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..