When Carroll came to himself that night after his fall, his first conscious motion was for his dollar watch.  He was in William Allbright’s bed.  There were only two sleeping-apartments in the little tenement.  William was seated beside him, watching him with his faithful, serious face; there was also a physician, keenly observant, still closer to the injured man’s head; and the sister, Allbright’s sister, was visible in the next room, seated in a chair which commanded a good view of the bed.  It was Allbright who had rescued Carroll from the station-house; for when he did not rise, the usual crowd, who directly attribute all failures to recover one’s self from a manifestly inappropriate recumbent position, had collected, and several policemen were on the scene.

“I know this gentleman,” Allbright said, in his rather humble, still half-respectful, voice, which carried conviction.  “I know this gentleman.  I have been a book-keeper in his office.  He slipped on the ice.  I saw him fall.  He is not drunk.”

One of the policemen, who had been long in the vicinity and knew Allbright, as from the heights of the law one might know an unimportant and unoffending citizen, responded.

“All right,” he said, laconically.  “Hospital?”

“Guess he’s hurted pretty bad,” remarked another policeman, who was a handsome athlete.

“Hospital?” inquired the first, who was a man of few words, of Allbright.

“I guess we’d better have him taken to my house.  It’s right here,” replied Allbright.  “Then we’ll call in Dr. Wilson and see how much is the matter with him.  Maybe he’s only stunned.  The hospital is apt to be a long siege, and if there isn’t any need of it—­”

“His house is right here,” said the first policeman to the second, with a stage aside.

“All right,” said the second.

A boy pulled Allbright by the sleeve.  “Say, I’ll go for the doc,” he cried, eagerly.  He was enjoying the situation keenly.

“Well,” replied Allbright, “be quick about it.  Tell him there’s a man badly hurt at my house.”

The boy sped like a rocket, and three more with him.  They all yelled as they ran.  They were street gamins of the better class, and were both sympathetic and entertained.  They lived in a tenement-house near Allbright, and knew him quite well by sight.

Meantime the two policemen carried Carroll the short distance to William Allbright’s house.  He was quite unconscious, and it was an undertaking of considerable difficulty to carry him up the stairs, since the Allbrights lived in the second story.

The clerk in the department store, and his mother, who lived on the first floor, came to their door in undress and offered their hospitality, but Mr. Allbright declined their aid.

“No,” he said.  “I know him.  It is Mr. Carroll.  He had better be taken up to my rooms.”

When at last they laid the unconscious man on Allbright’s bed, which his sister, pale, and yet with a collectedness under such surprising circumstances which spoke well for her, had opened, the policeman who was not an athlete, and was, in fact, too stout, wiped his forehead and said, “Gee.”