And to-night he had said, "Will you come with me?"

David's pulse quickened. A thousand little snow demons beat in his face
to challenge his courage. The wind swept down, as if enraged at the
thought in his mind, and scooped up volley after volley of drifting snow
and hurled them at him. There was only the thin glass between. It was
like the defiance of a living thing. It threatened him. It dared him. It
invited him out like a great bully, with a brawling show of fists. He
had always been more or less pusillanimous in the face of winter. He
disliked cold. He hated snow. But this that beat and shrieked at him
outside the window had set something stirring strangely within him. It
was a desire, whimsical and undecided at first, to thrust his face out
into that darkness and feel the sting of the wind and snow. It was
Father Roland's world. And Father Roland had invited him to enter it.
That was the curious part of the situation, as it was impressed upon him
as he sat with his face flattened against the window. The Little
Missioner had invited him, and the night was daring him. For a single
moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he
laughed--a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was
the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to
a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden and inexplicable
spontaneity of it he was startled. He turned quickly, as though some one
at his side had laughed and he was about to demand an explanation. He
looked across the aisle and his eyes met squarely the eyes of a woman.

He saw nothing but the eyes at first. They were big, dark, questing
eyes--eyes that had in them a hunting look, as though they hoped to find
in his face the answer to a great question. Never in his life had he
seen eyes that were so haunted by a great unrest, or that held in their
lustrous depths the smouldering glow of a deeper grief. Then the face