“Bah!” said Roy and ran after. They had raced for a hundred yards, when, with a cry, Christina fell. Roy, who was still some distance behind, having had to pack up his rod, hastened to Christina’s side. He found that she had scrambled to her knees, and was looking anxiously into Joan Shoesmith’s face. “Oh, Roy,” she wailed, “her eyes have gone!” It was too true. Joan Shoesmith, lately so radiantly observant, now turned to the world the blankest of empty sockets. Roy took her poor head in his hand and shook it. A melancholy rattle told that a pair of once serviceable blue eyes were now at large. Christina sank on the grass in an agony of grief—due partly, also, to the knowledge that if she had not been naughty this would never have happened. Roy stood by, feeling hardly less unhappy. After a while he took her arm. “Come along,” he said, “let’s see if Jim can mend her.” “Jim!” Christina cried in a fury, shaking off his hand. “But come along, anyway,” Roy said. Christina continued sobbing. After a while she moved to rise, but suddenly fell back again. Her sobbing as suddenly ceased. “Roy!” she exclaimed fearfully, “I can’t walk.” Christina had sprained her ankle. Roy ran to the house as fast as he could to find help, and very soon old Stedder, the gardener, and Jim were carrying Christina between them, with mother and nurse walking by her side. Christina was put to bed at once and her foot wrapped in bandages, but she cried almost incessantly, no matter how often she was assured that she was forgiven. “Her sobs,” the cook said, coming downstairs after her twentieth visit to the nursery, “her sobs are that heart-rending I couldn’t stand it; and all the while she asks for that blessed doll, which its eyes is rattling in its head like marbles through falling on the ground, and Master Roy and Jim’s trying to catch them with a skewer.” Cook was quite right. Roy and Jim, with Joan Shoesmith between them, were seated in the harness-room, probing tenderly the depths of that luckless creature’s skull. A housemaid was looking on without enthusiasm. “You won’t do it,” she said every now and then; “you can’t mend dolls’ eyes with skewers. No one can. It’s impossible. The king himself couldn’t. You ought to take it to the Miss Bannisters’ brother at Dormstaple. He’d mend it in a jiffy—there’s nothing he can’t do in that way.” Roy at last gave up in despair. “I’ll take it to the Miss Bannisters’ brother,” he said, rising with Joan Shoesmith in his arms; “it’s only six miles.” But a sudden swoop from a figure in the doorway interrupted his bold plan. “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” cried nurse, seizing the doll, “with that angel upstairs crying for it every minute, and the doctor saying she’s in a high fever with lying on the wet grass”; and with a swirl of white skirts and apron, nurse and Joan Shoesmith were gone. Roy put his hands in his pockets and wandered moodily into the garden. The world seemed to have no sun in it any more.