Lad did not cringe--did not seek to dodge or run--did not show his teeth. This mad assailant was a woman. Moreover, she was a guest, and as such, sacred under the Guest Law which he had mastered from puppyhood. Had a man raised his hand against Lad--a man other than the Master or a guest--there would right speedily have been a case for a hospital, if not for the undertaker. But, as things now were, he could not resent the beating. His head and shoulders quivered under the force and the pain of the blows. But his splendid body did not cower. And the woman, wild with fear and mother-love, continued to smite with all her random strength. Then came the rescue. At the first blow the child had cried out in fierce protest at her pet's ill-treatment. Her cry went unheard. "Mother!" she shrieked, her high treble cracked with anguish. "Mother! Don't! _Don't!_ He kept the snake from eating me! He----!" The frantic woman still did not heed. Each successive blow seemed to fall upon the little onlooker's own bare heart. And Baby, under the stress, went quite mad. Scrambling to her feet, in crazy zeal to protect her beloved playmate, she tottered forward three steps, and seized her mother by the skirt. At the touch the woman looked down. Then her face went yellow-white; and the parasol clattered unnoticed to the ground. For a long instant the mother stood thus; her eyes wide and glazed, her mouth open, her cheeks ashy--staring at the swaying child who clutched her dress for support and who was sobbing forth incoherent pleas for the dog. The Master had broken into a run and into a flood of wordless profanity at sight of his dog's punishment. Now he came to an abrupt halt and was glaring dazedly at the miracle before him. The child had risen and had walked. The child had _walked!_--she whose lower motive-centers, the wise doctors had declared, were hopelessly paralyzed--she who could never hope to twitch so much as a single toe or feel any sensation from the hips downward! Small wonder that both guest and Master seemed to have caught, for the moment, some of the paralysis that so magically departed from the invalid! And yet--as a corps of learned physicians later agreed--there was no miracle--no magic--about it. Baby's was not the first, nor the thousandth case in pathologic history, in which paralyzed sensory powers had been restored to their normal functions by means of a shock. The child had had no malformation, no accident, to injure the spine or the co-ordination between limbs and brain. A long illness had left her powerless. Country air and new interest in life had gradually built up wasted tissues. A shock had re-established communication between brain and lower body--a communication that had been suspended; not broken.