sank helpless
before one. "You had better go and sit under that tree (Sam, take a
cushion out of the carriage for Madame) and keep quiet; then Sam must
drive to the village and give the alarm, and the strawwagon had better
go, too; and the rest of us will hunt by threes, three always keeping
together. Remember, children, three of you keep together, and, whatever
you do, be sure and do not separate. We cannot have another lost."

It seemed very sound advice. Madame, pale and frightened, sat on the
cushion under the tree and sniffed at her smelling-bottle, and the rest
scattered and searched the grove and surrounding underbrush thoroughly.
But it was sunset when the groups returned to Madame under her tree,
and the strawwagon with excited people was back, and the victoria with
Lucy's father and the rector and his wife, and Dr. Trumbull in his
buggy, and other carriages fast arriving. Poor Miss Martha Rose had been
out calling when she heard the news, and she was walking to the scene of
action. The victoria in which her cousin was seated left her in a
cloud of dust. Cyril Rose had not noticed the mincing figure with the
card-case and the parasol.

The village searched for little Lucy Rose, but it was Jim Patterson who
found her, and in the most unlikely of places. A forlorn pair with a
multiplicity of forlorn children lived in a tumble-down house about half
a mile from the grove. The man's name was Silas Thomas, and his wife's
was Sarah. Poor Sarah had lost a large part of the small wit she had
originally owned several years before, when her youngest daughter, aged
four, died. All the babies that had arrived since had not consoled her
for the death of that little lamb, by name Viola May, nor restored her
full measure of under-wit. Poor Sarah Thomas had spied adorable little
Lucy separated from her mates by chance for a few minutes, picking wild
flowers, and had seized her in forcible but loving arms and carried her
home. Had Lucy not been such a silent, docile child, it could never
have happened; but she was a mere little limp thing in the grasp of the
over-loving, deprived mother who thought she had gotten back her own
beloved Viola May.

When Jim Patterson, big-eyed and pale, looked in at the Thomas door,
there sat Sarah Thomas, a large, unkempt, wild-visaged, but gentle
creature, holding little Lucy and cuddling her, while Lucy, shrinking
away as far as she was able, kept her big, dark eyes of wonder and
fear upon th