"Curse them!" muttered the tinker, fiercely. "If I only had a coat to put around you--anything to break the wind. Curse them warm and dry inside there!" and he shook his fist at the forbidden door. Patsy tried to smile, but failed. "Faith! I haven't the breath to curse them; but God pity them, that's all." Before she had finished the tinker had a firm grip of her arm. "Hang it! If no one will take us in, we'll break in. Cheer up, lass; I'll have you by a crackling good fire if I have to steal the wood." He hurried her along--somewhere. Weariness and bodily depression closed her eyes; and she let him lead her--whither she neither wondered nor cared. Time and distance ceased to exist for her; she stumbled along, conscious of but two things--a fear that she would be ill again with no one to tend her, and a gigantic craving for heat--heat! When she opened her eyes again they had stopped and were standing under a shuttered window at what appeared to be the back of a summer cottage; the tinker was prying a rock out of the mud at their feet. In a most business-like manner he used it to smash the fastening of the shutters, and, when these were removed, to break the small, leaded pane of glass nearest the window-fastening. It was only a matter of seconds then before the window was opened and Patsy boosted over the sill into the kitchen beyond. "Ye'd best stand me in the sink and wring me out, or I'll flood the house," Patsy managed to gasp. "I'd do it myself, but I know, if I once let go of my hands, I'll shake to death." The tinker followed her advice, working the water out of her dripping garments in much the same fashion that he would have employed had she been a half-drowned cat. In spite of her numbness Patsy saw the grim humor of it all and came perilously near to a hysterical laugh. The tinker unconsciously forestalled it by shouldering her, as if she had been a whole bag of water-soaked cats, and carrying her up the stairs. After looking into three rooms he deposited her on the threshold of a fourth. "It has the look of women folks; you're sure to find some left-behind clothes o' theirs hanging up somewhere. Come down when you're dry an' I'll have that fire waiting for you." What followed was all a dream to Patsy's benumbed senses: the search in drawers and closets for things to put on, and the finding of them; the insistent aching of fingers and arms in trying to adjust them, and the persistent refusal of brain to direct them with any degree of intelligence. She came down the stairs a few minutes later, dragging a bundle of wet clothes after her, and found the tinker kneeling by the hearth, still in his dripping rags, and heaping more logs on the already blazing fire.