"Is that you coughing, Lizarann?" Teacher raised her voice to ask, and Lizarann replied that she had "a stiss" in her side whenever she licked the slite. She licked it to try, and the experiment was crowned with success. She then tried to readjust something out of gear inside her by short coughs and wriggles. This did not seem so successful. Teacher lowered her voice again: "Mucous membrane," said she, "or muscular." "Very likely. She's had a deal of exposure though, snow and all. Let's keep our eyes on her." But Lizarann didn't cough again, that time. Nevertheless Miss Fossett seemed not quite easy in her mind about that cough, and when Mr. Taylor remarked that he ought to be thinking about starting, if we were to get to the Hospital by four o'clock, she said--only she pretended it was quite a sudden idea of hers--that if she spoke the truth she would really be much happier to have the child not go out of doors in all this terrible cold and slush. For it was a thaw, and an enthusiastic one; and, you see, Miss Fossett had come by her knowledge of mucous membranes and so forth in a sad curriculum of two courses; one of nursing a sister through phthisis to death; and the other, which was incomplete, of doing the like at intervals for a brother, with only a poor hope that it would end otherwise. So she knew all about it. "I really should feel easier, Yorick," she repeated. And Lizarann looked up from the slate to see who else was in the room, that Teacher could be speaking to. But seeing no one, and being a sharp little girl, she perceived that it was her friend the gentleman that was addressed. Only, of course, she couldn't guess that it was a sort of nickname, given, years ago, to her brother's schoolfellow by her friend the lady. "_I_ should, a good deal. It's not the right sort of day at all for little girls with coughs. How shall we console her?" "_You_ must." "I suppose I shall have to, Addie. I always have to do all the dirty work." This metaphor distracted Lizarann's attention from two uneven numbers, one of which had to be took off the other and wouldn't come out right. Did the New Police scrub underneath the beds, clear the flues of sut, scour out the sink, and so on? Impossible! He went on: "Look here, Lizarann! You're a good little girl, aren't you?" "Yass!" "And you're not going to cry--that's about it, isn't it?" "Ye-e-e--yass!" She is not quite so confident about this, but will conciliate public opinion to the best of her ability. "Well, Lizarann, the doctor says we mustn't see Daddy till--till a day or two." The small face clouds over pitifully. The disappointment is bitter. But Lizarann won't cry--well!--not _yet_, anyhow. Yorick continues: "I shall go to the Sospital to hear about Daddy, and come back and tell. But you mustn't go yet, because it would hurt Daddy." He conceals his consciousness of the background of tears to the child's Spartan resolution.