THE Sick-A-Bed Lady lived in a huge old-fashioned mahogany bedstead,
with solid silk sheets, and three great squashy silk pillows edged with
fluffy ruffles. On a table beside the Sick-A-Bed Lady was a tiny little,
shiny little bell that tinkled exactly like silver raindrops on a golden
roof, and all around this Lady and this Bedstead and this Bell was a
big, square, shadowy room with a smutty fireplace, four small paned
windows, and a chintzy wall-paper showered profusely with high-handled
baskets of lavender flowers over which strange green birds hovered
languidly.
* * * * *
The Sick-A-Bed Lady, herself, was as old as twenty, but she did not look
more than fifteen with her little wistful white face against the creamy
pillows and her soft brown hair braided in two thick pigtails and tied
with great pink bows behind each ear.
When the Sick-A-Bed Lady felt like sitting up high against her pillows,
she could look out across the footboard through her opposite window. Now
through that opposite window was a marvelous vista--an old-fashioned
garden, millions of miles of ocean, and then--France! And when the wind
was in just the right direction there was a perfectly wonderful smell to
be smelled--part of it was Cinnamon Pink and part of it was
Salt-Sea-Weed, but most of it, of course, was--France. There were days
and days, too, when any one with sense could feel that the waves beat
perkily against the shore with a very strong French accent, and that all
one's French verbs, particularly "_J'aime_, _Tu aimes_, _Il aime_," were
coming home to rest. What else was there to think about in bed but funny
things like that?
It was the Old Doctor who had brought the Sick-A-Bed Lady to the big
white house at the edge of the Ocean, and placed her in the cool, quaint
room with its front windows quizzing dreamily out to sea, and its side
windows cuddled close to the curving village street. It was a long,
tiresome, dangerous journey, and the Sick-A-Bed Lady in feverish fancy
had moaned: "I shall die, I shall die, I shall _die_," every step of the
way, but, after all, it was the Old Doctor who did the dying! Just like
a snap of the finger he went at the end of two weeks, and the
Sick-A-Bed Lady rallied to the shock with a plaintive: "Seems to me he
was in an _awful_ hurry," and fell back on her soft bed into days of
unconsciousness that were broken only by riotous visions day and night
of an old man rushing frantically up to a great white throne yelling:
"One, two, three, for Myself!"
Out of this trouble the Sick-A-Bed Lady woke one day to find herself
quite alone and quite alive. She had often felt alone before, but it was
a long time since she had felt alive. The world seemed very pleasant.
The flowers on the wall-paper were still unwilted, and the green paper
birds hung airily without fatigue. The room was full of the most
enticing odor of cinnamon pinks, and by raising herself up in bed the
merest trifle she could get a smell of good salt, a smell which somehow
you couldn't get unless you actually _saw_ the Ocean, but just as she
was laboriously tugging herself up an atom higher, trying to find the
teeniest, weeniest sniff of France, everything went suddenly black and
silver before her eyes, and she fell down, down, down, as much as forty
miles into Nothing At All.
When she woke up again all limp and wappsy there was a Young Man's Face
on the Footboard of the bed; just an isolated, unconnected sort of face
that might have blossomed from the footboard, or might have been merely
a mirage on the horizon. Whatever it was, though, it kept staring at
her fixedly, balancing itself all the while most perfectly on its chin.
It was a funny sight, and while the Sick-A-Bed Lady was puckering her
forehead trying to think out what it all meant the Young Man's Face
smiled at her and said "_Boo!_" and the Sick-A-Bed Lady tiptilted her
chin weakly and said--"Boo _yourself_!" Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady fell
into her fearful stupor again, and the Young Man's Face ran home as fast
as it could to tell its Best Friend that the Sick-A-Bed Lady had spoken
her first sane word for five weeks. He thought it was a splendid
victory, but when he tried to explain it to his friend, he found that
"Boo _yourself_!" seemed a fatuous proof of so startling a truth, and
was obliged to compromise with considerable dignity on the statement:
"Well, of course, it wasn't so much what she said as the _way_ she said
it."
For days and days that followed, the Sick-A-Bed Lady was conscious of
nothing except the Young Man's Face on the footboard of the bed. It
never seemed to wabble, it never seemed to waver, but just stayed there
perfectly balanced on the point of its chin, watching her gravely with
its blue, blue eyes. There was a cleft in its chin, too, that you could
have stroked with your finger if--you could have. Of course, there were
some times when she went to sleep, and some times when she just seemed
to go _out_ like a candle, but whenever she came back from _anything_
there was always the Young Man's Face for comfort.
