ble.

"Oh, why couldn't it have come sooner," she mourned, "before I was all
dressed up so spick and span for your grand speechifying occasion? I
always feel as if I ought to be fumigated when I come back from there.
More than likely it's just another complaint that old Mrs. Donegan wants
to lodge against the universe. She seems to think lately that it owes
her a special grudge, and that my ears are Heaven-ordained funnels for
her to pour her troubles into."

But it was not Mrs. Donegan's troubles this time which summoned her,
although that excitable old woman met her, crying and wringing her
hands. It was for a neighbor's misfortunes that she invoked Mary's aid.
Dena Barowsky, a frail girl in the room above hers, who supported a
family by her work in the factory, had had a bad fall.

"Both legs broken and all hurted inside she is!" wailed Mrs. Donegan,
eager to be the first to tell the bad news.

"Where is she?" asked Mary. "Where did it happen? At the factory?"

Half a dozen eager voices interrupted each other to tell her. It seemed
as if all the inmates of the tenement had gathered on the stairs and the
landing to discuss the accident in sympathizing little groups. It was
something which might have happened to any one of them. Dena Barowsky
had come home from the factory at noon to fix a bite and sup for her old
father, who was worse than usual, and while going down the rickety
stairs to the cellar for some reason, had fallen. A loose board had
tripped her, so that she pitched against the bannister, which was so
rotten that it broke under her weight, and she fell headlong into the
cellar.

A doctor was in the room with her now, examining to find how badly she
was hurt, Mrs. Donegan explained. The saints only knew what would become
of the family if it should be so that she was laid up long. Her father
was bedridden, and her mother so queer in her head that she did nothing
but sit in a corner and mutter to herself all day long. Luckily there
wasn't more than a foot of water in the cellar, and they got her out
right away. It had been half full when little Terence Reilly fell in,
for that was the time of the backwater in the spring freshets.

Following half a dozen self-appointed guides, Mary picked her way to the
stairway and looked down. The broken piece of rotten timber, the gaping
hole in the splintered bannister, the dark gleam of the water beneath,
told their own story. One long, horrified look was enough fo