Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman.  A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer.  But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.

One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.

“She has one chance in—­let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer.  “And that chance is for her to want to live.  This way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly.  Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well.  Has she anything on her mind?”

“She—­she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,” said Sue.

“Paint?—­bosh!  Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice—­a man, for instance?”

“A man?” said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice.  “Is a man worth—­but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”

“Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor.  “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish.  But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent. from the curative power of medicines.  If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”

After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp.  Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.

Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window.  Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.

She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story.  Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated.  She went quickly to the bedside.

Johnsy’s eyes were open wide.  She was looking out the window and counting—­counting backward.

“Twelve,” she said, and a little later “eleven;” and then “ten,” and “nine;” and then “eight” and “seven,” almost together.

Sue looked solicitously out the window.  What was there to count?  There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away.  An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall.  The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.