Eli Machin bent down, and peered through his spectacles at the prone form upon which the mid-day sun was beating.

‘It’s Miriam’s boy!’ he ejaculated under his breath, and looked round as if in inquiry—­the yard was empty.  Then with quick decision he picked up this limp and inconvenient parcel of humanity and hastened—­ran—­with it out of the yard into the road.

Down the road he ran, turned to the left into Clowes Street, and stopped before a row of small brown cottages.  At the open door of one of these cottages a woman sat sewing.  She was rather stout and full-bosomed, with a fair, fresh face, full of sense and peace; she looked under thirty, but was older.

‘Here’s thy Tommy, Miriam,’ said Eli Machin shortly.  ’He give me some of his sauce, and I doubt I’ve done him an injury.’

The woman dropped her sewing.

‘Eh, dear!’ she cried, ‘is that lad o’ mine in mischief again?  I do hope he’s no limb brokken.’

‘It in’na that,’ said the old man, ’but he’s dazed-like.  Better lay him on th’ squab.’

She calmly took Tommy and placed him gently down on the check-covered sofa under the window.  ‘Come in, father, do.’

The man obeyed, astonished at the entire friendliness of this daughter, whom, though he had frequently seen her, he had never spoken to for more than ten years.  Her manner, at once filial and quite natural, perfectly ignored the long breach, and disclosed no trace of animosity.

Father and daughter examined the unconscious child.  Pale, pulseless, cold, he lay on the sofa like a corpse except for the short, faint breaths which he drew through his blue lips.

‘I doubt I’ve killed him,’ said Eli.

‘Nay, nay, father!’ And her face actually smiled.  This supremacy of the soul against years of continued misfortune lifted her high above him, and he suddenly felt himself an inferior creature.

‘I’ll go for th’ doctor,’ he said.

‘Nay!  I shall need ye.’  And she put her head out of the window.  ’Mrs. Walley, will ye let your Lucy run quick for th’ club doctor? my Tommy’s hurt.’

The whole street awoke instantly from its nap, and in a few moments every door was occupied.  Miriam closed her own door softly, as though she might wake the boy, and spoke in whispers to people through the window, finally telling them to go away.  When the doctor came, half an hour afterwards, she had done all that she knew for Tommy, without the slightest apparent result.

‘What is it?’ asked the doctor curtly, as he lifted the child’s thin and lifeless hand.

Eli Machin explained that he had boxed the boy’s ear.

‘Tommy was impudent to his grandfather,’ Miriam added hastily.

‘Which ear?’ the doctor inquired.  It was the left.  He gazed into it, and then raised the boy’s right leg and arm.  ‘There is no paralysis,’ he said.  Then he felt the heart, and then took out his stethoscope and applied it, listening intently.