primary
mystery of her own toes, inviting Silas, with much chuckling, to
consider the mystery too. But the wet boots had at last suggested to
Silas that the child had been walking on the snow, and this roused him
from his entire oblivion of any ordinary means by which it could have
entered or been brought into his house. Under the prompting of this
new idea, and without waiting to form conjectures, he raised the child
in his arms, and went to the door. As soon as he had opened it, there
was the cry of "mammy" again, which Silas had not heard since the
child's first hungry waking. Bending forward, he could just discern
the marks made by the little feet on the virgin snow, and he followed
their track to the furze bushes. "Mammy!" the little one cried again
and again, stretching itself forward so as almost to escape from
Silas's arms, before he himself was aware that there was something more
than the bush before him--that there was a human body, with the head
sunk low in the furze, and half-covered with the shaken snow.

CHAPTER XIII

It was after the early supper-time at the Red House, and the
entertainment was in that stage when bashfulness itself had passed into
easy jollity, when gentlemen, conscious of unusual accomplishments,
could at length be prevailed on to dance a hornpipe, and when the
Squire preferred talking loudly, scattering snuff, and patting his
visitors' backs, to sitting longer at the whist-table--a choice
exasperating to uncle Kimble, who, being always volatile in sober
business hours, became intense and bitter over cards and brandy,
shuffled before his adversary's deal with a glare of suspicion, and
turned up a mean trump-card with an air of inexpressible disgust, as if
in a world where such things could happen one might as well enter on a
course of reckless profligacy. When the evening had advanced to this
pitch of freedom and enjoyment, it was usual for the servants, the
heavy duties of supper being well over, to get their share of amusement
by coming to look on at the dancing; so that the back regions of the
house were left in solitude.

There were two doors by which the White Parlour was entered from the
hall, and they were both standing open for the sake of air; but the
lower one was crowded with the servants and villagers, and only the
upper doorway was left free. Bob Cass was figuring in a hornpipe, and
his father, very proud of this lithe son, whom he repeatedly declared
to be j