"Heart alive!" breathed Ellen, in fear of his sanity. She felt his temples and his wrists and his limp little body. Was he going to be sick now, just as his father and She were coming home?--now, of all times! Which would be better to give him, quinine, or aconite and belladonna? "Never mind," sighed Morry, hopelessly. Ellens--he might have known--were not made to tell you _close_ things like that. They were made to undress you and give you doses and laugh and wheel your chair around. Jollys were better than Ellens, but they told you pretty hard things sometimes. In bed he lay and thought out his little puzzles and steeled himself for what was to come. He pondered over the word Jolly had looked up in the dictionary for him. It was a puzzly word,--Rec-om-pense,--but he thought he understood it now. It meant something that made up to you for something you'd suffered,--"suffered," that was what it said. And Morry had suffered--oh, _how!_ Could it be possible there was anything that would make up for little, limp, sorrowful legs that had never been? With the fickleness of night-thoughts his musings flitted back to step-ones again. He shut his eyes and tried to imagine just the right kind of one,--the kind a boy would be glad to have come home with his Dadsy. It looked an easy thing to do, but there were limitations. "If I'd ever had a real one, it would be easier," Morry thought wistfully. Of course, any amount easier! The mothers you read about and the Holy Ones you saw in pictures were not quite real enough. What you needed was to have had one of your own. Then,--Morry's eyes closed in a dizzy little vision of one of his own. One that would have dressed and undressed you instead of an Ellen,--that would have moved your chair about and beaten up the cushions,--one that maybe would have _loved_ you, legs and all! Why!--why, that was the kind of a step-one a boy'd like to have come home with his father! That was the very kind! While you'd been lying there thinking you couldn't imagine one, you'd imagined! And it was _easy!_ The step-one a boy would like to have come home with his father seemed to materialize out of the dim, soft haze from the shaded night-lamp,--seemed to creep out of the farther shadows and come and stand beside the bed, under the ring of light on the ceiling that made a halo for its head. The room seemed suddenly full of its gracious presence. It came smiling, as a boy would like it to come. And in a reg'lar mother-voice it began to speak. Morry lay as if in a wondrous dream and listened. "Are you the dear little boy whose legs won't go?" He gasped a little, for he hadn't thought of there being a "dear." He had to swallow twice before he could answer. Then:-- "Oh yes'm, thank you," he managed to say. "They're under the bedclothes." "Then I've come to the right place. Do you know--guess!--who I am?" "Are--are you a step-one?" breathing hard. "Why, you've guessed the first time!" the Gracious One laughed.