“She is at the house,” answered the voice.

“Get your horse,” said the Scotch Preacher.

I ran back and led the mare across the bridge (how I remember, in that silence, the thunder of her hoofs on the loose boards!) Just at the top of the little hill leading up from the bridge the two men turned in at a gate.  I followed quickly and the three of us entered the house together.  I remember the musty, warm, shut-in odour of the front room.  I heard the faint cry of a child.  The room was dim, with a single kerosene lamp, but I saw three women huddled by the stove, in which a new fire was blazing.  Two looked up as we entered, with feminine instinct moving aside to hide the form of the third.

“She’s all right, as soon as she gets dry,” one of them said.

The other woman turned to us half complainingly: 

“She ain’t said a single word since we got her in here, and she won’t let go of the baby for a minute.”

“She don’t cry,” said the other, “but just sits there like a statue.”

McAlway stepped forward and said: 

“Well—­Anna?”

The girl looked up for the first time.  The light shone full in her face:  a look I shall never forget.  Yes, it was the girl I had seen so often, and yet not the girl.  It was the same childish face, but all marked upon with inexplicable wan lines of a certain mysterious womanhood.  It was childish, but bearing upon it an inexpressible look of half-sad dignity, that stirred a man’s heart to its profoundest depths.  And there was in it, too, as I have thought since, a something I have seen in the faces of old, wise men:  a light (how shall I explain it?) as of experience—­of boundless experience.  Her hair hung in wavy dishevelment about her head and shoulders, and she clung passionately to the child in her arms.

The Scotch Preacher had said, “Well—­Anna?” She looked up and replied: 

“They were going to take my baby away.”

“Were they!” exclaimed McAlway in his hearty voice.  “Well, we’ll never permit that.  Who’s got a better right to the baby than you, I’d like to know?”

Without turning her head, the tears came to her eyes and rolled unheeded down her face.

* * * * *

“Yes, sir, Dr. McAlway,” the man said, “I was coming across the bridge with the cows when I see her standing there in the water, her skirts all floating around her.  She was hugging the baby up to her face and saying over and over, just like this:  ’I don’t dare!  Oh, I don’t dare!  But I must.  I must,’ She was sort of singin’ the words:  ’I don’t dare, I don’t dare, but I must.’  I jumped the railing and run down to the bank of the river.  And I says, ‘Come right out o’ there’; and she turned and come out just as gentle as a child, and I brought her up here to the house.”

* * * * *