It was nearly noon before Mr. Parlin could go for the children. Dotty was received at home as joyfully as if she had been gone on a long journey.

“Kiss me all you’re going to, Prudy,” said she, as she sat in her mother’s lap, with her sisters kneeling before her, “’cause, when you’ve kissed me enough, I want to put some canther ice on my lips, the wind has scorched ’em so.”

“It’s splendid that you didn’t freeze,” said Susy; “but what is the reason you are always getting into such awful fixes, Dotty Dimple?”

Dotty sat upright and looked down on Susy with an air of injured innocence.

“It wasn’t my fix this time, Susy Parlin; it was Tate Penny’s. And do you think my conscience pricks? No, indeed!”

“O, no,” said Prudy, quickly; “it is so different—”

She was about to add, “from running away,” but checked herself.

“Yes, Prudy, I didn’t run away this time, truly; I blowed away. Why, I couldn’t have helped it, mamma, not if I’d been the mayor, and ’bliged to put myself in the lock-up for it!”

“No, dear; we understand.”

“I didn’t think I’d ever sit in my own mother’s lap again. I gave up, and my head went tipside over. Then Solly Rosenbug said he’d set the dog on me. There wasn’t any dog! I shouldn’t think he’d talk so to a froze girl—should you? that never did a thing, only hold on to his jacket?”

“But, dear,” said grandma Read, chafing Dotty’s hands, “through the mercy of God, the boy saved thy life!”

“I s’pose so,” said Dotty, solemnly; “was he an angel a charger of?”

“What does thee mean, Alice?”

“No’m, I didn’t s’pose he was; I knew he wasn’t.”

Dotty hastened to change the subject.

“Grandma’ll think I’m a nidiot,” she reflected, “to call him an angel, with a comforter on, and fibbed about a dog!”

“Mamma, what is the sky made of, that makes it so blue?”

“What we call the sky, Dotty, is only atmosphere, or air. I cannot explain it to you; it seems blue because it is so far away.”

“Why, that was what made me so ‘blue’ last night, ’cause I was so far away.”

“Pshaw!” said Susy; “it’s nonsense for such a little girl as you are to talk about the ‘blues.’ If you have them so much, I’m afraid they’ll settle in your nose, and you’ll be a ‘Blue Nose,’ like Norah.”

“O, what did Norah say when I didn’t come home? I’m going out to see.”

“Norah,” cried Dotty, bursting into the kitchen, “you never came in to ask if I was froze to death!”

Norah set down her flat-iron and kissed the child.

“Didn’t I know for sure you wasn’t last night, when your father came home and told us? And wouldn’t it have broke my heart if you’d died in the storm?”

“Would it, though, Norah? Then your heart must be hard; a soft one couldn’t break!”

“Well, well, Miss Dimple, you’re the first one ever told me my heart was hard!”

“Turn your face round, Norah. Why, ’tisn’t blue; the end of it’s red!”

“What’s red?”

“Your nose. I thought it wasn’t blue!”

“Pretty talk that is, now,” exclaimed Norah, angrily. “If mother and I had come straight from Ireland, it’s Paddies we’d be. But if we stopped in Nova Scotie, it’s Blue Noses; and that’s all the manners there is in this country, for sure.”

Dotty was rather glad to have made a sensation.

“It’s ’cause your mother is so far away, Norah; that’s why they say her nose is so blue, like the sky up there. I cannot explain it to you, but that’s the reason why.”

Norah’s little flash of temper died out in a laugh. She would not allow herself to be angry with such a simple little child.

“Never mind about noses,” said she, pleasantly. “Here’s something I baked for you this morning.”

It was a little custard pie, with a delicate surface of sugar frosting.

“O, thank you, ever so much! I’ll never call your nose blue again. Your mother’s is, but yours isn’t.”

Dotty skipped away to show the pie to her sisters.

“Norah wouldn’t have made it if I’d run away. Nobody blames me this time; how can they, Prudy, when I did just right?”

Little thrills of exceeding joy danced through and through Dotty’s heart. It was so seldom she got into trouble when she “wasn’t to blame,” and could say she had done “just right”!

“What do you find in that paper that interests you so much, my dear?” said her father, as he saw her eagerly spelling out the advertisements in the Portland Press.

