ong time. Lady Alicia crossed to the shack door,
and stood staring out through it....

She was still standing there when Whinnie came in, with the stable
lantern in his hand, and brushed her aside. He came to where I was
sitting and knelt down in front of me, on the shack-floor, with his
heavy rough hand on my knee. I could smell the stable-manure that
clung to his shoes.

"God has been guid to ye, ma'am!" he said in a rapt voice, which was
little more than an awed whisper. But it was more his eyes, with the
uncanny light in them making them shine like a dog's, that brought me
to my feet. For I had a sudden feeling that there was Something just
outside the door which he hadn't dared to bring in to me, a little
dead body with pinched face and trailing arms.

I tried to speak, but I couldn't. I merely gulped. And Whinnie's rough
hand pushed me back into my chair.

"Dinna greet," he said, with two tears creeping crookedly down his own
seamed and wind-roughened face.

But I continued to gulp.

"Dinna greet, for _your laddie's safe and sound_!" I heard the rapt
voice saying.

I could hear what he'd said, quite distinctly, yet his words seemed
without color, without meaning, without sense.

"Have you found him?" called out Lady Alicia sharply.

"Aye, he's found," said Whinnie, with an exultant gulp of his own, but
without so much as turning to look at that other woman, who,
apparently, was of small concern to him. His eyes were on me, and he
was very intimately patting my leg, without quite knowing it.

"He says that the child's been found," interpreted Lady Alicia,
obviously disturbed by the expression on my face.

"He's just yon, as warm and safe as a bird in a nest," further
expounded Whinstane Sandy.

"Where?" demanded Lady Alicia. But Whinnie ignored her.

"It was Bobs, ma'am," were the blessed words I heard the old lips
saying to me, "who kept whimper-in' and grievin' about the upper
stable door, which had been swung shut. It was Bobs who led me back
yon, fair against my will. And there I found our laddie, asleep in the
manger of Slip-Along, nested deep in the hay, as safe and warm as if
in his own bed."

I didn't speak or move for what must have been a full minute. I
couldn't. I felt as though my soul had been inverted and emptied of
all feeling, like a wine-glass that's turned over. For a full minute I
sat looking straight ahead of me. Then I got up, and went to where I
remembered Dinky-Dunk kept hi