r
when you've had a basin of hot bread and milk. Bring her over to the
fire, Harry, she's starved with the cold."

"Harry," her first friend, carried her over, and put her in a big
armchair by the fire, and presently one of the others brought her a
basin of hot bread and milk, and a plateful of food for Dick, and
before Huldah had taken a half of it she was feeling altogether a
different person.

"I didn't feel hungry, but I s'pose I was," she said, simply, looking
up with grateful, friendly eyes at the old policeman. "I feel ever
so much better now."

"Ay, ay; we don't always know what we want, nor what is good for
us,--but here's somebody as'll be good for you, unless I'm very much
mistaken!" and Huldah, following the direction of his eyes as they
travelled to the door, gave one long low cry of rapturous delight,
for there walking in to the police station were Mrs. Perry and Miss
Rose!

CHAPTER X.

ONE SUMMER'S AFTERNOON.

Huldah was home again, and Dick too, and more free and happy than
they had ever been in their lives before, for, from Huldah, at any
rate, there was lifted the great dread of being traced by her uncle
and taken back, a dread which had in the old days lain always like a
shadow on her life. Now, the worst had happened, and was over, for
the law had declared that neither Tom Smith nor Emma, his wife had
the slightest claim to her, not being related at all. Nor were they
fit and proper persons to have the charge of any child. And to her
great delight she was handed over to the guardianship of the vicar
and Miss Rose Carew, and to the care of Mrs. Perry, to be trained and
brought up to be an honest, truthful, industrious woman.

Never to the end of her life would Huldah forget that home-coming,
that drive back to Woodend Lane, or those days that followed.

"Was it really only yesterday that I was here, and Dick and I walked
into Belmouth?" she asked, incredulously, as she lay back in the
carriage. "It seems weeks and weeks ago! Oh, how lovely everything
is! It seems as if I didn't notice it enough till now;" and she drew
in long breaths of the fresh cold air, and the mingled scents of wet
earth and pine trees. "I seem to smell vi'lets, but they can't be
out yet, can they, miss?"

Miss Carew laughed. "Lots of things have happened since yesterday,
brownie; but even the brownies could not make the violets spring up
and open in one night."

"But God could," thought Huldah to he