking for understanding there? Peggy lightly tapped the floor with her foot.

“You may go,” Mrs. Forest graciously permitted at this point, “I’m sorry, Miss Parsons,” she so far unbent as to say at parting, “that you thought you were lost and had a fright, but discipline above all things—discipline, my dear. Perhaps after this we shan’t have to combat your continual tardiness.”

In their own room a while later Peggy threw her arms around her room-mate’s neck and danced her this way and that, in a manner quite out of keeping with the tiredness that she felt.

“The greatest adventures, Katherinekins,” she shouted. “Oh, listen, listen, I can hardly wait to tell you.”

On releasing her friend, she proceeded to prepare for bed, saying she was too exhausted to sit up another minute. But she talked as she slipped on her kimono and folded back the couch cover from the cot bed on her side of the room.

“And, Katherine,” she came to the wonderful part at last, “who do you suppose he was? One of the people we tried to kill with our rose-tree—yes, he had our rose—”

“Rose-tree?” cried Katherine, and then her face, growing whiter and whiter in its excitement, she clasped her hands together and screamed out: “The fortune teller, the fortune teller! She spoke of that—quick, Peggy, hurry, what’s his name—is one of his initials H? Peggy, don’t keep me in suspense a minute longer—what is his name?”

Peggy was sitting up in bed with a queer expression in her face. As Katherine finished she looked across at her with a blank expression.

“Why, I don’t know his name!” she cried.