Dotty did not reply at once. She did not like to confess that she had been looking for her own name, “Alice Parlin, a little girl with a red calico wrapper, and little pockets in.” But no such name appeared. There seemed to be very much said about silk, and soap, and lard, and nails; but nothing at all concerning two little girls who had lost their way in the storm. Dotty concluded the mayor had not heard of it.

“Are you sure you know all your letters, Alice?” said Mr. Parlin, quite amused by her earnestness.

“O, papa, what an idea! When I’ve known them for years and years, and been to school in the primary’s department in the First Reader up to the head three times!”

“I beg your pardon, my dear!”

Dotty thought she would give her father a proof that she could read.

“Papa,” said she, looking up from the newspaper, with quite a grown-up expression of face, “who is Scat?”

“Scat? What do you mean, Alice?”

“O, there’s a man in this paper called Scat, and it’s such a funny name, I wanted to know where he lived.”

Dotty passed the Press to her father, pointing to some votes in a recent election. “Jones 110, Fling 106, Scat. 45.” “Scat. does not mean any one in particular,” said Mr. Parlin, laughing; “it merely stands for ‘scattering.’”

“But it said Scat.,” returned Dotty, indignantly.

She had expected her father to express some surprise at her progress in reading. She would be careful next time, and choose a better newspaper; the Portland Press said one thing when it meant another.

Mrs. Parlin thought Dotty was not well enough to go to school that afternoon.

“I don’t know what Miss Parker’ll think,” said the child; “she always looks to see if I am there.”

But Dotty was not at all sorry to be sitting between her mother and her grandmother, making a book-mark, while the wind whistled at the windows, and the fire glowed in the grate.

“You needn’t try to get in here, old Wind,” said she, shaking her sampler fiercely; “you can’t get through the double windows! O, mamma, it doesn’t seem much as it did yesterday, with me a-blowing to which ways, and thought I shouldn’t live to get home—hadn’t any h-o-p-e,” added she, quoting from her book-mark.

“We will try to be very thankful you were spared,” said Mrs. Parlin, kissing the earnest little face.

“Yes, thee could easily have died,” said. Mrs. Read; “but the Lord willed it otherwise.”

Dotty held her needle in the air, and looked into the coals. There was a picture there of a white snow-storm, and two little girls lying dead, like the babes in the wood, with only the storm to wrap them in chilly sheets of snow.

“Yes, we could have tipped over and died very easy,” thought she, with a shudder; “but it wasn’t best; so a boy came and saved us. But,” said she, aloud, “I guess he didn’t know God sent him, or he wouldn’t have dared whistle a lie with his mouth, when there wasn’t a bit of a dog to whistle to.”

Grandma looked into the coals, and said nothing.

“I know what she wants to say,” thought Dotty. “God saved me to purpose; and He wouldn’t have saved me to purpose if He didn’t s’pect I was going to be a good girl. And I mean to; O, yes, I mean to. I’ll try harder’n ever I tried before. No tempers I’m not going to have, and no anything that’s naughty, and always put it in my prayers to ask if I needn’t grow better every minute; and then I truly shall! You don’t s’pose He’d hear and not pay ’tention? No; He always pays ’tention, and likes to have us ask such questions as that; mother says so.”

Dotty plodded away at her book-mark, going to her mother with every stitch, or now and then venturing to make one of her own, which always had to be pulled out. But it was finished at last, and Prudy was pleased with the present, only there was a slight mistake in the motto, and it read, “Hope on, hop ever.”

“I didn’t mean to tell you to hop,” said Dotty; “I left out an ‘e;’ ’twas a mistake, there were so many e’s; but I do know how to spell, Prudy Parlin.”

“O, yes, little sister; Miss Parker says you learn very fast.”

“O, Prudy, did you see her to-day; and what did she say about me and Tate?”

“She feels dreadfully, Dotty; the tears came to her eyes.”

“They did, Prudy? Well, I should think they would. Letting two little things like us lose ourself! Wasn’t it awful? She’ll kiss me when I go back to school, and she’ll want to give me pep’mints and taffy; but it wouldn’t be polite right before the other girls. She’ll only say, ‘I’m glad to see our dear little Dotty back again, and Tate, too,’ says she, ‘and you may sit together if you like, and just whisper the whole living time!’ That’s what she’ll say.”

“O, she won’t, either, Dotty; you musn’t think of such a thing,” laughed Prudy.