'I am not going to faint; but it makes me sick and shaky to think of a woman freezing to death so near us that if she had cried for help we might perhaps have heard her,' Frank replied.
Then turning to Harold, he continued:
'How did she look? Was she young? Was she pretty? Was she dark or fair?'
He almost gasped the last word, as if it choked him, and no one guessed how anxiously he waited for Harold's answer, which did not afford him much relief.
'I don't know; it was so dark in there, and cold, and I was afraid some of the time, and in a hurry. I only know that her nose was long and large, for I touched it when I was trying to get at the little girl, and it was so cold—oh, oh!'
And Harold shuddered as if he still felt the icy touch of the dead.
'A long nose and a large one,' Frank said, involuntarily, while a sigh of relief escaped him as he remembered that the nose of the picture in his brother's room was neither long nor large.
Still Harold might be mistaken, and though he had no good cause for believing that the woman lying dead in the Tramp House was Gretchen, there was a horrible feeling in his heart, while a lump came into his throat and affected his speech, which was thick and indistinct, as he rose from his chair at last and said to John:
'We have no time to lose. Hitch up the horses to the long sleigh as quick as you can. We must go to the Tramp House after the woman, and send to the village for a doctor, and telegraph to Springfield for the coroner. I suppose there must be an inquest; and, Dolly, see that a room is prepared for the body.'
'Oh, Frank, must it come here? Why not take it to the cottage? The child is there,' Mrs. Tracy said, not because she cared so much for the trouble, but because of her aversion to having the corpse of a stranger in the house, with all that it involved.