you worry one mite—­not one mite.  I remember once, when I was a girl, my father didn’t come home, and mother and I were almost crazy, and he came in laughing the next morning.  He had lost his last train because there was a block on account of the ice.  The river was frozen over.  There is nothing for you to worry about.  Now come right up-stairs and go to bed.  There is a little room out of mine, as warm as toast, and you won’t be a bit afraid.  There you were all alone in that great house, you poor, blessed child.”

Charlotte sobbed, but now with a certain comfort.

“I should have been so afraid, I should have lost my senses, all alone in a house at your age,” said Mrs. Anderson, all the time gently impelling the girl along with her.  “Of course there is nothing to be afraid of, but one imagines things; and you came here all alone at this time of the night!”

“Yes,” responded Charlotte, with a gasp of the intensest self-pity, sure of an echo.

Randolph ran up-stairs before his mother and Charlotte and snatched the hot-water bottle out of his mother’s bed, and was out the opposite door, which connected with the back stairs leading to the kitchen.  As he went out he heard his mother say:  “All that way alone this time of night, you poor, precious child!” and Charlotte’s little, piteous, yet comforted sob in response, exactly as a hurt baby might respond to commiserations.  He felt his own knees tremble as he went down-stairs, carrying the hot-water bottle, which had always struck him as a rather absurd article, to be regarded with the concessions which a man should make to the little, foolish devices for the comfort of a softer and slighter sex.  He hunted up the milk in the ice-box, and warmed it with solicitude in a china cup, which, luckily, did not break.  The fire was still very good, and the water in the tea-kettle quite boiling.  It was not long before he knocked at his mother’s door, bearing the water-bottle dangling on one wrist, and carrying the cup of milk.  His mother opened the door just wide enough to receive the articles.

“Is the milk hot?” she asked.

Randolph meekly replied that it had almost boiled.

“The water-bottle is hot, too,” said his mother, in a satisfied tone.  “She is undressed.  I got one of my nightgowns for her, and it is quite warm in the little room.  Now I am going to take this in to her, and make her drink the milk, and I hope she will get to sleep.”

“I hope she will,” replied Randolph, in a sort of dazed fashion, and there was a foolish radiance over his face, and he did not meet his mother’s eyes.

“I’m coming into your room a minute, after I see to her,” said his mother, and if the man had been a child the tone would have sounded ominous.