She stopped abruptly, and throwing the water-proof back from her head, looked at him through the driven fog of snow.  One of her hands was stretched towards him involuntarily, and it was in that attitude that he long remembered her:  standing in the drift which had piled up against the gate almost knee-deep, the shabby skirt and the black water-proof flapping like torn sails, one hand out-stretched like that of a figure in a tableau, her brown face with its thin features mottled with cold and unlovely, her startled eyes fixed on him with a strange, wild tenderness that held something of the laughter of whole companionship in it mingling with a loyalty and championship that was almost ferocious—­she looked an Undine of the snow.

Suddenly she ran to him, still keeping her hand out-stretched until it touched his own.

“How did you know me?” he said.

“Know you!” was all the answer she made to that question.  “Come into the house.  I’ve got some coffee on the stove for you.  I’ve been up and down the street waiting for you ever since it began to get light.”

“Your grandfather won’t—­”

“He’s at Uncle Jonas’s; he won’t be back till noon.  There’s no one here.”

She led him to the front-door, where he stamped and shook himself; he was snow from head to foot.

“I’m running away from the good Gomorrah,” he said, “but I’ve stopped to look back, and I’m a pretty white pillar.”

“I know where you stopped to look back,” she answered, brushing him heartily with her red hands.  “You came in the alley way.  It was Mamie’s window.”

He did not reply, and the only visible token that he had any consciousness of this clairvoyance of hers was a slight lift of his higher eyebrow.  She wasted no time in getting him to the kitchen, where, when she had removed his overcoat, she placed him in a chair, unwound the comforter, and, as carefully as a nurse, lifted the cap from his injured head.  When the strip of towel was disclosed she stood quite still for a moment with the cap in her hand; then with a broken little cry she stooped and kissed a lock of his hair, which escaped, discolored, beneath the bandage.

“Stop that!” he commanded, horribly embarrassed.

“Oh, Joe,” she cried, “I knew!  I knew it was there—­but to see it!  And it’s my fault for leaving you—­I had to go or I wouldn’t have—­I—­”

“Where’d you hear about it?” he asked, shortly.

“I haven’t been to bed,” she answered.  “Grandfather and I were up all night at Uncle Jonas’s, and Colonel Flitcroft came about two o’clock, and he told us.”

“Did he tell you about Norbert?”

“Yes—­a great deal.”  She poured coffee into a cup from a pot on the stove, brought it to him, then placing some thin slices of bread upon a gridiron, began to toast them over the hot coals.  “The Colonel said that Norbert thought he wouldn’t get well,” she concluded; “and Mr. Arp said Norbert was the kind that never die, and they had quite an argument.”