the fellow did it without placing any tricks."

The doctor turned on the small lady a curious glance.

"I think you may be able to do something, even for Dirk Colson," he
said.

"Do you know him?"

He laughed over the eagerness of the question.

"Never heard of him before. I was only thinking of our friend's
description of his awfulness. Ah, whom have we here?"

For the door had opened abruptly, and a pair of great blue eyes, set in
a frame of tawny hair, all in a frizzle, had peered in on them. The
vision was clothed in garments so torn the wonder was that they stayed
on at all, and there was a general look of abject poverty about her to
which Sallie Calkins, with all the bareness of her lot, was a stranger.
She stood for just a moment, as if transfixed by astonishment at the
unwonted sight in the room, then turned and sped away as swiftly and
silently as she had come.

"That is Dirk's sister," Sallie Calkins said, coming forward, her homely
face aglow with shame. "She isn't a bad girl, ma'am, she doesn't mean to
be, but she has a dreadful time. Her mother is sickly, and has to go out
washing, times when she isn't able to sit up; and there'll be days when
she can't hold up her head; and the father is bad, ma'am, and drinks,
and swears, and sells things for drink till there ain't nothing left to
sell; and Mart hasn't anything to mend her clothes with, and she doesn't