The four encountered gayly.  “Ah, not this time,” Aline said.  “I came only to meet my aunts; they had locked the gate!  But I will call, very soon.”

They walked up to the next corner, the sisters confusingly instructing Mrs. Chester how to take a returning street-car.  Leaving them, she had just got safely across from sidewalk to car-track when Cupid came pattering after, to bid her hail only the car marked “Esplanade Belt.”

As he backed off—­“Take care!” was the cry, but he sprang the wrong way and a hurrying jitney cast him yards distant, where he lay unconscious and bleeding.  The packed street-car emptied.

“No, he’s alive,” said one who lifted him, to the two jitney passengers, who pushed into the throng.  “Arm broke’, yes, but he’s hurt worst in the head.”

There was an apothecary’s shop in sight.  They put him and the four ladies into the jitney and sent them there, and the world moved on.

At the shop he came to, and presently, in the jitney again, he was blissfully aware of Geoffry Chester on the swift running-board, questioning his mother and Aline by turns.  He listened with all his might.  Neither the child nor his mistress had seen or heard the questioner since the afternoon he was locked out of the garden.

Nearing that garden now, questions and answers suddenly ceased; the child had spoken.  Limp and motionless, with his head on Aline’s bosom and his eyes closed, “Don’t let,” he brokenly said, “don’t let him go ’way.”

To him the answer seemed so long coming that he began to repeat; then Aline said——­

“No, dear, he shan’t leave you.”

The sisters had telephoned their own physician from the apothecary’s shop, and soon, with Cupid on his cot, pushed close to a cool window looking into the rear garden, and the garden lighted by an unseen moon, Mrs. Chester, at the cot’s side awaited the doctor’s arrival.  The restless sisters brought her a tray of rusks and butter and tea, though they would not, could not, taste anything themselves until they should know how gravely the small sufferer—­for now he began to suffer—­was hurt.

“Same time tha’z good to be induztriouz”—­this was all said directly above the moaning child—­“while tha’z bad, for the sick, to talk ad the bedside, and we can’t stay with you and not talk, and we can’t go in that front yard; that gate is let open so the doctor he needn’ ring and that way excide the patient; and we can’t go in the back garden”—­they spread their hands and dropped them; the back garden was hopelessly pre-empted.

They went to a parlor window and sat looking and longing for the front gate to swing.  They had posted on it in Corinne’s minute writing:  “No admittance excep on business.  Open on account sickness.  S. V. P. Don’t wring the belle!!!”