“The what?” gasped Mrs. Worthington, who, terrified beyond measure at the mention of a dead woman, was doubly so at hearing of a child. “A child,” she repeated, “whose child?” while ’Lina, shrinking back from the keen blast, refused to obey, and so the mother, throwing her cloak around her, joined the group by the gate. Carefully Hugh lifted the light figure in his arms and bore it to the house, where ’Lina, whose curiosity had overcome her selfishness, met him on the piazza and led the way to the sitting-room, asking innumerable questions as to how he found her and who she was. Hugh made no reply save an order that the lounge should be brought near the fire and a pillow from his mother’s bed. “From mine, then,” he added, as he saw the anxious look in his mother’s face, and guessed that she shrank from having her own snowy pillow come in contact with the wet, limpid figure he was depositing upon the lounge. It was a slight, girlish form, and the long brown hair, loosened from its confinement, fell in rich profusion over the pillow which ’Lina brought half reluctantly, eyeing askance the insensible object before her, and daintily holding back her dress lest it should come in contact with the child her mother had deposited upon the floor, where it lay crying lustily, unnoticed save by Rover, who, quite as awkward as his master would have been in like circumstances, seemed trying to amuse and protect it, interposing his shaggy proportions between that and the fire when once it showed a disposition to creep that way. “Do one of you _do something_,” Hugh said, as he saw how indisposed both his mother and sister were to help, the former being too much frightened and the latter too indignant to act. The idea of a strange woman being thrust upon them in this way was highly displeasing to Miss ’Lina, who haughtily drew back from the little one when it stretched its arms out toward her, while its pretty lip quivered and the tears dropped over its rounded cheek. To her it was nothing but an intruder, a brat, and so she steeled her heart against its touching appeal, and turned her back upon it, leaving for Rover the kindly office of soothing the infant.