"You're all right, little woman." "Yes, I know," trying not to smile, "I'm all right when it don't cost nothing and when it comes to the dirty work of trying to make two ends meet." "You're certainly a splendid manager. No one can take that away from you." "Well, I wish you would both appreciate it a little more." "We do appreciate it, don't we, Lilly?" "Yes, papa." Her second year in High School, Lilly was kept out for five weeks by an attack of typhoid fever. An aversion for physical shortcoming, from her mother's occasional headaches to the mortally afflicted Mr. Hazzard with the great chronic sore crisscrossed with court plaster at the end of one of his eyes, amounted in Lilly to something actually Indian. "Oh, mamma, if I had a headache, I wouldn't always be talking about it. People aren't interested." "I'm going to tell your father when he comes home to-night what a sympathetic daughter I have. If ever I fall sick the City Hospital will be the place for me. When I see the way that Flora Kemble carries her mother around and the way my own daughter sympathizes with me. If I don't tell your father this night!" It was this queer little congenital urge that kept Lilly on her feet for two weeks after the malady had hold of her. With a stoicism that taxed her cruelly, she would march smilingly off to school, a bombardment of pains shooting through her head, her hands and tongue dry, a ball and chain of inertia dragging at her ankles. "Lilly, what is the matter? Why don't you eat your bread and butter after school? Has Mrs. Schum said anything?" "No, no, mamma. I'm not hungry, that's all." "Funny. Open the closet. There is a basket of oranges behind your father's overcoat, and a bag of baby pretzels, too." "Goodness! mamma, if I was hungry, I'd eat." "Don't you feel well, Lilly?" "Of course I feel well, mamma. Why shouldn't I?" But next day, at her after-school hour of practice, a small discordant crash broke suddenly in upon "Chaminade's Scarf Dance" and Mrs. Becker's rhythmic rocking above. Lilly had fainted, with her head in her arms and face down among the keys. Followed two weeks that crowded up the little back parlor with anxiety, the tension of two doctors in consultation, and a sense of hysteria that was always just a scratch beneath the surface of Mrs. Becker. She would break suddenly into loud and unexpected fits of crying, crushing her palms up against her mouth; would waken from a light doze beside the bed, on the shriek of a nightmare, and have literally to be dragged from the room. She harassed the doctors with questions that only the course of the disease could answer. The crisis came in the watches of the night, Lilly very straight and very white and light of breathing in the center of her parents' bed, her glossy hair in a thick plait over each shoulder, her fine white and developed chest hardly rising. "O God! help me to live this night! Ben! Ben!"