darkness. The carriage had overturned.

Philip was a good deal hurt. He sat up and rocked himself to and fro,
holding his arm. He could just make out the outline of the carriage
above him, and the outlines of the carriage cushions and of their
luggage upon the grey road. The accident had taken place in the wood,
where it was even darker than in the open.

"Are you all right?" he managed to say. Harriet was screaming, the horse
was kicking, the driver was cursing some other man.

Harriet's screams became coherent. "The baby--the baby--it slipped--it's
gone from my arms--I stole it!"

"God help me!" said Philip. A cold circle came round his mouth, and, he
fainted.

When he recovered it was still the same confusion. The horse was
kicking, the baby had not been found, and Harriet still screamed like a
maniac, "I stole it! I stole it! I stole it! It slipped out of my arms!"

"Keep still!" he commanded the driver. "Let no one move. We may tread on
it. Keep still."

For a moment they all obeyed him. He began to crawl through the mud,
touching first this, then that, grasping the cushions by mistake,
listening for the faintest whisper that might guide him. He tried to
light a match, holding the box in his teeth and striking at it with the
uninjured hand. At last he succeeded, and the light fell upon the bundle
which he was seeking.

It had rolled off the road into the wood a little way, and had fallen
across a great rut. So tiny it was that had it fallen lengthways it
would have disappeared, and he might never have found it.

"I stole it! I and the idiot--no one was there." She burst out laughing.

He sat down and laid it on his knee. Then he tried to cleanse the face
from the mud and the rain and the tears. His arm, he supposed, was
broken, but he could still move it a little, and for the moment he
forgot all pain. He was listening--not for a cry, but for the tick of a
heart or the slightest tremor of breath.

"Where are you?" called a voice. It was Miss Abbott, against whose
carriage they had collided. She had relit one of the lamps, and was
picking her way towards him.

"Silence!" he called again, and again they obeyed. He shook the bundle;
he breathed into it; he opened his coat and pressed it against him. Then
he listened, and heard nothing but the rain and the panting horses, and
Harriet, who was somewhere chuckling to herself in the dark.

Miss Abbott approached, and took it gently from him. The face was