said; "then he can take it in the course of
the night if he is able; and beat him up some eggs in the morning."

"I'll make the gruel if she ain't able," said the down-stairs woman,
in a tone vibrating between kindness and scorn.

"Thank you. I am quite able to make it," said Allbright's sister, and
she was full of small triumph and persistency. Yes, she would make
the gruel, even if she was so very delicate that she ought to go at
once to bed. It was quite evident that she thought that the
down-stairs woman could not make gruel good enough for that man in
there, anyway.

"Well, I guess I'll go," said the down-stairs woman, "as long as I
don't seem to be of any use. If there was anything I could do, I'd
stay." And she went.

"The idea of her coming up here and trying to find out what was going
on!" Allbright's sister said to her brother as she was getting the
meal ready for the gruel. "I never saw such a curious woman."

"If we hadn't got so attached to the place we would move," said
Allbright, who was leaving his patient momentarily, to change his
shoes for slippers.

"I know it," said the sister, "but I can't help feeling attached to
the place, we have lived here so long; and there is that beautiful
cherry-tree out in the yard, and everything."

"That is so," said Allbright.

"I am glad Mr. Carroll didn't have to be carried to a hospital."

"I suppose he would have been if I had not happened to be right on
the spot," said Allbright, reflectively, to his sister.

"You think he'll be all right in the morning, don't you?"

"Oh yes, the doctor said so!"

Outside, the watching boys in the shadow of the church disappointedly
vanished, cheated of their small and grewsome excitement, when they
saw the doctor quietly walk towards his house and realized that there
was to be no ambulance and no hospital.

"Gee! I've had knocks harder 'n that, and never said nothin' about
it," said one boy as he scurried away with the others towards his
home in the high tenement-house.

Chapter XLI

It was quite early the next morning when Charlotte received the
telegram that her father had had a fall on the ice, was not badly
injured, and would be home on the noon train. Anderson had gone very
early to the telegraph-office. It was being ticked off in Andrew
Drake's drug-store when he inquired, and the boy viewed him with
intense curiosity when he took the message, but did not dare ask any
questions. Anderson hurried ho