Lad had never seen a human carried in this manner. It did not make sense to him. And he stepped, hesitantly, forward to investigate. The Master laid the bundle tenderly on the veranda hammock-swing, and loosed the blanket-folds that swathed it. Lad came over to him, and looked down into the pitiful little face. There had been no baby at The Place for many a year. Lad had seldom seen one at such close quarters. But now the sight did something queer to his heart--the big heart that ever went out to the weak and defenseless, the heart that made a playfully snapping puppy or a cranky little lapdog as safe from his terrible jaws as was Lady herself. He sniffed in friendly fashion at the child's pathetically upturned face. Into the dull baby-eyes, at sight of him, came a look of pleased interest--the first that had crossed their blankness for many a long day. Two feeble little hands reached out and buried themselves lovingly in the mass of soft ruff that circled Lad's neck. The dog quivered all over, from nose to brush, with joy at the touch. He laid his great head down beside the drawn cheek, and positively reveled in the pain the tugging fingers were inflicting on his sensitive throat. In one instant, Lad had widened his narrow and hard-established circle of Loved Ones, to include this half-dead wisp of humanity. The child's mother came up the steps in the Master's wake. At sight of the huge dog, she halted in quick alarm. "Look out!" she shrilled. "He may attack her! Oh, _do_ drive him away!" "Who? Lad," queried the Mistress. "Why, Lad wouldn't harm a hair of her head if his life depended on it! See, he adores her already. I never knew him to take to a stranger before. And she looks brighter and happier, too, than she has looked in months. Don't make her cry by sending him away from her." "But," insisted the woman, "dogs are full of germs. I've read so. He might give her some terrible----" "Lad is just as clean and as germless as I am," declared the Mistress, with some warmth. "There isn't a day he doesn't swim in the lake, and there isn't a day I don't brush him. He's----" "He's a collie, though," protested the guest, looking on in uneasy distaste, while Baby secured a tighter and more painful grip on the delighted dog's ruff. "And I've always heard collies are awfully treacherous. Don't you find them so?" "If we did," put in the Master, who had heard that same asinine question until it sickened him, "if we found collies were treacherous, we wouldn't keep them. A collie is either the best dog or the worst dog on earth. Lad is the best. We don't keep the other kind. I'll call him away, though, if it bothers you to have him so close to Baby. Come, Lad!" Reluctantly, the dog turned to obey the Law; glancing back, as he went, at the adorable new idol he had acquired; then crossing obediently to where the Master stood.