previous day was past being worn again
until it had been laundered. She looked at her handkerchief. That, too,
was impossible.

"Mrs. Biggs," she said at last, "have you a handkerchief you can loan
me?"

"To be sure! To be sure! Half a dozen, if you like," Mrs. Biggs
answered, hurrying from the room, and soon returning with a handkerchief
large enough for a dinner napkin.

It was coarse and half-cotton, but it was clean, and Eloise tied it
around her neck, greatly to Mrs. Biggs's surprise.

"Oh," she said, "you wanted it for that? Why not have a lace ruffle?
I'll get one in a jiffy."

Eloise declined the ruffle. The handkerchief was bad enough, but a lace
ruffle with that gown would have been worse.

"Now, I'll call Tim to go in front and keep you from falling. He is kind
of awkward, but I'll go behind and stiddy you, and you grit your teeth
and put on the mind cure, and down we go," Mrs. Biggs said, calling Tim,
who came shambling up the stairs, and laughed aloud when he saw Eloise
wrapped in his mother's gown.

"Excuse me, I couldn't help it; mother has made you into such a
bundle," he said good-humoredly, as he saw the pained look in Eloise's
face. "I'll get your trunk the next train, and you can have your own
fixin's. What am I to do?"

This last was to his mother, who explained the way she had gone
downstairs when she sprained her ankle twenty years ago come Christmas.

"She must sit down somehow on the top stair and slide down with one
before her,--that's you,--and one behind,--that's me,--and she's to put
on the mind cure. Miss Jenks says it does a sight of good."

Tim looked at his mother and then at Eloise, whose pitiful face appealed
to him strongly.

"Oh, go to grass," he said, "with your mind cure! It's all rot! I'll
carry her, if she will let me. I could of done it last night as well as
them fine fellows."

He was a rough young boy of sixteen, with uncouth ways; but there was
something in his face which drew Eloise to him, and when he said, "Shall
I carry you?" she answered gladly, "Oh, yes, please. I don't think I
have any mind to put on."

Lifting her very gently in his strong arms, while his mother kept saying
she knew he'd let her fall, Tim carried her down and into the best room,
where he set her in a rocking-chair, and brought a stool for her lame
foot to rest upon, and then said he would go for her trunk, if she would
give him her check. There was something magnetic about Tim, and E