“Can’t you even go up and down stairs?”
The lady shook her head.
“I was carried up here the day I left the hospital,” she said, sadly, “and I have lived in this room ever since. I shall never walk again, the doctors tell me. But I manage to get on very well,” she added, brightening at sight of Molly’s distressed face. “You would really be surprised to know all the things I can do without getting out of my chair. Then people are very kind to me. Miss Collins, the lady who keeps this house, was an old friend of my mother’s, and she often comes to sit with me in the evening. The chambermaid helps me in many little ways, and with my books, and my dear piano, I really get on very comfortably indeed.”
Molly was deeply impressed.
“Could you walk when you were a little girl?” she inquired, anxiously.
A shadow crossed the lady’s sweet face.
“Oh yes, indeed,” she said. “I walked just like any one else till three years ago, when I met with my accident.”
“What sort of an accident was it?” Molly was so much interested that she quite forgot that some people might have considered her questions rather impertinent.
“I was run over, crossing Broadway one very slippery day. The ground was covered with ice, and I fell in the middle of the street. Before I could get on my feet again, a horse-car came around the corner, and the driver could not stop his horses in time. It really wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
Molly rose. She was beginning to feel embarrassed again. There was something in the sight of the helpless little figure in the wheel-chair that made her feel all at once as if she wanted to cry.