ld the house be? Near
End Cottage, perhaps in sight of the garden to which he had stolen on
that evil night to listen for the voice of a bird!

After many hours the train was dug out of the snow, and sped forward
again in daylight. Maurice slept a little, but uneasily. And now, when
he was awake, he began to be filled with an unreasonable apprehension,
for which he accounted by taking stock of the low temperature of his
body, and of the loss of vitality occasioned by want of food and rest.
He was seized with fear as he came up into the north and saw vaguely the
moors around him, the snowy waves where the white woods rippled up the
flanks of the white hills. He began to realise again his former
condition when his life was full of the lamentation of the child. He
began to feel as if he drew near to that lamentation once more. Perhaps
the little sorrowful spirit had only deserted him to return to the
valley in which it first greeted him. Perhaps it would come again to him
there. He might hear the cry from the garden of the cottage as he
hastened past.

He shuddered and cursed his wild fancies. But they stayed with him
through all the rest of the journey, through all the delays and periods
of numb patience. And they increased upon him. When at last he reached
the dreary station by the flat sandbanks, at which he changed into the
valley train, he was pale and careworn, and full of alarm.

Very slowly the tiny train crawled up into the heart of the hills as the
darkness of the second night came down. Maurice was the only passenger
in it. He felt like one alone in a lonely world, fearing inhabitants
unseen, but whose distant presence he was aware of. Could Lily indeed be
here, beyond him in this desolation? It seemed impossible. But the
child might be here, wandering, a lost spirit, in this unutterable
winter. That would not be strange to him. And his soul grew colder than
his body. He could see nothing from the window, but occasionally he
heard the dry tapping of twigs upon the glass, as the train crept among
the leafless woods. And this tapping seemed to him to be the tiny
fingers of the child, feebly endeavouring to attract his attention. He
shrank away from the window to the centre of the carriage.

At the last station in the valley the train stopped. Maurice got out
into the darkness, and asked the guard the name of the house in which
Mrs. Dale lived.

"Mrs. Dale," he said, in the broad Cumberland dialect, "Oh, she b