As she spoke the baby raised her head and stared in startled wonder at the pitying faces about her. The shawl fell back a little from her head, and, in the brilliant light from the fire, the girls could see golden rings of hair clustering around a face delicately pink and white. The big brown eyes gazed at them for a moment, then with a little sob she buried her head on Mr. Marshall's shoulder again.
"I must look like some one she has known," he said softly, as he wrapped the shawl closely around her, "for the minute she saw me she held out her arms to me, and no one could get her away. These poor people around here have enough to look out for over night, so I'll take this baby home. Do you think you can help take care of her for a while, daughter?"
"Oh, yes, I'd love to," assented Dolly eagerly. "I wish she'd let me take her," but for the present, at least, the sorrowful baby refused to leave her safe resting-place, and only clung more tightly to Mr. Marshall when the girls tried to beguile her.
Mr. Hamilton and Betty's older brothers stayed to make some arrangements for the poor family that had been turned out-of-doors, and, as by this time the fire was well under control, the spectators dispersed in various directions. The girls and boys escorted Mr. Marshall and the baby home, and then left Ruth at her own door.
By the time she had finished telling Mrs. Hamilton and Arthur about the fire and the forlorn baby, Mr. Hamilton appeared and was at once besieged with questions.
"I wish you had been there, Mary," he said to his wife; "you always seem to know how to make every one comfortable. It is wonderful to me to see how good those people are to each other. They were only too anxious to shelter that poor Schmidt family, in which there are six children, and I didn't know whether we should ever get them peaceably divided up. I tried to get more information about the baby's mother; but no one seems to know anything except that she was called Mrs. Winter, and had lost her husband quite recently."
"Was she a young woman?" asked Mrs. Hamilton.
"She looked hardly more than a girl as she lay there, and her face was so refined and sweet that I couldn't help fancying that the early part of her life had been spent under very different conditions from these."
"Didn't the woman they lived with know anything more about them?" asked Ruth, much disappointed.
"Poor Mrs. Schmidt was so excited, and so anxious to see that her own brood was safe and to be well cared for, that she didn't know much about anything else. The poor little mother had only been with her a few days, and beyond the fact that she seemed very sad and had cried a great deal, and that the little one's name was Elsa, she could tell me nothing. Oh, she did say that the mother and baby looked very much alike, the same large, brown eyes, and the same fair complexion and fair hair."