CHAPTER II

WHAT ROVER FOUND


Unmindful of the sleet beating upon his uncovered head Hugh hastened to
the spot, where the noble brute was licking a face, a baby face, which
he had ferreted out from beneath the shawl trapped so carefully around
it to shield it from the cold, for instead of one there were two in that
rift of snow--a mother and her child! That stiffened form lying there so
still, hugging that sleeping child so closely to its bosom, was no
delusion, and his mother's voice calling to know what he was doing
brought Hugh back at Last to a consciousness that he must act, and that
immediately.

"Mother," he screamed, "send a servant here, quick! or let Ad come
herself. There's a woman dead, I fear. I can carry her, but the child,
Ad must come for her."

"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?"

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, limp figure he was depositing upon the lounge. It was a slight,
girlish form, and the long brown hair, loosened from its confinement,