ROSE HARROW wouldn’t have felt slighted had she known that Mr.
Meadowcroft didn’t think of including her among his friends. She
realized, as Betty did not, that he didn’t care for her as he did for
Tommy and Betty, but she did not resent his preference for them. She
was grateful to him for persuading her mother to allow her to go to
school, but she wasn’t particularly drawn to him. Secretly she thought
him “stuck-up” and she felt she would be bored to go to see him as
Tommy and Betty did constantly. And when Betty had asked her to go to
the station on the day he went away, Rose had decided it was too near
supper time and she wouldn’t go.
As the train pulled out, the boy and girl on the platform looked into
one another’s eyes with a sudden sense of loss and loneliness upon
them. And when Betty recollected that Mr. Meadowcroft was to see a
surgeon, it came to her that he would probably suffer terribly, and she
clasped her hands with a look of despair.
As Tommy gazed at her in perplexity, on a sudden a light came to his
eyes, and he gave vent to a whoop that recalled his grammar school days
before he had acquired the dignity of the long trousers that were now
so short.
“Golly, I almost forgot!” he cried. “Come into the depot, Bet, while
I show you something. I found it in the woodshed just now--that’s why
I was so late. I was reading something in a paper that was wrapped
round a box of axle-grease dad got over in Millville the week before
Christmas. His wheel got stuck. He gave me blazes for not oiling the
wagon, but perhaps I ain’t glad now that I forgot! Come on in quick.”
Millville, an ugly, unsightly factory village a mile and a half north
of Paulding, was scarcely more than a name to South Paulding people.
With trembling hands, Tommy drew forth a copy of its weekly paper,
unfolded and spread it out upon a bench in the station, calling Betty’s
attention to an advertisement in conspicuous type embellished by a
picture of a bearded, benevolent-looking man in spectacles.
Dr. Vandegrift of London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco, large
type immediately below declared him, and announced that he would be
in the parlors of the Eagle Hotel, Millville, for the week beginning
December 26th, to fit glasses and to treat all affections and diseases
of the eye. Finer print following gave an account of the doctor’s
education and enumerated the degrees he had received from foreign
universities and the decorations from various potentates. It narrated
many marvelous cures he had effected, including more than one case
of total blindness, and predicted yet more marvelous things to come
because of his recently perfected invention. There were, of course,
other eye-cups (so-called) on the market, but this eye-cup of Dr.
Vandegrift differed in one vital particular from anything of the sort
ever patented. It was warranted to cure a list of ailments and diseases
of the eye that occupied six lines of the advertisement; and the
friends of the blind were urged to bring forward all but inveterate
cases.
The look that Betty gave Tommy might have made an angel weep--or sing.
She folded the paper solemnly and handed it to him. Then silently but
with one accord they hastened towards the Pogany dictionary to look up
“inveterate.”
Betty lighted a lamp, and together they turned over the pages of the
big book. Tommy put a greenish-yellow finger at the margin beside the
word.
“_Long-established?_ It ain’t a year yet. _Deep-rooted?_ Not on your
tin-type!” he declared. “_Obstinate?_ I shouldn’t call it obstinate,
should you?”
“I don’t believe Rose could turn her eyes if it were obstinate,” Betty
opined.
“Nor they wouldn’t look as they do,” he added eagerly. “Obstinate is
the very thing they ain’t. That’s sure enough.”
And Tommy began to dance wildly about the room. Impelled to join him,
Betty remembered her aunt and held up a warning hand.
“Aunt Sarah will be down here in five minutes, Tommy,” she whispered,
“so we can’t waste any time, though I was never so excited in my life.
Let’s sit right here on the sofa and make our plans quick. When will we
take Rose over to Millville? To-morrow?”
“Sure. That’s the last day Dr. Vandegrift’s there,” he said.
“O, Tommy!” cried Betty with tears in her shining eyes. “It’s all too
beautiful. It seems more than I can bear. Just listen--everything is
right. Aunt Sarah is going over to Greenmeadow to-morrow to spend the
day. All I shall have to do will be to get father’s dinner. Then I’ll
just ask him if I may spend the afternoon with Rose, and we’ll take her
over.”
Tommy sprang suddenly from the sofa as if he had sat on a pin. And his
expression was in accord.
“O, Betty! O me! O my!” he cried dolefully, “I can’t go! There’s no way
possible. I’ve got to work all day right under dad’s eye. He’s going to
clean the shed upstairs and down and the loft in the barn. I couldn’t
sneak away or get away or anything.”
“But, Tommy! how can we go without you?” the girl cried. “Perhaps if
your father understood----”
Tommy considered. “I don’t believe it would be safe to tell him--or
even to say anything about it to anybody until afterwards,” he
concluded. “Of course if Mr. Meadowcroft was here it would be
different.”
“You’re sure to-morrow’s the last day?”
Tommy verified the fact by newspaper and calendar.
“Well, you’ll just have to go without me,” he declared dejectedly. “You
can go on the one-thirty train and change at Paulding for the through
train north. I guess you’ll have to walk back to Paulding and then get
the four o’clock from there.”
“Here comes Aunt Sarah!” said Betty, and Tommy made for the door.
“Will you go over to Rose’s after supper with me, Tommy?” Betty asked
in the entry. “You could explain to Mrs. Harrow better than I.”
Tommy frowned. “I don’t believe anybody’d better do any explaining to
her until after you’ve got back from Millville,” he said. “It would
be awful to tell Mrs. Harrow and then have her disappointed. There
might be some hitch. The doctor might not be there. He might ’a been
taken sick since that notice in the paper came out or he might ’a
been sandbagged by a thug. He must be rich, and anyhow all those
decorations must be valuable. I suppose they’re set with precious
stones, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” said Betty. “My mind doesn’t seem to take in anything
else but just that Rose is going to be cured. And about her mother--it
might be too much for her to have Rose come home with her sight
restored. It might go to her heart.”
“There’s something in that,” Tommy admitted. “O, I know how we can
get around that. If the doctor cures Rose, you two stop at my house
first when you get back. I’ll go along over to Mrs. Harrow’s and talk
with her a while and break it to her very gently that you have gone
over Paulding way with Rose to see a doctor that cures blindness and
that she had better be prepared for anything. Then I’ll give the
signal--probably by coming out the door--and you’ll walk right in.”
“We’ll all almost die of joy, I am sure!” cried Betty.