'He's dead! He's broken in two! Oh, mine Nobbles! mine Nobbles!'
'Here, Nurse, take him up to the nursery. He has been trying to act as champion to an ill-used dog, and come off rather the worse in the encounter. You must not let him stray into the road by himself. I don't know what his grandmother would say if she had seen him just now.'
Nurse picked up Bobby as if he were a baby and carried him upstairs.
'Hush! now, Master Bobby. Tell me what you've been doing. Let me see Nobbles; I expect he can be mended.'
Hope leaped into Bobby's heart; he put the two pieces of stick upon the table. Nurse, seeing his grief, pointed triumphantly to Nobble's little smiling face, which was quite uninjured.
'Nobbles is all right,' she said. 'We can have a new stick put into him, and he will be better than ever. Look! he's smiling at you to tell you not to cry. Boys of your age ought never to cry; you don't want to be a baby.'
Nurse got her work-basket out, and very cleverly tied Nobbles together with a bit of tape.
'There!' she said, laying him in Bobby's arms. 'Be gentle with him, and he'll last like that till we get him mended; and now tell me all about it.'
The story was told; and Nurse was proud of her charge's pluck. When she undressed him that evening and found marks across his back and legs, which told of the beating he received, she declared she would find out the names of the cowardly bullies who had done it, and get them richly punished. But Bobby made light of his own hurt; he got into bed and clasped Nobbles to him, and after a long whispered conversation he suddenly called for Nurse.
'How does a heart get broken, Nurse? Jane said her mother died of a broken heart.'