ar marked "Esplanade Belt."

As he backed off--"Take care!" was the cry, but he sprang the wrong way
and a hurrying jitney cast him yards distant, where he lay unconscious
and bleeding. The packed street-car emptied.

"No, he's alive," said one who lifted him, to the two jitney
passengers, who pushed into the throng. "Arm broke', yes, but he's
hurt worst in the head."

There was an apothecary's shop in sight. They put him and the four
ladies into the jitney and sent them there, and the world moved on.

At the shop he came to, and presently, in the jitney again, he was
blissfully aware of Geoffry Chester on the swift running-board,
questioning his mother and Aline by turns. He listened with all his
might. Neither the child nor his mistress had seen or heard the
questioner since the afternoon he was locked out of the garden.

Nearing that garden now, questions and answers suddenly ceased; the
child had spoken. Limp and motionless, with his head on Aline's bosom
and his eyes closed, "Don't let," he brokenly said, "don't let _him_ go
'way."

To him the answer seemed so long coming that he began to repeat; then
Aline said----

"No, dear, he shan't leave you."

The sisters had telephoned their own physician from the apothecary's
shop, and soon, with Cupid on his cot, pushed close to a cool window
looking into the rear garden, and the garden lighted by an unseen moon,
Mrs. Chester, at the cot's side awaited the doctor's arrival. The
restless sisters brought her a tray of rusks and butter and tea, though
they would not, could not, taste anything themselves until they should
know how gravely the small sufferer--for now he began to suffer--was
hurt.

"Same time tha'z good to be induztriouz"--this was all said directly
above the moaning child--"while tha'z bad, for the sick, to talk ad the
bedside, and we can't stay with you and not talk, and we can't go in
that front yard; that gate is let open so the doctor he needn' ring and
that way excide the patient; and we can't go in the back garden"--they
spread their hands and dropped them; the back garden was hopelessly
pre-empted.

They went to a parlor window and sat looking and longing for the front
gate to swing. They had posted on it in Corinne's minute writing: "No
admittance excep on business. Open on account sickness. S. V. P.
Don't wring the belle!!!"

Cupid lay very flat on his back, his face turned to the open window.
He had ceased to moan. When Mrs.