She thought again of those isolated country houses that her train had passed, and of the life there the long winter through--the ceaseless glare through the windows, the crust forming on the soft drifts of snow, finally the slow cheerless melting and the harsh spring of which Roger Patton had told her. Her spring--to lose it forever--with its lilacs and the lazy sweetness it stirred in her heart. She was laying away that spring--afterward she would lay away that sweetness. With a gradual insistence the storm broke. Sally Carrol felt a film of flakes melt quickly on her eyelashes, and Harry reached over a furry arm and drew down her complicated flannel cap. Then the small flakes came in skirmish-line, and the horse bent his neck patiently as a transparency of white appeared momentarily on his coat. "Oh, he's cold, Harry," she said quickly. "Who? The horse? Oh, no, he isn't. He likes it!" After another ten minutes they turned a corner and came in sight of their destination. On a tall hill outlined in vivid glaring green against the wintry sky stood the ice palace. It was three stories in the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows, and the innumerable electric lights inside made a gorgeous transparency of the great central hall. Sally Carrol clutched Harry's hand under the fur robe. "It's beautiful!" he cried excitedly. "My golly, it's beautiful, isn't it! They haven't had one here since eighty-five!" Somehow the notion of there not having been one since eighty-five oppressed her. Ice was a ghost, and this mansion of it was surely peopled by those shades of the eighties, with pale faces and blurred snow-filled hair. "Come on, dear," said Harry. She followed him out of the sleigh and waited while he hitched the horse. A party of four--Gordon, Myra, Roger Patton, and another girl--drew up beside them with a mighty jingle of bells. There were quite a crowd already, bundled in fur or sheepskin, shouting and calling to each other as they moved through the snow, which was now so thick that people could scarcely be distinguished a few yards away. "It's a hundred and seventy feet tall," Harry was saying to a muffled figure beside him as they trudged toward the entrance; "covers six thousand square yards." She caught snatches of conversation: "One main hall"--"walls twenty to forty inches thick"--"and the ice cave has almost a mile of--"--"this Canuck who built it---" They found their way inside, and dazed by the magic of the great crystal walls Sally Carrol found herself repeating over and over two lines from "Kubla Khan": "It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!"