By the time he went around to the shed, at the rear of the house, where he had stabled the livery horse, he could scarce see his hand before his face. The gale was hurling the tons of snow from end to end of the Valley, in solid masses. There was no question of holding the road or even of finding it. The horse knew that--and he snorted, and jerked back on the bit when Osmun essayed to lead him from shelter. Every minute, the blizzard increased. The corps of indoor laborers and their bosses had gone to their Pittsfield quarters, for Sunday. Osmun had the deserted place to himself. Swathed in his greatcoat and in a mountain of burlap, and burrowing into a bed of torn papers and paint-blotched wall-cloths, he made shift to pass a right miserable night. By dawn the snowfall had ceased. But so had the Valley’s means of entrance and of exit. The two roads leading from it to the outer world were choked breast high with solid drifts. For at least three days there could be no ingress or egress. Aura bore this isolation, philosophically. To be snowbound and cut off from the rest of the universe was no novelty to the Valley hamlet. Osmun bore it less calmly. By dint of much skill and more persuasion, he piloted his floundering horse down the hill and into the village. There, at the first house, he demanded food and shelter. He received neither. Neither the offer of much money nor an appeal to common humanity availed. It took him less than an hour to discover that Aura was unanimous in its mode of paying him back for his slight to its laborers. Not a house would take him in. Not a villager would sell him a meal or so much as feed his horse. Raging impotently, Osmun rode back to his frigid and draughty hilltop mansion-shell. By the time he had been shivering there for an hour a thin little man stumped up the steps. The newcomer introduced himself as Malcolm Creede. He had stopped for a few minutes in Aura, that morning, for provisions, and had heard the gleeful accounts of the villagers as to their treatment of the stuck-up millionaire. Wherefore, Creede had climbed the hill, in order to offer the scanty hospitality of his own farmhouse to Osmun, until such time as the roads from the Valley should be open. Osmun greeted the offer with a delight born of chill and starvation. Leading his horse, he followed Creede across a trackless half-mile or so to a farm that nestled barrenly in a cup of the hills. During the plungingly arduous walk he learned something of his host.