"But there is no help for it, and she’ll be far better off there than she would be at home," the doctor answered; "but, all the same, they’d better not talk about it before your wife. Even when she is delirious or half-unconscious she knows a good deal of what’s going on about her. I’ll step up and have a look at her, and will speak to the women myself." Before a couple of hours were over, Ada Elizabeth was comfortably in bed in the quiet and shady ward of the well-managed hospital, and in the little house in Gardener’s Lane the struggle between life and death went on, while Gerty had to devote herself as best she could to the children. Gerty felt that it was desperately hard upon her, for Mirry and six-year-old Georgie fretted without ceasing for "our Ada Elizabeth," and would not be comforted; not, all the same, that Gerty’s ideas of comfort were very soothing ones--a bump and a shake, and divers threatenings of Bogle-Bo, and a black man who came down chimneys to carry naughty children away, being about her form; and little Mirry and Georgie found it but a poor substitute for the tender if dull patience of "our Ada Elizabeth." However, in spite of all the very real drawbacks which she had to fight against, Mrs. Dicki’son did not die; slowly and painfully she struggled back to her own senses again, with a dim realization of how very near the gate of death she had wandered. But, alas! by the time the doctor had, with a kindly pat upon his shoulder, told Mr. Dicki’son that his wife would live if no very serious relapse took place, the fever had fastened on another victim, and little Mirry was tossing to and fro with fever-flushed face, and the same unnatural brilliancy in her bonny blue eyes as had lighted up Ada Elizabeth’s dull, grey ones. They had not taken her to the hospital; it was so full that only urgent cases were admitted now: and since the mother was on the road to recovery, there was time to attend to the child. And so she lay in the next room to her mother, whose weakened senses gradually awoke to the knowledge of what was going on about her. "Is that Mirry crying?" she asked, on the morning when the child was at its worst. "Now don’t you fret yourself, love," returned the nurse evasively. "T’ bairn’s being took care of right enough; they will cry a bit sometimes, you know"; and then she shut the door, and the mother dozed off to sleep again. But in the evening the pitiful wail reached her ears again. "I want our Ada ’Liz’bet’," the child’s fretful voice cried; "Mirry do want our Ada ’Liz’bet’ so bad-a-ly--me want our Ada ’Liz’bet’." Mrs. Dicki’son started nervously and tried to lift herself in her bed. "I’m sure Mirry’s ill," she gasped. "Mrs. Barker, don’t deceive me. Tell me, is she ill?"