“Well, pick her up and bring her through,” the woman said. “She can’t lie there—she’s terrible wet, poor dear!”
The bearded man stooped down, and, lifting Mary as if she had been a doll, strode with her into the house and placed her in an easy chair before a roaring fire in the warm, well-lighted kitchen, and there she lay, with the water dripping from her skirts and forming tiny rills on the hitherto spotless floor.
“Poor dear, she’s worn out!” the woman said. “Now you go and look after your van, and I’ll see to her. It’s bed she wants, and something hot to drink. You keep out of the way for a bit, and I’ll get those clothes off her and some warm blankets round her.”
She ran bustling upstairs, returning in a minute or two with an armful of blankets and some big towels. In three or four minutes she had Mary stripped and then, after a vigorous rubbing, wrapped her in half a dozen blankets, until there was nothing visible save a small, white face peering out from what looked like a bale of woollen goods in a furniture store.
But the exposure and suffering had had their effect, and Mary fell into an illness from which she emerged—it was a surprise to those who nursed and tended her that she came out at all—but a wreck of her former self, with her mind a confused tangle, and her memory gone.
Physically, she made a little, very slow progress, but mentally, she seemed to be at a standstill. And thus it was that Ronald Thoyne found her.
She was seated on the long, wooden bench that flanked the porch of the cottage, when a motor-car drew up suddenly, and Thoyne, leaping therefrom, came towards her with long strides.
“Mary!” he cried. “Is it really yourself, Mary?”
For a moment or two the girl’s brows were knit in a puzzled frown, and then she shook her head. A woman came running from the cottage and laid a hand on his arm.
“Do you know her?” she asked.