CHAPTER XIII.

THE WOMAN.

They slept later than usual at the park house that morning, and Frank and his family were just sitting down to breakfast, and Arthur was taking his rolls and coffee in his own room, when John, with a white, scared face, looked in and said: 

’Excuse me, Mr. Tracy, but—­but something dreadful has happened.  There’s a woman frozen to death in the Tramp House, with a baby, and Harold Hastings found them, and—­but he is here, sir; he will tell you himself;’ and he went for the boy, who soon entered the room, followed by every servant in the house.

Harold had come upon John first in the stable, and sinking down exhausted upon the hay, had told his story, while the man, John, listened terror-stricken and open-mouthed.  Then seeing how weak and tired Harold seemed, and how he sank back upon the hay when he attempted to rise, he took him in his arms, and carrying him to the kitchen, left him there while he went with the news to his master.

‘A woman dead in the Tramp House, and a baby!’ Frank exclaimed, and for an instant he felt as if he were dying, for there flashed over him a conviction that the woman had come in the train the previous night, and that it was her cry for help which had been borne to him on the winds, and to which he had paid no heed.

‘Are you sick?  Are you going to faint?’ his wife said to him, as she saw how white he grew, and how heavily he leaned back in his chair as Harold related the particulars of his finding the woman and the child.

’I am not going to faint; but it makes me sick and shaky to think of a woman freezing to death so near us that if she had cried for help we might perhaps have heard her,’ Frank replied.

Then turning to Harold, he continued: 

‘How did she look?  Was she young?  Was she pretty?  Was she dark or fair?’

He almost gasped the last word, as if it choked him, and no one guessed how anxiously he waited for Harold’s answer, which did not afford him much relief.

’I don’t know; it was so dark in there, and cold, and I was afraid some of the time, and in a hurry.  I only know that her nose was long and large, for I touched it when I was trying to get at the little girl, and it was so cold—­oh, oh!’

And Harold shuddered as if he still felt the icy touch of the dead.

‘A long nose and a large one,’ Frank said, involuntarily, while a sigh of relief escaped him as he remembered that the nose of the picture in his brother’s room was neither long nor large.

Still Harold might be mistaken, and though he had no good cause for believing that the woman lying dead in the Tramp House was Gretchen, there was a horrible feeling in his heart, while a lump came into his throat and affected his speech, which was thick and indistinct, as he rose from his chair at last and said to John: