"Oh, dear!" groaned Laura always ready to meet a sensation sensationally, and Margery looked aghast, remembering how her mother had come home in a carriage, completely broken down, less than a year before.
"Let's go see, motherums!" said Happie cheerfully, though she was badly frightened.
They had not got down one flight of the three between them and the lower hall, when they heard slow steps and many of them, and saw Bob trying to smile at them above the shoulders of Ralph, the stout German janitor, the colored fireman and the hall boy as they carried him up-stairs.
"Lo! we bring with us the hero—
Lo! we bring the conquering Graeme,
Crowned as best beseems a victor
From the altar of his fame,"
Bob declaimed, setting Ralph's skating cap, which he imperatively borrowed, rakishly on one eye to give point to his quotation.
"Bob, my dear Bob, what has happened?" cried his mother.
"I'm like Tennyson's Brook, mother; 'I slip, I slide'—I don't 'gleam,' though. It wasn't a long plan of mine. I just sat down on the icy sidewalk to mature it, and when I got up—well, I didn't get up,—to make a bull—I was pulled up." Bob cheerfully called this information up the stairs to his anxious mother, smiling into her down-bent face, and entirely indifferent to what the other tenants might think of his nonsense.
"It's a sprain or a strain, Mrs. Scollard; it isn't anything serious," Ralph corroborated. "But Bob can't join one of Mrs. Stewart's classes this week."
The doctor came and bandaged Bob, pronouncing his hurt one that would recover in a reasonable time if he did not try to force it.