"I can never make my way to the store!" she moaned. "I— I will perish in this awful cold!"
She grew bewildered as to the direction which had been given her. "It can not be that I am going the right way," she sobbed.
Involuntarily she turned around and took the first cross-street in view. She had scarcely made her way half a dozen blocks when the knowledge was fully forced upon her that she must have lost her way, that each step she took was bringing her toward the suburbs of the city instead of the business portion.
Jessie stopped short. Then she fell. Hubert Varrick, on the other side of the street, saw the slender figure suddenly reel backward, whirl about, and then fall face downward in a huge snow-drift that swallowed her from sight. He plunged quickly forward, muttering to himself: "What a terrible thing it is for a weak woman to be out on such a night as this!"
And he wondered if it could be the poor sewing-girl whom he had just heard the servants discussing. They had said that Rosamond Lee had sent her to one of the stores for a few yards of velvet ribbon, without giving her her car-fare, expecting her to walk all the way in the face of such a storm.
"I declare, it is a thousand pities!" muttered Varrick.
In less time than it takes to tell it he had reached the spot where the girl lay prostrate.
Heavens! how thinly she was clad! And he shivered even from the depths of his fur-lined overcoat at the very thought of it.
Deftly as a woman might have done, he raised her, remembering that there was a drug store across the way to which he could carry her. For one instant his eyes rested on her face in the dim, uncertain, fading daylight; then an awful cry broke from his lips—a cry of horror.
"My God! is it Jessie Bain? Am I mad, or am I dreaming?"