ad
fallen; and then Polly, still holding him, rushed for the door, only to
be caught back and held, while the heavy fist came down with cruel
weight.

"Wemock's a bit worse than common," they said in the next room as the
sounds began; but the shrieks in another moment had drawn every one in
the Buildings, and the doorway filled with faces, no one volunteering,
however, to interfere with the Briton's right to deal with his own as
he will. He had flung Polly from him, and she lay on the floor
unconscious and bleeding. Orlando had crept under the bed, and lay there
paralyzed with terror; and the mother shrieked so loudly that the brute
slunk back and seated himself again with attempted indifference.

"You've done for yourself this time," a neighbor said, and Wemock sprang
up, too late to escape the policemen who had been brought by the sounds,
not usual in broad daylight, and who suddenly had their hands upon him,
while another stooped doubtfully over the child.

"She's alive," he said. "They take a deal to kill 'em, such do, but
she'll need the 'ospital. Her arm's broke."

He lifted the arm as he spoke, and it fell limp, a cry of pain coming
from the child, whose eyes had opened a moment and then closed with a
look of death on the face. An ambulance was passing. Some one had been
hurt on the Docks, where accidents are always happening, and was being
carried to the hospital; and a neighbor ran down.

"It's best to do it sudden," she said, "or Orlando 'll never let her go
or her mother either," and she hailed the ambulance driver, who
objected to taking two, but agreed when he found it was only a child.

Polly came to herself at last, gasping with pain. A broken arm was the
least of it. There was a broken rib as well, and bruises innumerable.
But worse than any pain was the separation from Orlando, for whom Polly
wailed, till, in despair, the nurse promised to speak to the surgeon and
see if he might not be brought; and, satisfied with this hope, the child
lay quiet and waited.

She was in a clean bed,--such a bed as she had never seen, and her soft
dark eyes examined the nurse and all the strange surroundings in the
intervals of pain. But fever came soon, and in long days of unconscious
murmurings and tossings, all that was left of Polly's thin little frame
wasted away.

"It is a hopeless case," the doctor said, "though after all with
children you can never tell."

There came a day when Polly opened her eyes, qu