dozen men could be seen at work dragging the
river-bed with grappling irons. It made a sadly suggestive picture, and
the young girl at my side shuddered violently as we noted the expression
of morbid curiosity on the faces of such onlookers, men and women, as
were drawn up at the end of the small point on which the boat-house
stood.

But I had another reason than this for urging her on. I had noticed how,
at the sight of her slight figure descending the slope, some half-dozen
men or so had separated themselves from this group, with every
appearance of intending to waylay and question her. She noticed this
too, and drawing up more closely to my side, exclaimed with marked
feeling:

"Save me from these men and I will tell you something that no one--"

But here she stopped, here our very thoughts stopped. A shout had risen
from the group at the water-edge; a shout which made us both turn, and
even caused the men who had started to follow us to wheel about and rush
back to the dock with every appearance of intense excitement.

"What is it? What can it be?" faltered my greatly-alarmed companion.

"They have found something. See! what is that the man in the boat is
holding up? It looks like--"

But she was already half-way to the point, outstripping the very men
whose importunities she had shrunk from a moment before. I was not far
behind her, and almost immediately we found ourselves wedged among the
agitated group leaning over the little object which had been tossed
ashore into the first hand outstretched to receive it.

It was a second little shoe--filled with sand and dripping with water,
but recognizable as similar to the one already found on the preceding
day high up on the bank. As this fact was borne in on us all, a groan of
pity broke from more than one pair of lips, and eye after eye stole up
the hillside to that far window in the great pile above us where the
mother's form could be dimly discerned swaying in an agitation caught
from our own excitement.

But there was one amongst us whose glance never left that little shoe.
The train she had been so anxious to take whistled and went thundering
by, but she never moved or noticed. Suddenly she reached out her hand.

"Let me see it, please," she entreated. "I was her nurse; let me take it
in my hand."

The man who held it passed it over. She examined it long and closely.

"Yes, it is hers," said she. But in another moment she had laid it down
with what I