the
two going down the road, "I say, girls, we're just a lot of selfish pigs
to leave that Poor Thing on Olga's hands all the time. It must be misery
to her to have Elizabeth hanging on to her as she does--a dead weight."

"Right you are! I should think she'd hate the Poor Thing--I should. I
should take her down to the dock some night and drown her," said Louise
Johnson with her inevitable giggle.

"I think Olga deserves all the honours there are for the way she endures
that--jellyfish," said Edith Rue.

"I never saw any one thaw out the way Olga has lately though. She really
deigns to speak amiably now--sometimes," Annie Pearson put in with a
sniff.

"She 'deigns' to do anything under the sun that will help that Poor
Thing to be a bit like other girls," cried Mary. "Olga is splendid,
girls! She makes me ashamed of myself twenty times a day. Do you realise
what it means? She is trying to make that Poor Thing _live_. She just
exists now. O, we must help her--we must--every single one of us!"

"But how, Molly? We're willing enough to help, but we don't know how.
Elizabeth turns her back on every one of us except Olga--you know she
does."

"I know," Mary admitted, "but if we really try we can find ways to
help."

When, compelled by Olga's unyielding determination, the Poor Thing had
taken a three-mile tramp every day for a week, she began to enjoy it,
and did not object when another mile was added. She was always happy
when she was with Olga, but at other times--when they were not
walking--her content was marred by the consciousness that Olga was not
really pleased with her because she could not do so many things that the
others wanted her to do--like beadwork and basketwork, and above all,
swimming. But Olga was pleased with her when she went willingly on these
daily tramps.

The Poor Thing seemed to find something particularly attractive about
the Slabtown settlement, and liked better to go in that direction than
any other. She would often stop and watch the dirty half-naked babies
playing in the bare yards; and as she watched them there would come into
her face a look that Olga could not understand--Olga, who had never had
a baby sister to love and cuddle.

One day when the two approached the little settlement, they saw half a
dozen boys and girls walking along the top of a stone-wall that bordered
the road. A baby girl--not yet three--was begging the others to help her
up, but they refused.

"You can't ge