The three shouted with laughter. "Isn't he clever?" cried the woman.
"Ask him something else!"
"No," said the man. "I want to think that over. Come, it is cold here!"
He picked Warren up from the floor where he had thrown him, and, carrying him down the long room, made his way around the great table and dropped him roughly on the pile of rags where, Elinor and Rika were crouched.
Poor little Elinor, huddled on her pile of rags, did not recognize the limp burden carried in by the larger of the two men, whom she had learned to dread with unspeakable terror. When he threw it down in the middle of the room, the pale face was turned toward the child, and she recognized, Warren. She commenced to scream. Shriek after shriek left her pale lips, and the man started over to her side, when a short, sharp word silenced her. She looked to see who had spoken, calling her so familiarly by name.
"Stop, Elly, stop," said the voice in English, and her cries were stilled as by magic, although she still gazed with longing and terror at the pale face down which a tiny line of blood trickled.
The second man clasped a second boy, dirty and torn, and meanly dressed in a workman's blouse. She stared at him, never recognizing Ivan, whom she had always seen so gorgeously clothed in furs and fine broadcloth and exquisite linen. It was not until he spoke again that she recognized him.
"Be quiet, Elinor," he said. "We will save you. Warren is not hurt, he is just dizzy. He will be all right soon."
Ivan spoke hopefully, but as he looked down at the boy lying before him, he wondered in his heart if there was really a spark of life left in that still, pale, bleeding body. As for Elinor, after the first outburst, she sat dumbly trembling.
The past day and night had been so crowded with horrors that the tender children were fast passing into a state where they neither realized nor felt the hardships and abuse they were subjected to.
The time when they sat playing in Professor Morris's quiet house seemed too far away to remember.