well to follow Mr. Patello's example and get some sleep, he made up the fire again, and disposing himself in a couple of easy chairs on the hearth, composed himself as well as he could for slumber. He slept at last—soundly in the end, waking eventually to find the fire dying down, and Mr. Patello sitting up, woe-begone, on his couch, lamenting the cold and audibly wondering on what was going to happen next.
It was six o'clock in the morning then, and still dark as midnight; when daylight came Wedgwood saw that while the snow had ceased to fall, it had evidently continued during a greater part of the night and was piled up in deep masses about the house. Mortover Grange, in fact, was cut off from the world; snow-bound; he saw little chance of leaving it to prosecute his enquiries. From thence onward until nearly noon he and his companions could do no more than gaze from the windows on a white and silent world. Here and there, in the distance, they saw the smoke rising from the chimneys of some house or other whose inhabitants were in the same plight as themselves, but though Wedgwood, from an upper window, kept a careful look-out in the directions in which he believed the roads to lie, noon had passed before he saw a sign of any human figure. Then, painfully struggling through the drifts from a