The Sick-A-Bed Lady was so sick that she thought all over her body
instead of in her head, so that it was very hard to concentrate any
particular thought in her mouth, but at last one afternoon with a mighty
struggle she opened her half-closed eyes, looked right in the Young
Man's Face and said: "Got any arms?"
The Young Man's Face nodded perfectly politely, and smiled as he raised
two strong, lean hands to the edge of the footboard, and hunched his
shoulders obligingly across the sky line.
"How do you feel?" he asked very gently.
Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady knew at once that it was the Young Doctor, and
wondered why she hadn't thought of it before.
"Am I pretty sick?" she whispered deferentially.
"Yes--I think you are _very pretty_--sick," said the Young Doctor, and
he towered up to a terrible, leggy height and laughed joyously, though
there was almost no sound to his laugh. Then he went over to the window
and began to jingle small bottles, and the Sick-A-Bed Lady lay and
watched him furtively and thought about his compliment, and wondered why
when she wanted to smile and say "Thank you" her mouth should shut
tight and her left foot wiggle, instead.
When the Young Doctor had finished jingling bottles, he came and sat
down beside her and fed her something wet out of a cool spoon, which she
swallowed and swallowed and swallowed, feeling all the while like a very
sick brown-eyed dog that couldn't wag anything but the far-away tip of
its tail. When she got through swallowing she wanted very much to stand
up and make a low bow, but instead she touched the warm little end of
her tongue to the Young Doctor's hand. After that, though, for quite a
few minutes her brain felt clean and tidy, and she talked quite
pleasantly to the Young Doctor: "Have you got any bones in your arms?"
she asked wistfully.
"Why, yes, indeed," said the Young Doctor, "rather more than the usual
number of bones. Why?"
"I'd give my life," said the Sick-A-Bed Lady, "if there were bones in my
silky pillows." She faltered a moment and then continued bravely: "Would
you mind--holding me up stiff and strong for a second? There's no bottom
to my bed, there's no top to my brain, and if I can't find a hard edge
to something I shall topple right off the earth. So would you mind
holding me like an _edge_ for a moment--that is--if there's no lady to
care? I'm not a little girl," she added conscientiously--"I'm twenty
years old."
So the Young Doctor slipped over gently behind her and lifted her limp
form up into the lean, solid curve of his arm and shoulder. It wasn't
exactly a sumptuous corner like silken pillows, but it felt as glad as
the first rock you strike on a life-swim for shore, and the Sick-A-Bed
Lady dropped right off to sleep sitting bolt upright, wondering vaguely
how she happened to have two hearts, one that fluttered in the usual
place, and one that pounded rather noisily in her back somewhere between
her shoulder-blades.
On his way home that day the Young Doctor stopped for a long while at
his Best Friend's house to discuss some curious features of the Case.
"Anything new turned up?" asked the Best Friend.
"Nothing," said the Young Doctor, pulling moodily at his cigar.
"Well, it certainly beats _me_," exclaimed the Best Friend, "how any
long-headed, shrewd old fellow like the Old Doctor could have brought a
raving fever patient here and installed her in his own house under that
clumsy Old Housekeeper without once mentioning to any one who the girl
was, or where to communicate with her people. Great Heavens, the Old
Doctor knew what a poor 'risk' he was. He knew absolutely that that
heart of his would burst some day like a firecracker."
"The Old Doctor never was very communicative," mused the Young Doctor,
with a slight grimace that might have suggested professional memories
not strictly pleasant. "But I'll surely never forget him as long as
ether exists," he added whimsically. "Why, you'd have thought the old
chap invented ether--you'd have thought he ate it, drank it, bathed in
it. I hope the _smell_ of my profession will never be the only part of
it I'm willing to share."
"That's all right," said the Best Friend, "that's all right. If he
wanted to go off every Winter to the States and work in the Hospitals,
and come back every Spring smelling like a Surgical Ward, with a lot of
wonderful information which he kept to himself, why, that was his own
business. He was a plucky old fellow anyway to go at all. But what I'm
kicking at is his wicked carelessness in bringing this young girl here
in a critical illness without taking a single soul into his confidence.
Here he's dead and buried for weeks, and the Girl's people are probably
worrying themselves crazy about not hearing from her. But why don't they
write? Why in thunder don't they write?"
