“This is a wiselike expedition,” said Thomas to John.

“Ay,” said John, “I’m mista’en if this is no a day that’ll be heard tell o’ yet;” and they mounted to their respective places and started.

The sky was very grim and the wind had been gradually rising.  The three ladies sat each in her corner, saying little, and feeling that this drive was certainly a means to an end, and not an end in itself.  Their pace had not been very quick from the first, but it became gradually slower, and the hard dry snow was drifting past the windows in clouds.  At last they came to a stand altogether, and John appeared at the window like a white column and said, “My leddy, we’ll hae to stop here.”

“Stop! why?”

“Because it’s impossible to wun ony farrer.”

“Nonsense!  There’s no such word as impossible.”

“The beasts might maybe get through, but they wad leave the carriage ahint them.”

“Let me out to look about,” said Lady Arthur.

“Ye had better bide where ye are,” said John:  “there’s naething to be seen, and ye wad but get yersel’ a’ snaw.  We might try to gang back the road we cam.”

“Decidedly not,” said Lady Arthur, whose spirits were rising to the occasion:  “we can’t be far from Cockhoolet here?”

“Between twa and three mile,” said John dryly.

“We’ll get out and walk,” said her ladyship, looking at the other ladies.

“Wi’ the wind in yer teeth, and sinking up to yer cuits at every step?  Ye wad either be blawn ower the muir like a feather, or planted amang the snaw like Lot’s wife.  I might maybe force my way through, but I canna leave the horses,” said John.

Lady Arthur was fully more concerned for her horses than herself:  she said, “Take out the horses and go to Cockhoolet:  leave them to rest and feed, and tell Mr. Ormiston to send for us.  We’ll sit here very comfortably till you come back:  it won’t take you long.  Thomas will go too, but give us in the luncheon-basket first.”

The men, being refreshed from the basket, set off with the horses, leaving the ladies getting rapidly snowed up in the carriage.  As the wind rose almost to a gale, Lady Arthur remarked “that it was at least better to be stuck firm among the snow than to be blown away.”

It is a grand thing to suffer in a great cause, but if you suffer merely because you have done a “daftlike” thing, the satisfaction is not the same.

The snow sifted into the carriage at the minutest crevice like fine dust, and, melting, became cold, clammy and uncomfortable.  To be set down in a glass case on a moor without shelter in the height of a snowstorm has only one recommendation:  it is an uncommon situation, a novel experience.  The ladies—­at least Lady Arthur—­must, one would think, have felt foolish, but it is a chief qualification in a leader that he never acknowledges that he is in the wrong:  if he once does that, his prestige is gone.