ppened I should have heard of it. I came out on
the last train myself. If there had been an accident I should
certainly have heard."

"Would you?"

"I surely should have. Don't, dear. Your father has just been
detained by business."

"Then why didn't papa telegraph?"

"He did not get it in the office in season. The office closes at
half-past eight," said Anderson, lying cheerfully.

"Does it?"

"Of course! There is nothing for you to worry about. Now I'll tell
you what we will do. My mother is awake. I will speak to her, and you
must go straight to bed, and go to sleep, and in the morning your
father will be along on the first train. He must have been as much
worried as you."

"Poor papa," said Charlotte.

"So you were all alone in the house, and you came down here all alone
at this time," said Anderson, in a tone which his mother had never
heard. But it was then that she spoke.

"Didn't her father come home?" she asked.

When the girl turned like a flash and saw her she seemed to realize
for the first time that she had been, and was, doing something out of
the wonted. A great, burning blush surged all over her. She shrank
away from the man who held her. She cowered before the other woman.

"No, papa didn't come," she stammered, "and--I didn't know what to
do, and I came here."

"You did quite right, you precious child," said Mrs. Anderson,
suddenly, in a voice of the tenderest authority. She held out her
arms and Charlotte fled to them. Mrs. Anderson looked over the girl's
head at her son with the oddest and most inexplicable reproach. "You
go up and see if the heat is turned on in that little room out of
mine," she commanded, "and then you go into the kitchen and see if you
can't find the milk, and set some on the stove to warm. You can pour
a little hot water in it to hurry it. If the fire isn't good, open
the dampers. And, Randolph, you get my hot-water bag out of my bed,
and fill it from the tea-kettle--that water will be hotter than the
bath-room, this time of night--and you bring it right up; be as quick
as you can." Then all in the same breath she was comforting
Charlotte. "Your father is all right, dear child. Don't you worry one
mite--not one mite. I remember once, when I was a girl, my father
didn't come home, and mother and I were almost crazy, and he came in
laughing the next morning. He had lost his last train because there
was a block on account of the ice. The river was frozen over. Ther