Highland Mist Read Online Free Page B

brusquely, and thrust a torch into Charles’s hand. “Take this, and direct the beam of it at your feet, so that you don’t both break your necks, and follow me!”
    He disappeared into the darkness ahead, and Toni clung to Charles’s arm, and followed as best she could. But the freezing quality of the cold numbed her wits, and her feet felt as if they were made of lead, and refused to obey the feeble messages her bewildered brain sent out to them. More than once she nearly dragged Charles down with her into a drift that looked like the wall of a house as it reared up beside them, and but for the somewhat surprising strength of his arm nothing could have prevented the torch being lost and the wall of snow collapsing on top of them and burying them.
    MacLeod had extracted a couple of their suitcases f-om the boot of the car, and armed with these he forged ahead, impervious to drifts or the white wilderness into which he plunged. Toni could have admired the uprightness of his figure and his indifference to the petrifying cold and the storm that beat at them if she had been capable of admiring anything at all just then. But the truth was she was appalled by the thought of covering a quarter of a mile under such conditions, and she very much doubted whether she could cover more than half a dozen yards.
    Charles kept his arm tightly about her and addressed her reassuringly every few seconds—at least she didn’t wonder now what her mother would have done under such conditions, or how Charles would have behaved towards her, for her mother simply would never have allowed herself to become caught up in an adventure such as this, and Charles was already more than a little out of patience with her. And when a blinding flurry of snow came at them he put up his hand to shield his eyes and dropped the torch on which their ability to crawl forward at all depended.
    Such blackness closed down that Toni remembered it all the rest of her life. And she remembered the cold round moon that suddenly sailed into a patch of clear sky above their heads as she stood helplessly with Charles’s arm temporarily withdrawn from her, and Charles himself swearing softly a foot or so away. It was so extraordinary that the clouds should thin sufficiently at that moment to allow the face of the moon to be seen that Toni lost her balance gazing at it, and before Charles could recover the torch she was rolling down a bank and into the utter silence of a bleak pine wood.
    She felt hard stones bruise her as she rolled, despite the fact that they were covered inches deep in snow, and the iciness of the frozen snow itself was an additional shock. She heard Charles call out to her in an alarmed fashion at the very moment that she crashed into a tree root and lay still.
    “Toni, in heaven’s name where are you?” MacLeod stopped forging ahead as if the weather was perfectly clement, and the night serene and still, and turned back.
    “Don’t tell me you’ve lost track of the girl?” he said to Charles impatiently.
    The snow had ceased temporarily, and the moon was riding high above them. Charles picked up his torch and gestured with it to the bank down the sloping side of which Toni had disappeared, and the younger man dropped the suitcases and plunged down the slope. Toni was sitting up dazedly and calling in a faint voice, “I’m here,” and when he reached her her voice grew stronger with relief.
    “I don’t quite know what happened,” she admitted. “But I was so surprised to see the moon.”
    “What a daft thing to be surprised about!” he exclaimed, and hauled her to her feet.
    “You’d better let me carry you,” he said, and swung her up into his arms and bore her back up the slope to the snow-filled road where Charles awaited them. In the mild light of the moon he was looking considerably disturbed, and he wanted to know at once whether Toni had hurt herself, and if so how badly. He even wanted to delay their progress to make absolutely