When at last they emerged from the cold, dark room into the bright sunshine, the child gave a great cry of delight, and the blue eyes fairly danced with joy as they fell upon the dazzling snow.  Then she put both arms around Harold’s neck, and nestling her face close to his, kissed him as fondly as if she had known him all her life, while the boy paid her back kiss after kiss as he proceeded slowly toward home.

The child was heavy, and the bag and shawl made such an unwieldy bundle that his progress was very slow, and he stopped more than once to rest and take breath, and as often as he stopped the blue eyes would look up enquiringly at him with an expression which made his boyish heart beat faster as he thought what pretty eyes they were and wondered who she was.  Once he fell down, and bag and baby rolled in the snow; but only the vigorous kicking of a pair of little legs inside the bag showed that the child disapproved of the proceeding, for she made no sound, and when he picked her up she brushed the snow from his hair, and laughed as if the thing had been done for fun.

He reached the cottage at last, and bursting into the room where his grandmother was sitting with her foot in a chair, exclaimed, as he put down the child, who, as she was still enveloped in the bag, stood with difficulty: 

’Oh grandma, what do you think?  I did see a light in the Tramp House, and there is somebody there—­a woman—­dead—­frozen to death, with nothing over her, for she had given her cloak and shawl to her little girl.  I went there.  I found her, and brought the baby home in the carpet-bag, and now I must go back to the woman.  Oh, it was dreadful to see her white face, and it is so cold there and dark;’ and if the horror of what he had seen had just impressed itself upon him, the boy turned pale and faint, and, staggering to a chair, burst into tears.

Too much astonished to utter a word, Mrs. Crawford stared at him a moment in a bewildered kind of way, and then when the child, seeing him cry, began also to cry for “Mah-nee,” and struggle in the bag, she forgot her lame foot, on which she had not stepped for a week, and going to the little girl, released her from the bag, and taking her upon her lap, began to untie the soft woollen cloak and to chafe the cold fingers, while she questioned her grandson.

Having recovered himself somewhat, Harold repeated his story, and asked with a shudder: 

’Must I go for her alone?  I can’t, I can’t.  I was not afraid with the baby there, but it is so awful, and I never saw any one dead before.’

‘Go back alone!  Of course not!’ his grandmother replied.  ’But you must go to the park at once and tell them; go as fast as you can.  She may not be dead.’

‘Yes, she is,’ Harold answered, decidedly.  ’I touched her face, and nothing alive could feel like that.’

He was buttoning his overcoat preparatory to a fresh start, but before he went he kissed the little girl who was sitting on his grandmother’s lap, and who, as she saw him leaving her, began to cry for him and to utter curious sounds unintelligible to them both.  But Harold brought her a piece of bread, which she began to devour ravenously, and then he stepped quietly out and was soon breaking through the drifts which lay between the cottage and the park.