Poor little Lottie, Janice Day’s friend and his own! It was because of Lottie that the young man had so recently begun to doubt if he had quite understood Janice during the past few months.
If Janice did not care for him at all—and Nelson had honestly believed that was a fact—why had she come to nurse him when he was ill? He had not asked Mrs. Beasely point-blank if what Lottie had said was true. He knew too well the widow’s liking for gossip.
But he had dovetailed together a word dropped here and another there, until he had secured all the evidence necessary to assure him that little Lottie had “let the cat out of the bag”—childishly unconscious that she had betrayed a secret. While he was delirious, Janice had been his close attendant. When he had turned the corner on the road to health, she had refrained from coming near him.
Nelson could not understand it; but he had to accept the fact as it was for the time being. He longed to get Janice alone and to find out the truth of the matter; but every time he tried to do so something seemed to intervene. And Frank Bowman was always around, too!
These thoughts did not keep Nelson from shouting at intervals; but his reiterated shouts did not reach little Lottie’s ears for a long time. Confused by the storm, and utterly helpless to breast it, Lottie Drugg probably did the wisest thing she could have done under the circumstances.
She sat down in the midst of it and cried!
Ordinarily to give in to the gale and sink before it would be a perilous thing indeed; but in this case it kept the child from going too far to be rescued. She had not got out of the more or less sheltered cove. Had she done so, the gale would have swept her off her feet and buried her under the drifts.
But Nelson, forcing his way through the heaped-up snow, shouting now and then, staggering on with determination, his own back to the gale, finally stumbled upon a heap that seemed of strange formation. He stooped, scratched away the snow, and seized the half-unconscious Lottie in his arms.
“Child! child!” he cried. “How did you come here? You’d have been frozen in a little while.”
“Don’t! don’t wake me up, Nelson Haley,” she whined. “I want to go to sleep. Lottie’s so tired. And I could—couldn’t fi-find my echo after all!” and she began to whimper.