"Don't ask me!" cried the Young Doctor nervously. "I don't know! I don't
know anything about it. Why, I don't even know whether the Girl is
going to live. I don't even know whether she'll ever be sane again. How
can I stop to quiz about her name and her home, when, perhaps, her whole
life and reason rests in my foolish hands that have never done anything
yet much more vital than usher a perfectly willing baby into life, or
tinker with croup in some chunky throat? There's only one thing in the
case that I'm sure of, and that is that she doesn't know herself who she
is, and the effort to remember might snap her utterly. She's just a
thread.
"I have an idea--" the Young Doctor shook his shoulders as though to
shake off his more somber thoughts--"I have an idea that the Old Doctor
rather counted on building up a sort of informal sanitarium here. He was
daft, you know, about the climate on this particular stretch of coast.
You remember that he brought home some athlete last Summer--pretty bad
case of breakdown, too, but the Old Doctor cured him like a magician;
and the Spring before that there was a little lad with epilepsy, wasn't
there? The Old Doctor let me look at him once just to tease me. And
before that--I can count up half-a-dozen people of that sort, people
whom you would have said were 'gone-ers,' too. Oh, the Old Doctor would
have brought home a dead man to cure if any one had 'stumped' him. And
I guess this present case was a 'stump' fast enough. Why, she was raging
like a prairie fire when they brought her here. No other man would have
dared to travel. And they put her down in a great silk bed like a
fairy-story, and the Old Doctor sat and watched her night and day
studying her like a fiend, and she got better after a while: not keen,
you know, but funny like a child, cooing and crooning over her pretty
room, and tickled to pieces with the ocean, and vain as a kitten over
her pink ribbons--the Old Doctor wouldn't let them cut her hair--and
everything went on like that, till in a horrid flash the Old Doctor
dropped dead that morning at the breakfast table, the little girl went
loony again, and every possible clew to her identity was wiped off the
earth!"
"No baggage?" suggested the Best Friend.
"Why, of course, there was baggage!" the Young Doctor exclaimed, "a
great trunk. Haven't the Housekeeper and I rummaged and rummaged it till
I can feel the tickle of lace across my wrists even in my sleep? Why,
man alive! she's a _rich_ girl. There never were such clothes in our
town before. She's no free hospital pauper whom the Old Doctor
obligingly took off their hands. That is, I don't see how she can be!
"Oh, well," he continued bitterly, "everybody in town calls her just the
Sick-A-Bed Lady, and pretty soon it will be the Death-Bed Lady, and
then it will be the Dead-and-Buried Lady--and that's all we'll ever know
about it." He shivered clammily as he finished and reached for a
scorching glass of whisky on the table.
But the Young Doctor did not feel so lugubrious the next day and the
next and the next, when he found the Sick-A-Bed Lady rallying slowly but
surely to the skill of his head and hands. To be frank, she still lay
for hours at a time in a sort of gentle daze watching the world go by
without her, but little by little her body strengthened as a wilted
flower freshens in water, and little by little she struggled harder for
words that even then did not always match her thoughts.
The village continued to speculate about her lost identity, but the
Young Doctor seemed to worry less and less about it as time went on. If
the sweetest little girl you ever saw knew perfectly whom you meant when
you said "Dear," what was the use of hunting up such prosy names as May
or Alice? And as to her funny speeches, was there anything in the world
more piquant than to be called a "beautiful horse," when she meant a
"kind doctor"? Was there anything dearer than her absurd wrath over her
blunders, or the way she shook her head like an angry little heifer,
when she occasionally forgot altogether how to talk? It was at one of
these latter times that the Young Doctor, watching her desperate
struggle to focus her speech, forgot all about her twenty years and
stooped down suddenly and kissed her square on her mouth.
"There," he laughed, "_that_ will help you remember where your mouth
is!" But it was astonishing after that how many times he had to remind
her.
He couldn't help loving her. No man could have helped loving her. She
was so little and dear and gentle and--lost.
The Sick-A-Bed Lady herself didn't know who she was, but she would have
perished with fright if she had realized that no one in the village, and
not even the Young Doctor himself, could guess her identity.
The Young Doctor knew everything else in the world; why shouldn't he
know who she was? He knew all about France being directly opposite the
house; he had known it ever since he was a boy, and had been glad about
it. He stopped her trying to count the green birds on the wall-paper
because he "knew positively" that there were four hundred and seventeen
whole birds, and nineteen half birds cut off by the wainscoting. He
never laughed at her when she slid down the side of her bed by the
village street window, and went to sleep with her curly head pillowed on
the hard, white sill. He never laughed, because he understood perfectly
that if you hung one white arm down over the sidewalk when you went to
sleep, sometimes little children would come and put flowers in your
hand, or, more wonderful still, perhaps, a yellow collie dog would come
and lick your fingers.
