“You are very unkind—­very rude,” I said.  “You wouldn’t dare to do that, or speak like that to Her.”

He laughed loudly.  “What—­haven’t you forgotten ‘Her?’” (As if I ever could!) “Well, I may tell you, it’s just because I did dare to ’speak like that’ to a woman, that I’m a chauffeur stuck in the snow with another man’s car, and the—­”

“The rest is another epithet which concerns me, I suppose,” I remarked with dignity, though suddenly I felt the chill of the icy air far, far more cruelly than I had felt it yet.  I was so cold, in this white desolation, that it seemed I must die soon.  And it wouldn’t matter at all if I were buried under the drifts, to be found in the late spring with violets growing out of the places where my eyes once had been.

“Yes,” said he, in that cool way he has, which can be as irritating as a chilblain.  “It was an epithet concerning you, but luckily for me I stopped to think before I spoke—­an accomplishment I’m only just beginning to learn.”

I swallowed something much harder and bigger than a cannon ball, and said nothing.

“Of course you’re covered with snow up to your knees, foolish child!” He was glaring ferociously at me.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter most infernally.  Don’t you know that you make no more than a featherweight of difference to the car?”

“I feel as if I weighed a thousand pounds, now.”

“It’s that snow!”

“No.  It’s you.  Your crossness.  I can’t have people cross to me, on lonely mountains, just when I’m trying to help them.”

His glare of rage turned to a stare of surprise.  “Cross?  Do you think I was cross to you?”

“Yes.  And you just stopped in time, or you would have been worse.”

“Oh, I see,” he said.  “You thought that the ‘epithet’ was going to be invidious, did you?”

“Naturally.”

“Well, it wasn’t.  I—­no, I won’t say it!  That would be the last folly.  But—­I wasn’t going to be cross.  I can’t have you think that, whatever happens.  Now sit still and be good, while I push again.”

I weighed no more than half the thousand pounds now, and the cannon ball had dissolved like a chocolate cream; but the car stood like a rock, fixed, immutable.

“There ought to be half a dozen of me,” said the chauffeur.  “Look here, little pal, there’s nothing else for it; I must trudge off to St. Flour and collect the missing five.  Are you afraid to be left here alone?”

Of course I said no; but when he had disappeared, walking very fast, I thought of a large variety of horrors that might happen; almost everything, in fact, from an earthquake to a mad bull.  As the sun leaned far down toward the west, the level red light lay like pools of blood in the snow-hollows, and the shadows “came alive,” as they used when I was a child lying awake, alone, watching the play of the fire on wall and ceiling.