"He _ain't coming_! Yass--he _ain't_! He's took to the doctor on a barrer. Yass--he _is_!" And Lizarann, whose small hands, cold and blue, are all tremor and visible unrest from panic, would like to run, but dares not. She has worded her awful message, though. That is something, however much Aunt Stingy may doubt its truth. "Who's to know you ain't lying? Who's to know he ain't in at the Robin Hood? Now, if you're story-tellin'...!" A bony warning finger should have been enough without any further details of the penalties of falsehood. A reference to a flagellum that had once been inherent in a discarded pair of the speaker's stays--an incredible wooden lathe--ought to have been quite superfluous. But Mrs. Steptoe had had great trials, to excuse her short temper. However, nothing can alter the facts; and Lizarann can only repeat her statement. Daddy had been took away on the p'leece barrer, with curtings; and his leg was hurt. But the doctor was at the Horspital. This was felt, and offered, as a palliative. Surely it deserved better recognition than, "And why couldn't the child tell me all this before? Keeping me standin' here!" very wrathfully fired off at poor Lizarann. She _had_ told it, and at the earliest possible moment. What could she do more? Aunt Stingy's reception of the story, which was less _émotionné_ than Lizarann had expected, had its good side. Perhaps the presumptuous boy's description of the powers of Hospitals was not all fanciful, and her aunt's wider experience knew that in a short time daddy would be back home again; not only well and sound, but even better and sounder. Lizarann extracted consolation from her aunt's half callous hearing of her news, without closely analyzing it. Probably Mrs. Steptoe would have been more sympathetic if her own cup of bitterness, like her small niece's, had not been full to the brim already. But sympathy would have intensified Lizarann's solicitude about her father; the fact that the news could be apathetically received by anyone, even Aunt Stingy, fortified her. It may even be that she was braced by her own keen feeling of the injustice her aunt did her in apparently ascribing her father's disaster to her, when really she was only the innocent and most unwilling bearer of the news of it. That, however, was Mrs. Steptoe's attitude. "There's a many'd 'a said you didn't deserve no supper," said she, and claimed a weak good-nature as a quality of her own. She hustled Lizarann into her father's bedroom, with needless collateral pushes in wrong directions, and the admonition, "Don't let me catch you in the parlour, or you'll know of it. Starin' round!" Her truculence, no doubt, had something of a safety-valve character, and she may have thought that the youth of its object would remain ignorant of its full stress, while she herself had the whole advantage of the relief it gave. But really the child understood more than she ascribed