She throws a shawl round her and comes to the door. The collie was hers before we were married, and she is almost as fond of him, I tell her, as she is of Jack, our eldest boy.
'Laddie, Laddie!' she calls; 'come in, sir.' He comes obediently at her call, but refuses to enter the house, and pursues the same dumb pantomime he has already tried on me.
'I shall shut him out, Jessie,' I say. 'A night in the snow won't hurt him;' and I prepare to close the door.
'You will do nothing of the kind!' she replies with an anxious look; 'but you will rouse the servants at once, and follow him. Some one is lost in the snow, and Laddie knows it.'
I laugh. 'Really, Jessie, you are absurd. Laddie is a sagacious animal, no doubt, but I cannot believe he is as clever as that. How can he possibly know whether any one is lost in the snow, or not?'
'Because he has found them, and come back to us for help. Look at him now.'
I cannot but own that the dog seems restless and uneasy, and is evidently endeavouring to coax us to follow him; he looks at us with pathetic entreaty in his eloquent eyes. 'Why won't you believe me?' he seems to ask.
'Come,' she continues; 'you know you could not rest while there was a possibility of a fellow-creature wanting your assistance. And I am certain Laddie is not deceiving us.'
What is a poor hen-pecked man to do? I grumble and resist and yield; as I have often grumbled and resisted and yielded before, and as I doubtless often shall again.
'Laddie once found a man in the snow before, but he was dead,' Jessie says, as she hurries off to fill a flask with brandy, and get ready some blankets for us to take with us. In the meantime I rouse the servants. They are all English, with the exception of Donald the gardener, and I can see that they are scoffingly sceptical of Laddie's sagacity, and inwardly disgusted at having to turn out of their warm beds and face the bitter winter's night.