“I’m sure I don’t know, except that we came to the end of that path and jumped off,” answered Teddy, feeling gingerly of his forehead on which Billie could see that a large purple lump was beginning to swell. “If I had had a chance to see what was coming I could have rolled off the sled and pulled you with me. But that turn in the road brought us right on top of it. It’s a sort of precipice, I guess,” he went on to explain, while Billie eyed with sympathy the swelling lump on his forehead. “It’s about fifteen feet high, I think, and if there hadn’t been snow on the ground we surely would have got hurt.” “If there hadn’t been snow on the ground, we wouldn’t have been sledding,” Billie pointed out, adding, so unexpectedly as to make Teddy jump: “Who hit you?” “Wh—what?” he gasped. Then seeing that her eyes were fixed on the bump that he was still fingering gingerly, Teddy’s face grew redder than it already was, if such a thing were possible, and his hand fell quickly to his side. “Oh, that!” he said, loftily, as if it were nothing at all. “I guess the runner of the sled gave me a whack just as we dumped over. It doesn’t hurt, though. Not a bit.” “I bet it does, too,” said Billie, as the boy pulled his cap down tight over the tell-tale spot. “Where is the sled, Teddy?” she added. “Out there, somewhere, sticking in a drift,” answered the boy. “I didn’t have time to pull it out because I thought you had been killed or something and I had to come to look for you.” “Thanks,” she laughed at him. Then her face became suddenly serious, and she struggled to her feet, trying to brush off the snow that seemed to cover her from head to foot. “How are we going to get out of this, Teddy?” she asked, looking at him seriously. “Ask me an easy one,” he returned, his good-looking face extremely anxious and puzzled. “The snow is awfully deep, and I don’t believe we could ever get up to that path again. It would take us a couple of hours to go around, and besides, I’m not sure just how to go.” “In other words,” said Billie, trying her best to speak gayly while her heart sank at this unusually long speech of Teddy’s, “we’re lost, aren’t we?” “I guess it amounts to that,” Teddy answered soberly, and for a long minute they just stood staring at each other. Then Billie gave herself an impatient little shake. “Help me out of this,” she said, as she tried to push through the heavy snow that seemed to press in upon her from every side. “I’d like to have a look around, anyway.” She found that even with Teddy’s help it was no easy task to clamber out of the snowdrift that she had fallen into, and both she and the boy were panting with exertion when they had finally managed to get out into the open. Even there they stood up to their waists in the clinging snow, and Billie, looking desolately out over the white expanse, began to realize that she was very, very cold.