toiling along the
snowy country roads to and from school, coughing as he went. The topic
was not an uncongenial one to the members of the sewing-circle, who
had really very little to talk about. So absorbed were they, indeed,
in the discussion of poor Dan's fate, and of the long list of
casualties that had preceded it, that no one noticed the entrance of a
young girl, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, who had come to help with
the supper. There was an air of peculiar freshness about her, and as
she stood in her blue dress and white apron near the door, her ruddy
brown hair shining in the lamp-light, the effect was like the opening
of a window in a close room. Her step was arrested in the act of
coming forward, and, as she paused to listen, the pretty colour was
quite blotted out of her cheeks.

"I don't think Dan's will be a lingering case," Mrs. Lapham was
saying. "The lingering cases are the most trying."

Polly stood motionless. Was it true then, that which she had dreaded,
that which she had shrunk from facing? Was it more than a cold that
Dan had got? Was Dan really ill? Her Dan? Really ill? Her heart was
beating like a trip-hammer, but no one seemed to hear it.

"Queer that the doctors don't find any cure for lung-trouble," Mrs.
Royce was saying. "Seems as though there must be some way of stopping
it, if you could only find it out."

"Have you tried Kinderling's Certain Cure?" asked Mrs. Dodge. "They do
say that it's _very_ efficacious."

"Well, no," said Mrs. Lapham; "I don't hold much to medicines myself;
but if I did I should think it just a wilful waste to try them for
Dan. The boy's doomed, to begin with, and there's no help for it."

"There _is_ a help for it, there _shall_ be a help for it!" cried a
voice, vibrating with youthful energy and emotion. "I don't see how
you can talk so, Aunt Lucia! Dan _isn't_ doomed! he _sha'n't_ die! I
won't _let_ him die!"

The women looked at Polly and then they looked at one another, fairly
abashed by the girl's spirit; all, that is, excepting Aunt Lucia, who
was not impressionable enough to feel anything but the superficial
rudeness of Polly's outbreak.

"That'll do, Polly," she said, with a spiritless severity. "This is no
place for a display of temper."

The colour had come back into the girl's face now, and there were hot
tears in her eyes. She turned without a word and left the room, nor
was she seen again among the waitresses who came to hand the tea.

Polly