ng and holding
both hands frantically over his left eye. This time it might be serious,
might have injured the eye-ball. Those swing-boards were deadly. Marise
snatched up the screaming child and carried him into the kitchen,
terrible perspectives of blindness hag-riding her imagination; saying to
herself with one breath, "It's probably nothing," and in the next seeing
Mark groping his way about the world with a cane, all his life long.

She opened the first-aid box on the kitchen-shelf, pulled out a roll of
bandage and a length of gauze, sat down with Mark in her lap near the
faucet, and wet the gauze in cold water. Then she tried in vain to
induce him to take down his hands so that she could see where the blow
had struck.

But the terrified, hysterical child was incapable of hearing what she
said, incapable of doing anything but scream louder and louder when she
tried to pull down those desperately tight little hands held with
frantic tenseness over the hurt eye. Marise could feel all his little
body, quivering and taut. His shrieks were like those of someone
undergoing the most violent torture.

She herself responded nervously and automatically to his condition, felt
herself begin to tighten up, and knew that she was equally ready to
shake him furiously, or to burst into anguished tears of sympathy for
his pain.

Wait now . . . wait . . . what was the thing to do for Mark? What would
untie those knots of fright and shock? For Paul it would have been talk
of the bicycle he was to have for his birthday; for Elly a fairy-story
or a piece of candy! For Mark . . .

High above the tumult of Mark's shrieks and her own spasmodic reactions
to them, she sent her intelligence circling quietly . . . and in an
instant . . . oh yes, that was the thing. "Listen, Mark," she said in his
ear, stopping her effort to take down his hands, "Mother's learned a new
song, a _new_ one, awfully funny. And ever so long too, the way you like
them." She put her arms about him and began, hearing herself with
difficulty through his cries.

"On yonder hill there stands a damsel,
Who she is, I do not know."

("How preposterous we must sound, if Eugenia is listening," she thought
to herself, as she sang, "out-yelling each other this way!")

"I'll go and court her for her beauty.
She must answer 'yes' or 'no.'"

As usual Mark fell helpless before the combination of music and a story.
His cries diminished in volume. She s