falling faster and thicker, and darkness was surely coming. It looked as if I was either to struggle through the snow for more miles than I knew of, or be condemned to creep under any shelter I could find and pass a miserable night. But even then my bad luck was on the turn. Going onward and downward, from off the moorland towards the valley, I suddenly realised that I had struck some sort of road or made track; it was hard and wide, as I ascertained by striking my stick through the snow at various places. And just as suddenly, a little way farther to the east, I saw, bright and beckoning, the lights of a house.
The dusk was now so much fallen, and the whirling snow-flakes so thick that I had come right up to it before I could make out what manner of house it was that I had chanced upon so opportunely. It stood a little back from the road, on its north side, and in a sort of recess in the moorland, with the higher ground shelving down to its walls on all sides except that on which I stood. There was a courtyard all round it; on three sides of this the walls were unusually high, but on mine lower—low enough to enable me to see what