Nothing could surprise the Young Doctor. Sometimes the Sick-A-Bed Lady
took thoughts she did have and mixed them up with thoughts she didn't
have, and _sprung_ them on the poor Young Doctor, but he always said,
"Why, of _course_," as simply as possible.
But more than all the other wise things he knew was the wise one about
smelly things. He knew that when you were very, very, _very_ sick,
nothing pleased you so much as nice, smelly things. He brought wild
strawberries, for instance, not so much to eat as to smell, but when he
wasn't looking she gobbled them down as fast as she could. And he
brought her all kinds of flowers, one or two at a time, and seemed so
disappointed when she just sniffed them and smiled; but one day he
brought her a spray of yellow jasmine, and she snatched it up and kissed
it and cried "_Home_," and the Young Doctor was so pleased that he wrote
it right down in a little book and ran away to study up something. He
let her smell the fresh green bank-notes in his pocketbook. Oh, they
were good to smell, and after a while she said "Shops." He brought her
a tiny phial of gasoline from his neighbor's automobile, and she
crinkled up her nose in disgust and called it "gloves" and slapped it
playfully out of his hand. But when he brought her his riding-coat she
rubbed her cheek against it and whispered some funny chirruppy things.
His pipe, though, was the most confusing symbol of all. It was his best
pipe, too, and she snuggled it up to her nose and cried "_You, y-o-u_!"
and hid it under her pillow and wouldn't give it back to him, and though
he tried her a dozen times about it, she never acknowledged any
association except that joyous, "_Y-o-u_!"
So day by day she gained in consecutive thought till at last she grew so
reasonable as to ask: "Why do you call me _Dear_?"
And the Young Doctor forgot all about his earliest reason and answered
perfectly simply: "Because I love you."
Then some of the evenings grew to be almost sweetheart evenings, though
the Sick-A-Bed Lady's fragile childishness keyed the Young Doctor into
an almost uncanny tenderness and restraint.
Those were wonderful evenings, though, after the Sick-A-Bed Lady began
to get better and better. A good deal of the Young Doctor's practice was
scattered up and down the coast, and after the dust and sweat and glare
and rumble of his long day he would come back to the sleepy village in
the early evening, plunge for a freshening swim into the salt water,
don his white clothes and saunter round to the quaint old house at the
edge of the ocean. Here in the breezy kitchen he often sat for as long
as an hour, talking with the Old Housekeeper, till the Sick-A-Bed Lady's
tiny silver bell rang out with absurd peremptoriness. Then for as much
time as seemed wise he went and sat with the Sick-A-Bed Lady.
One night, one full-moon night, he came back from his day's work
extraordinarily tired and fretted after a series of strident
experiences, and hurried to the old house as to a veritable Haven of
Refuge. The Housekeeper was busy with village company, so he postponed
her report and went at once to the Sick-A-Bed Lady's room.
Only fools lit lights on such a night as that, and he threw himself down
in the big chair by the bedside, and fairly basked in peacefulness and
moonlight and content, while the Sick-A-Bed Lady leaned over and stroked
his hair with her little white fingers, crooning some pleasant, childish
thing about "nice, smoky Boy." There was no fret or fuss or even sound
in the room, except the drowsy murmur of voices in the Garden, and the
churky splash of little waves against the shore.
"Hear the French Verbs," said the Sick-A-Bed Lady, at last, with
deliberate mischief. Then she shut her lips tight and waved her hands
distractedly after a manner she had when she wished to imply that she
was suddenly stricken dumb. The Young Doctor laughed and reached over
and kissed her.
"_J'aime_," he said.
"_J'aime_," the Sick-A-Bed Lady repeated.
"_Tu aimes_," he persisted.
"_Tu aimes_," she echoed on his lips.
--Then--"There'll be no '_he_ loves' to our story," he cried suddenly,
and caught her so fiercely to his breast that she gave a little quick
gasp of pain and struggled back on her pillows, and the Young Doctor
jumped up in bitter, stinging contrition and strode out of the room.
Just across the threshold he met the Old Housekeeper with a clattering
tray of dishes.
"I'm going down to the Library to smoke," he said huskily to her. "Come
there when you've finished. I want to talk with you."
His thoughts of himself were not kind as he wandered into the library
and settled down in the first big chair that struck his fancy.
