This the girls were not in the least reluctant to do, for they were chilled through, and the warmth of Mrs. Haddon’s kitchen was wonderfully comforting. They set the children on the floor, and the little ones ran straight to their mother. Polly Haddon dropped to her knees and put her arms around the three of them, cuddling them hungrily. “My precious little lambs, you frightened mother so!” she said. “She thought you were lost—but you are wet—or you have been!” She rose to her feet and faced the girls while the children clung to her skirts. “Where did you find my little ones?” she asked abruptly, looking anxiously from one to the other of them. “We found them up to their waists in icy water,” Billie explained, knowing that no time was to be lost if the children were to be saved from a bad cold. “They fell through the ice on the lake.” “Fell through the ice!” the woman repeated dumbly, then, seeming suddenly to realize the full seriousness of the situation, she roused herself to action. With a quick motion she swept the children nearer to the warmth of the coal stove, then started for a door at the opposite end of the room. Then as if she realized that something was due the girls, she paused and looked back at them. “Draw up chairs close to the fire and warm yourselves,” she directed. “You must be nearly frozen.” The girls managed to find three rather rickety old chairs, and these they drew as close to the stove as they could without scorching their clothes. They tried to draw the children into their laps, but the children were either too miserable to want to be touched by strangers or they had become a little shy. At any rate, they drew away so sharply that one of them nearly fell on the stove. This frightened them all and they began to cry dismally. The girls were glad when Mrs. Haddon returned with three shabby but warm little bath robes which she hung close to the stove. Then she undressed the children quickly, rubbed their little bodies till they were in a glow, then slipped them into the snug robes. And all the time she was doing it she kept up a running fire of conversation with the girls. “Thank goodness,” she said, “I only missed the children a little while ago. They have always been so good to play close to the house, and I was so busy I didn’t look out as usual. And to think that they ran away and fell into the lake! Well, it’s only one more trouble, that’s all. It’s funny how a person can become used to trouble after a while.” “But it would have been so much worse,” Billie suggested, gently, “if the kiddies had fallen through into deeper water.” “Eh?” said Mrs. Haddon, looking up at Billie quickly, then down again. “Yes, I suppose that would have been worse.” Then she added, with a bitterness the girls did not understand: “It isn’t often that the worst doesn’t happen to me.” Puzzled, the girls looked at each other, then around the bare, specklessly clean little kitchen.