“I’ve had a mean fall, mother,” said Baron, trying to keep a martyr-like tone out of his voice. “I’m afraid I’ll have to be carried into the house. This man was good enough to bring me home. He was afraid of alarming you. It was his idea that you ought to be notified before he carried me in.” “Oh, I didn’t understand!” There was swift, childlike remorse in her bearing. “It was kind of you,” she added to the driver, by way of atonement for her rudeness. She regarded him with flickering eyes. She could not help shrinking from the warm, gross bulk of the man, yet she admired him somewhat as a lamb might admire a benevolent bull that has just driven a wolf away. She went as far as the curb and looked up at Baron critically. Yes, he was seriously injured. Something told her that. A strained expression about his lips and eyes, perhaps, and his attitude. She turned anxiously to the driver. “Do you suppose you can get him in without any help?” she asked. “Sure!” The driver derived no joy from her sudden discomfiture--in the sudden levelling of her high spirit to the lowly plane of a fearful mother. Perhaps he did not realize that she had been wrathful toward her son, and rude to him. “You go and push the door open and get things ready.” He approached Baron and held his arms up. Baron put his hands on the immense fellow’s shoulders, and again he experienced that sensation of being swung through space. In an instant he was being borne up his own front steps. “Can you carry him up-stairs?” inquired Mrs. Baron dubiously. “Why not?” And up the stairs the driver proceeded, without the slightest evident effort. At the top Mrs. Baron led the way into Baron’s old room--now Bonnie May’s. But the driver paused on the threshold, leisurely casting his eyes over the evidences of feminine proprietorship. “You’d better let me take him to his own room, mother,” he declared decisively. He seemed quite unconscious of bearing a burden. He was woodenly indifferent to Baron’s efforts to get down. “But that’s up another flight,” was Mrs. Baron’s faltering response. “That’s all right. You see, I’m used to delivering beer-barrels, and they always find they save trouble if they let me put ’em just where they belong.” Baron, thinking of the difficulties which might arise when this willing and capable Atlas was gone, quite agreed with the suggestion. “I’m sure he’s right, mother,” he said, “if he doesn’t mind.” Up another flight Baron was borne, and at the top the driver turned about haltingly, but still seemingly unaware of having his strength taxed, and called down: “You better see about getting a doctor, mother. He’ll need to have himself looked after. I can put him to bed.”