Pearl gazed around with a troubled look on her face.  A large basket of old carpet rags stood near the little bed.  She dragged it into the farthest corner.  She tried to open the window, but it was nailed fast.

Then a determined look shone in her eyes.  She went quickly down the little ladder.

“Please ma’am,” she said going over to Mrs. Motherwell, “I can’t sleep up there.  It is full of diseases and microscopes.”

“It’s what?” Mrs. Motherwell almost screamed.  She was in the pantry making pies.

“It has old air in it,” Pearl said, “and it will give me the fever.”

Mrs. Motherwell glared at the little girl.  She forgot all about the frying pan.

“Good gracious!” she said.  “It’s a queer thing if hired help are going to dictate where they are going to sleep.  Maybe you’d like a bed set up for you in the parlour!”

“Not if the windies ain’t open,” Pearl declared stoutly.

“Well they ain’t; there hasn’t been a window open in this house since it was built, and there isn’t going to be, letting in dust and flies.”

Pearl gasped.  What would Mrs. Francis say to that?

“It’s in yer graves ye ought to be then, ma’am,” she said with honest conviction.  “Mrs. Francis told me never to sleep in a room with the windies all down, and I as good as promised I wouldn’t.  Can’t we open that wee windy, ma’am?”

Mrs. Motherwell was tired, unutterably tired, not with that day’s work alone, but with the days and years that had passed away in gray dreariness; the past barren and bleak, the future bringing only visions of heavier burdens.  She was tired and perhaps that is why she became angry.

“You go straight to your bed,” she said, with her mouth hard and her eyes glinting like cold flint, “and none of your nonsense, or you can go straight back to town.”

When Pearl again reached the little stifling room, she fell on her knees and prayed.

“Dear God,” she said, “there’s gurms here as thick as hair on a dog’s back, and You and me know it, even if she don’t.  I don’t know what to do, dear Lord—­the windy is nelt down.  Keep the gurms from gittin’ into me, dear Lord.  Do ye mind how poor Jeremiah was let down into the mire and ye tuk care o’ him, didn’t ye?  Take care o’ me, dear Lord.  Poor ma has enough to do widout me comin’ home clutterin’ up the house wid sickness.  Keep yer eye on Danny if ye can at all, at all.  He’s awful stirrin’.  I’ll try to git the windy riz to-morrow by hook or crook, so mebbe it’s only to-night ye’ll have to watch the gurms.  Amen.”

Pearl braided her hair into two little pigtails, with her little dilapidated comb.  When she brought out the contents of the bird-cage and opened it in search of her night-dress, the orange rolled out, almost frightening her.  The purse, too, rattled on the bare floor as it fell.

She picked it up, and by going close to the fly-specked window she counted the ten ten-cent pieces, a whole dollar.  Never was a little girl more happy.