clear-headed, and when Sally says
she will go at once, he spots the only risk she would run, being young
and healthy:

"Sure you can find your way? Over the club-house--Hurkaru Club----"
And then is stopped by a threat of returning cough.

But Sally knows all about it, and can find her way anywhere--so she
says. She is off in a twinkling, leaving her mother and the nurse to
wait for the terrible attack that means to come, in due course, as
soon as the new cough-mixture gets tired.

Sally is a true Londoner. _She_ won't admit, whoever else does,
that a fog is a real evil. On the contrary, she inclines to Prussian
tactics--flies in the face of adverse criticism with the decision that
a fog is rather a lark when you're out in it. Actually face to face
with a human creature choking, Sally's optimism had wavered. It
recovers itself in the bracing atmosphere of a main-thoroughfare
charged to bursting with lines of vehicles, any one of which would
go slowly alone, but the collective slowness of which finds a vent
in a deadlock a mile away--an hour before we can move, we here.

By what human agency it comes about that any wheeled vehicle drawn
of horses can thunder at a hand-gallop through the matrix of such
a deadlock, Heaven only knows! But the glare of the lamps of the
fire-brigade, hot upon the wild excitement of their war-cry, shows
that this particular agglomeration of brass and copper, fraught with
suppressed energy of steam well up, means to try for it--seems to have
had some success already, in fact. It quite puts Sally in spirits--the
rapid _crescendo_ of the hissing steam, the gleaming boiler-dome that
might be the fruitful mother of all the helmets that hang about her
skirts, the sudden leaping of the whole from the turgid opacity behind
and equally sudden disappearance into the void beyond, the vanishing
"Fire!" cry from which all consonants have gone, leaving only a sound
of terror, all confirm her view of the fog as a lark. For, you see,
Sally believed the Major might pull through even now.

Also the coming of the engine relieved her from what threatened to
become a permanent embarrassment. A boy, who may have been a good
boy or may not, had attached himself to her, under pretext of
either a strong organ of locality or an extensive knowledge of town.

"Take yer 'most anywhere for fourpence! Anywhere yer like to name.
'Ammersmith, 'Ackney Wick, Noo Cross, Covent Garden Market, Regency
Park. Come, I say, mis