Presently she slipped from his knee and
began to toddle about, but with a pretty stagger that made Silas
jump up and follow her lest she should fall against anything that
would hurt her. But she only fell in a sitting posture on the
ground, and began to pull at her boots, looking up at him with a
crying face as if the boots hurt her. He took her on his knee again,
but it was some time before it occurred to Silas's dull bachelor
mind that the wet boots were the grievance, pressing on her warm
ankles. He got them off with difficulty, and baby was at once
happily occupied with the 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.
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