hey?' Arthur said. 'Well, let them. If
any poor, homeless wretches want to stay here nights they are very
welcome, I am sure, and I will see that the door is rehung and glass put
in the windows. May as well make them comfortable.'

'Do as you like,' Frank replied, and there, so far as he was concerned,
the matter ended.

But while the carpenters were at work at the Park Arthur sent one of
them to the old stone house and had the door fixed and glass put in two
of the windows, while rude but close shutters were nailed before the
others, and then Arthur went himself into the room and pushed a long
table which the picnic people had used for their refreshments and the
tramps for a bed into a corner, where one sleeping upon it would be more
sheltered from the draught. All this seemed nonsense to Frank, who
laughingly suggested that Arthur should place in it a stove and a ton of
coal for the benefit of his lodgers. But Arthur cared little for his
brother's jokes. His natural kindness of heart, which was always seeking
another's good, had prompted him to this care for the Tramp House, in
which he felt a strange interest, never dreaming that what he was doing
would reach forward to the future and influence not only his life but
that of many others.

The storm which had raged so fiercely around the house in the park had
not spared the cottage in the lane, which rocked like a cradle as gust
after gust of wind struck it with a force which made every timber
quiver, and sent the boy Harold close to his grandmother's side as he
asked, tremblingly:

'Do you think we shall be blown away?'

The rheumatism from which Mrs. Crawford had been suffering in the fall
had troubled her more or less during the entire winter, and now,
aggravated by a cold, it was worse than it had ever been before, and on
the night of the storm she was suffering intense pain, which was only
relieved by the hot poultices which Harold made under her direction and
applied to the swollen limb. This kept him up later than usual, and the
clock was striking eleven when his grandmother declared herself easier,
and bade him go to bed.

It was at this hour that Arthur Tracy had fancied he heard the cry for
help, and the snow was sweeping past the cottage in great billows of
white when Harold went to the window and looked out into the night. In
the summer when the leaves were upon the trees the old stone house could
not he seen from the cottage, from which it was dista