‘Do as you like,’ Frank replied, and there, so far as he was concerned, the matter ended.

But while the carpenters were at work at the Park Arthur sent one of them to the old stone house and had the door fixed and glass put in two of the windows, while rude but close shutters were nailed before the others, and then Arthur went himself into the room and pushed a long table which the picnic people had used for their refreshments and the tramps for a bed into a corner, where one sleeping upon it would be more sheltered from the draught.  All this seemed nonsense to Frank, who laughingly suggested that Arthur should place in it a stove and a ton of coal for the benefit of his lodgers.  But Arthur cared little for his brother’s jokes.  His natural kindness of heart, which was always seeking another’s good, had prompted him to this care for the Tramp House, in which he felt a strange interest, never dreaming that what he was doing would reach forward to the future and influence not only his life but that of many others.

The storm which had raged so fiercely around the house in the park had not spared the cottage in the lane, which rocked like a cradle as gust after gust of wind struck it with a force which made every timber quiver, and sent the boy Harold close to his grandmother’s side as he asked, tremblingly: 

‘Do you think we shall be blown away?’

The rheumatism from which Mrs. Crawford had been suffering in the fall had troubled her more or less during the entire winter, and now, aggravated by a cold, it was worse than it had ever been before, and on the night of the storm she was suffering intense pain, which was only relieved by the hot poultices which Harold made under her direction and applied to the swollen limb.  This kept him up later than usual, and the clock was striking eleven when his grandmother declared herself easier, and bade him go to bed.

It was at this hour that Arthur Tracy had fancied he heard the cry for help, and the snow was sweeping past the cottage in great billows of white when Harold went to the window and looked out into the night.  In the summer when the leaves were upon the trees the old stone house could not he seen from the cottage, from which it was distant a quarter of a mile or more, but in the winter when the trees were stripped of their foliage it was plainly discernible, and as Harold glanced that way a gleam of light appeared suddenly, as if the door had been opened and the flickering rays of a candle had for a moment shone out into the darkness.  Then it disappeared, but not until Harold had cried out: 

’Oh, grandma, there’s a light in the Tramp House; I saw it plain as day.  Somebody is in there.’

‘God pity them.’ was Mrs. Crawford’s reply, though she did not quite credit Harold’s statement, or think of it again that night.