"We've got to play at some game every day, Elizabeth," she announced, with grim determination. She hated games, but Elizabeth must win her red beads and the red blood for which they stood. She had undertaken to make something out of this jellyfish of a girl and she did not mean to fail. That was all there was about it. So every day she led forth the reluctant Elizabeth and patiently stood over her while she blundered through a game of basket-ball, hockey, prisoner's base, or whatever the girls were playing. But Elizabeth made small progress. Always she barely stumbled through her part, helped in every way by Olga and often by other girls who helped her for Olga's sake. It was Mary Hastings who broke out earnestly one day, looking after the two going down the road, "I say, girls, we're just a lot of selfish pigs to leave that Poor Thing on Olga's hands all the time. It must be misery to her to have Elizabeth hanging on to her as she does--a dead weight." "Right you are! I should think she'd hate the Poor Thing--I should. I should take her down to the dock some night and drown her," said Louise Johnson with her inevitable giggle. "I think Olga deserves all the honours there are for the way she endures that--jellyfish," said Edith Rue. "I never saw any one thaw out the way Olga has lately though. She really deigns to speak amiably now--sometimes," Annie Pearson put in with a sniff. "She 'deigns' to do anything under the sun that will help that Poor Thing to be a bit like other girls," cried Mary. "Olga is splendid, girls! She makes me ashamed of myself twenty times a day. Do you realise what it means? She is trying to make that Poor Thing _live_. She just exists now. O, we must help her--we must--every single one of us!" "But how, Molly? We're willing enough to help, but we don't know how. Elizabeth turns her back on every one of us except Olga--you know she does." "I know," Mary admitted, "but if we really try we can find ways to help." When, compelled by Olga's unyielding determination, the Poor Thing had taken a three-mile tramp every day for a week, she began to enjoy it, and did not object when another mile was added. She was always happy when she was with Olga, but at other times--when they were not walking--her content was marred by the consciousness that Olga was not really pleased with her because she could not do so many things that the others wanted her to do--like beadwork and basketwork, and above all, swimming. But Olga was pleased with her when she went willingly on these daily tramps. The Poor Thing seemed to find something particularly attractive about the Slabtown settlement, and liked better to go in that direction than any other. She would often stop and watch the dirty half-naked babies playing in the bare yards; and as she watched them there would come into her face a look that Olga could not understand--Olga, who had never had a baby sister to love and cuddle.