The sound of a child crying, surely? Yes--the voice of the little girl, in an agony of grief or fear, in the next room! He flung the madman from him, and passed out of the room, locking him in. "I heard him," said he, afterwards, "begging me to keep Simon Magus off, but I couldn't stop to see to it." He went into the back room, where Lizarann, roused by memory of her miseries from the lighter sleep of morning, was shedding bitter tears because Daddy was not there, but in the Hospital. Who does not know how the consciousness of affliction awaiting us will drag us awake, however much we may strive to remain in dreamland? Lizarann was glad of the gentleman, though, whatever he was. And it was all the easier for her to give a short abstract of her tragedy of the night before, that her aunt had gone upstairs to dress, as a preliminary to action in connection with the front parlour, whatever it was that was going on there. For whether anyone was there with her husband--the gentleman of the night before, or a policeman, or doctor perhaps--she had yet to learn. And she was horribly cold. A favourable disposition towards lighting a bit of fire in the kitchen was all the more marked on this account.
The very small person sobbing in a very dirty nightgown in the middle of the back room could not--so Athelstan Taylor decided--go on indefinitely unwarmed on such a morning as this. He rejoiced to feel that there was still plenty of vital heat in her rudiment of a carcass, as he wrapped it in the first thing that came to hand, a stray relic of a blanket of days gone by. He picked the little bundle, so compacted, up on his knee, and helped the subsidence of its sobs with a word or two of consolation. While doing so, he could hear what difficulties his case next door was getting into with Simon Magus.
"Berbecause derdaddy's in the Sussospital and hurted his leg," said Lizarann, as far as our spelling will carry us, in reply to inquiry.
"That's a good little woman! Now she'll tell me all about it. How did Daddy hurt his leg?"
Lizarann settled down to her narrative. Here was human sympathy, at last, for her real trouble. For all the dreadful scene of last night was only Uncle Bob; and of course that sort of thing was always happening, more or less, with uncles. Not daddies, look you!--that was quite another pair of shoes.