“He! who on earth is he?”

“Deary me!  I never thought of axing; but his mother lives in Hall street.  Somebody saw me carrying him to the doctor, and went and told her.  Oh! he was welly killed, Miss Leaf—­the doctor said so; but he’ll do now, and you’ll get your towel clean washed tomorrow.”

While Elizabeth spoke so incoherently, and with such unwonted energy and excitement, Johanna looked as if she thought her sister’s fears were true, and the girl had really gone mad; but Hilary’s quicker perceptions jumped at a different conclusion.

“Quiet yourself, Elizabeth,” said she, taking a firm hold of her shoulder, and making her sit down, when the rolled-up apron dropped, and showed itself all covered with blood spots.  Selina screamed outright.

Then Elizabeth seemed to become half conscious that she had done something blamable, or was at least a suspected character.  Her warmth of manner faded; the sullen cloud of dogged resistance to authority was rising in her poor dirty face, when Hilary, beginning with, “Now, we are not going to scold you; but we must hear the reason of this,” contrived by adroit questions, and not a few of them, to elicit the whole story.

It appeared that, while standing at Miss Selina’s window, Elizabeth had watched three little boys, apparently engaged in a very favorite amusement of little boys in that field, going quickly behind a horse, and pulling out the longest and handsomest hairs in his tail to make fishing lines of.  She saw the animal give a kick, and two of the boys ran away; the other did not stir.  For a minute or so she noticed a black lump lying in the grass; then, with the quick instinct for which nobody had ever given her credit, she guessed what had happened, and did immediately the wisest and only thing possible under the circumstances, namely, to snatch up a towel, run across the field, bind up the child’s head as well as she could, and carry it, bleeding and insensible, to the nearest doctor, who lived nearly a mile off.

She did not tell—­and they only found it out afterward—­how she had held the boy while under the doctor’s hands, the skull being so badly fractured that the frightened mother fainted at the sight; how she had finally carried him home, and left him comfortably settled in bed, his senses returned, and his life saved.

“Ay, my arms do ache above a bit,” she said, in answer to Miss Leaf’s questions.  “He wasn’t quite a baby—­nigh upon twelve, I reckon; but then he was very small of his age.  And he looked just as if he was dead—­and he bled so.”

Here, just for a second or two, the color left the big girl’s lips, and she trembled a little.  Miss Leaf went to the kitchen cupboard, and took out their only bottle of wine—­administered in rare doses, exclusively as medicine.

“Drink this, Elizabeth; and then go and wash your face and eat your dinner.  We will talk to you by-and-by.”