'Yes, she is,' Harold answered, decidedly. 'I touched her face, and nothing alive could feel like that.'
He was buttoning his overcoat preparatory to a fresh start, but before he went he kissed the little girl who was sitting on his grandmother's lap, and who, as she saw him leaving her, began to cry for him and to utter curious sounds unintelligible to them both. But Harold brought her a piece of bread, which she began to devour ravenously, and then he stepped quietly out and was soon breaking through the drifts which lay between the cottage and the park.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE WOMAN.
They slept later than usual at the park house that morning, and Frank and his family were just sitting down to breakfast, and Arthur was taking his rolls and coffee in his own room, when John, with a white, scared face, looked in and said:
'Excuse me, Mr. Tracy, but—but something dreadful has happened. There's a woman frozen to death in the Tramp House, with a baby, and Harold Hastings found them, and—but he is here, sir; he will tell you himself;' and he went for the boy, who soon entered the room, followed by every servant in the house.
Harold had come upon John first in the stable, and sinking down exhausted upon the hay, had told his story, while the man, John, listened terror-stricken and open-mouthed. Then seeing how weak and tired Harold seemed, and how he sank back upon the hay when he attempted to rise, he took him in his arms, and carrying him to the kitchen, left him there while he went with the news to his master.
'A woman dead in the Tramp House, and a baby!' Frank exclaimed, and for an instant he felt as if he were dying, for there flashed over him a conviction that the woman had come in the train the previous night, and that it was her cry for help which had been borne to him on the winds, and to which he had paid no heed.
'Are you sick? Are you going to faint?' his wife said to him, as she saw how white he grew, and how heavily he leaned back in his chair as Harold related the particulars of his finding the woman and the child.