and showed itself all covered with blood spots. Selina screamed
outright.

Then Elizabeth seemed to become half conscious that she had done
something blamable, or was at least a suspected character. Her warmth
of manner faded; the sullen cloud of dogged resistance to authority
was rising in her poor dirty face, when Hilary, beginning with, "Now,
we are not going to scold you; but we must hear the reason of this,"
contrived by adroit questions, and not a few of them, to elicit the
whole story.

It appeared that, while standing at Miss Selina's window, Elizabeth
had watched three little boys, apparently engaged in a very favorite
amusement of little boys in that field, going quickly behind a horse,
and pulling out the longest and handsomest hairs in his tail to make
fishing lines of. She saw the animal give a kick, and two of the boys
ran away; the other did not stir. For a minute or so she noticed a
black lump lying in the grass; then, with the quick instinct for
which nobody had ever given her credit, she guessed what had
happened, and did immediately the wisest and only thing possible
under the circumstances, namely, to snatch up a towel, run across the
field, bind up the child's head as well as she could, and carry it,
bleeding and insensible, to the nearest doctor, who lived nearly a
mile off.

She did not tell--and they only found it out afterward--how she had
held the boy while under the doctor's hands, the skull being so badly
fractured that the frightened mother fainted at the sight; how she
had finally carried him home, and left him comfortably settled in
bed, his senses returned, and his life saved.