She ran to the front door to summon the nearest neighbour, and she remembered then, with relief, that the nearest neighbour was Doctor Churchill, the young physician who had been called in to see her mother the evening before.

She flew across the narrow lawn between her own house and that where the new doctor had set up his office, and rang imperatively.  The door opened, and Doctor Churchill, hat and case in hand, evidently on his way to a patient, stood before her.

What he thought of the figure before him, with its riotous curly black hair, brilliant eyes, pale dark cheeks, dusty pinafore, a singular smudge upon the forehead, and sleeves rolled up to the elbows, nobody would have known from his manner, which instantly expressed a friendly concern.

Charlotte could only gasp, “Oh, come—­quick!”

He followed her, stopping to ask no questions.  At the open cellar door Charlotte stood aside to let him pass.

“Down there—­my sister!” she breathed.

“Bring a light, please,” said the doctor, and he disappeared down the stairs.  Charlotte lighted a little kitchen lamp and came after him.  He bade her stand by while he made his first brief examination.

“I think the blow on her head isn’t serious,” he said, presently, “but I can’t tell where else she may be hurt till I get her up-stairs.”

He was strong, and he lifted Celia as if she had been a child, and carried her easily up the steep stairs.

Charlotte led the way to a wide couch in the living-room.  As Celia was laid gently upon it she opened her eyes.

Half an hour later, John Lansing Birch, in his oldest clothes and wearing a rather disreputable soft hat pulled down over his forehead, with his hands and face excessively dirty and a lunch-pail on his arm, pushed open the kitchen door. “Phew-w! Something’s burning!” he shouted.  “Celia—­Charlotte—­where are you all?  Great Scott, what a smudge!”

He strode across the room and lifted from the stove a kettle of potatoes, from which the water had boiled away some minutes before.

“First returns from the amateur cooking district!” he muttered, glancing critically about the kitchen.

Something else in the way of overcooked viands seemed to assail his nostrils, and he jerked open the oven door.  A tin of blackened rolls puffed out at him their pungent smoke.

“Well, what—­” he was beginning with the natural irritation of the hungry man, who has been anticipating his supper all the way home, and sees it in ruin before his eyes, when Charlotte appeared in the doorway.

“O Lanse!” she cried, and ran to him.

“Well, what is it?  Celia got a headache and left you in charge?  Everything’s burnt up—­I can tell you that——­”

“Celia is—­she’s broken her knee!”

“What?”

“She fell down the cellar stairs and——­”

“Where is she?” Lunch-pail and hat went down on the floor as Lanse got rid of them and seized Charlotte’s arm.