"Hold on; I've got a horse blanket here," and he dived under the seat. "There!" and he wrapped it around her shoulders.
"Thanks," she said, briefly, and again her bird-like eyes scanned the road ahead.
"Hot cakes an' syrup!" she exclaimed, in a voice of resigned distress, "there's the North Marsden lady-board comin'. They must have 'phoned her. Say, mister, lemme sneak under here. If she holes you up, you'll have to tell a lie."
The young man grinned delightedly as the little girl slipped through the blanket and disappeared under the lap-robe. Then he again went skimming over the snow.
There was a very grand sleigh approaching him, with a befurred coachman on the seat driving a pair of roan horses, and behind him a gray-haired lady smothered in handsome robes.
"Please stop!" she called pathetically, to the approaching young man.
The creamery shark pulled up his mare, and blinked thoughtfully at her.
"Oh, have you seen a little girl?" she said excitedly; "a poor little girl, very thin and miserable, and with a lame, brown dog limping after her? She's wandering somewhere—the unfortunate, misguided child. We have had such trouble with her at the Middle Marsden Asylum—the orphan asylum, you know. We have fed her and clothed her, and now she's run away."
The fat young man became preternaturally solemn, the more so as he heard a low growl somewhere in the region of his feet.
"Did she have black hair as lanky as an Injun's?" he asked.