“Merciful Heaven!” cried her aunt, “what is the matter?  Speak, child, did you fall down?  How you look!  You are as pale as death, and all smeared with blood!  Dora, for heaven’s sake, do speak!”

Dora had been trying to speak, but she could not get in a word edgewise.  At last she said timidly,

“It was an arrow!”

A flood of lamentations followed.  Aunt Ninette flew up and down the room wringing her hands and crying, “An arrow! an arrow!  You have been shot!  Shot in the arm!  You will have a stiff arm all your life!  You will be a cripple!  You can never sew any more, nor do anything else!  You will come to want!  We shall all have to suffer for it!  How unlucky we are!  How are we to live, how can we ever get along, if your arm is lame?”

“Oh, Aunty dear, perhaps it will not be as bad as all that;” said the child sobbing, “did not papa tell us to remember: 

    “God holds us in his hand
     God knows the best to send.”

“Certainly, of course that’s true; but if you are lame, you will be lame;” said Mrs. Ehrenreich, whimpering, “it makes me perfectly desperate.  But go—­no—­come here to the water.  Where is Mrs. Kurd?  Somebody must go for the doctor.”

Dora went to the wash-basin, while her aunt ran for Mrs. Kurd, and begged her to send for the doctor to come immediately; it was a case of shooting, and no one could tell how dangerous it might prove.

The doctor came as quickly as possible.  He examined the wound, stopped the bleeding, bound it up without a word, in spite of Aunt Ninette’s pertinacious attempts to make him express an opinion.  He then took his hat and made for the door.

But Aunt Ninette followed him up before he could make good his retreat.  “Do tell me, doctor, will her arm be lame?  Stiff all the rest of her life?”

“Oh, I trust not.  I will call again to-morrow;” and the doctor was gone.

“‘Oh I trust not,’” repeated Aunt Ninette in a despairing tone, “that’s a doctor’s way of saying ‘yes, of course.’  I understand perfectly.  What will become of us?  How shall we ever live through this misfortune?”

And she kept on fretting in this way until late into the evening.

When Wili’s mother went in to hear her little boy’s prayers that night, she did not find him as usual, cheerfully sitting up in bed, ready for a good chat with her, if she would stay.  He was crouched down all in a heap, and did not even look up at her, nor speak to her, when she sat down by him.

“What is the matter with my little boy?” said she gently, “have you something wrong in your heart? have you been doing what you ought not?”

The child made an unintelligible sound, neither yes nor no.

“Well, say your evening hymn, Wili; perhaps that will make you feel better,” said his mother.

Wili began: 

    “The moon climbs up the sky,
     The stars shine out on high,
     Shine sparkling, bright and clear”—­