our bit of
tough mule-meat down. And so you went on like your neighbours, playing the
game, while your eyes grew larger and your girth less, and your cheekbones
more in evidence with every day that dawned.

Cheekbones have a strange, unnatural effect when they appear in childish
faces. There was a child in a rusty double perambulator that had been a
stylish baby-carriage only a little while ago, whose wizened face and
shrunken hands were pitiable to see. He was wheeled by a sallow woman,
with hollow, grey-blue eyes--a woman whose black alpaca gown hung loosely
on her wasted figure, and whose shabby, crape-trimmed hat was pinned on
anyhow. Siege confinement and siege terrors, siege smells and siege diet,
had made strange havoc of the plump comeliness of a matronly lady who once
rustled in purple satin befitting a Mayor's wife. She had lost one of her
children through diphtheria, and she knew, unless a miracle happened, that
she would also lose the boy.

Only look at him! She told you in that dull, toneless voice of hers how
sturdy he had been, how strong and masterful--how pretty, too, with his
plume of fair hair tumbling into his big, shining, grey eyes! The eyes
were bigger than ever now, but the light and the life had sunk out of
them, and his round face was pinched, and the colour of old wax. And the
arm that hung idly over the side of the little carriage was withered and
shrunken--the hand of an old man, and not of a child. The other, under the
light shawl that tucked him in, hugged something that bulged under the
coverlet.

"His father can't bear to look at him," the Mayor's wife said, glancing at
the Mayor's carefully-averted back. "And I'm sure it's no wonder. He just
lies like this, day and night, and doesn't want to move, or answer when
you speak to him, and he won't eat. The food is dreadful, but still he
might try, just to comfort his mother----"

"I does twy," piped Hammy weakly, "and ven my tummy shuts, and it isn't no
use twying any more."

The Mother-Superior brought a gaily-coloured little china cup of that rare
luxury, new milk, and bent over him, saying cheerfully, as she held it to
the colourless mouth, "Not always, Hammy. Taste this."

"No, fank you." He turned his head away, tightly shutting his eyes.

"It's real milk, Hammy, not condensed," the soft voice pleaded. He shook
his head again, and knit his childish brows.

"I saided it wasn't no use. My tummy just shuts."

"I think I would not