Then he fell to wondering whether there was anything gross about his
love, because it took no heed of mental qualifications. He thought of at
least three houses in the village where that very night he would have
found lights and laughter and clever talk, and the prodding sympathy of
earnest women who made the sternest happening of the day seem nothing
more than a dress rehearsal for the evening's narration of it. Then he
thought again of the big, quiet room upstairs, with its unquestioning
peace and love and restfulness and content. What was the best thing
after all that a woman could bring to a man? Yet a year ago he had
bragged of the blatant braininess of his best woman friend! He began to
laugh at himself.
Slowly the incongruities of the whole situation bore in upon him, and he
sat and smoked and smiled in moody silence, staring with skeptical
interest at the dimly lighted room around him. It was certainly the Old
Doctor's private study, and realization of just what that meant came
over him ironically.
The Old Doctor had been very stingy with his house and his books and his
knowledge and his patients. It was natural perhaps under the
professional circumstances of waning Age and waxing Youth. Yet the fact
remained. Never before in five years of village association had the
Young Doctor crossed the threshold of the Old Doctor's home, yet now he
came and went like the Man of the House. Here he sat at this instant in
the Old Doctor's private study, in the Old Doctor's chair, his feet upon
the Old Doctor's table, and the whole great room with its tier after
tier of bookcases, and its drawer after drawer of probable memoranda
_free_ before him. He could imagine the Old Doctor's impotent wrath over
such a contingency, yet he felt no sentimental mawkishness over his own
position. As far as he knew the Dead were dead.
Sitting there in the Old Doctor's study, he conjured up scene after
scene of the Old Doctor's irascibility and exclusiveness. Even as late
as the Sick-A-Bed Lady's arrival, the Old Doctor had snubbed him
unmercifully before a crowd of people. It was at the station when the
little sick stranger was being taken off the car and put into a
carriage, and the Old Doctor had hailed the Younger with unwonted
friendliness.
"I've got a case in there that would make you famous if you could master
it," he said.
The Young Doctor remembered perfectly how he had walked into the trap.
"What is it?" he had cried eagerly.
"That's none of your business," chuckled the Old Doctor, and drove away
with all the platform loafers shouting with delight.
Well, it seemed to be the Young Doctor's business _now_, and he got up,
turned the lamp higher and began to hunt through the Old Doctor's rarest
books for some light on certain curious developments in the Sick-A-Bed
Lady's case.
He was just in the midst of this hunt when the Old Housekeeper glided
in like a ghost and startled him.
"Sit down," he said absent-mindedly, and went on with his reading. He
had almost forgotten her presence when she coughed and said: "Excuse me,
sir, but I've something very special to say to you."
The Young Doctor looked up in surprise and saw that the Woman's face was
ashy white.
"I--don't--think--you quite--understand the case," she stammered. "I
think the little lady upstairs is going to be a Mother!"
The Young Doctor put his hand up to his face, and his face felt like
parchment. He put his hand down to the book again, and the book cover
quivered like flesh.
"What do you m-e-a-n?" he asked.
"I'll tell you what I mean," said the Old Housekeeper, and led him back
to the sick room.
Two hours later the Young Doctor staggered into his Best Friend's house
clutching a sheet of letter paper in his hand. His shoulders dragged as
though under a pack, and every trace of boyishness was wrung like a rag
out of his face.
"For Heaven's sake, what's the matter?" cried his friend, starting up.
"Nothing," muttered the Young Doctor, "except the Sick-A-Bed Lady."
"When did she die? What happened?"
The Young Doctor made a gesture of dissent and crawled into a chair and
began to fumble with the paper in his hand. Then he shivered and stared
his Best Friend straight in the face.
"You might say," he stammered, "that I have just heard from the
Sick-A-Bed Lady's Husband--" he choked at the word, and his Friend sat
up with astonishment: "You heard me _say_ I had heard from the
Sick-A-Bed Lady's Husband?" he persisted. "_You_ heard me say it, mind
you. You heard me say that her Husband is sick in Japan--detained
indefinitely--so we are afraid he won't get here in time for her
confinement--"
The sweat broke out in great drops on his forehead, and his hand that
held the sheet of paper shook like a hand that has strained its muscles
with heavy weights.
The Best Friend took a scathing glance at the scribbled words on the
paper and laughed mirthlessly.
"You're a good fool," he said, "a good fool, and I'll publish your
blessed lie to the whole stupid village, if that's what you want."
But the Young Doctor sat oblivious with his head in his hands,
muttering: "Blind fool, blind fool, how could I have been such a blind
fool?"
"What is it to _you_?" asked his Best Friend abruptly.
The Young Doctor jumped to his feet and squared his shoulders.
"It's _this_ to me," he cried, "that I wanted her for my own! I could
have cured her. I tell you I could have cured her. I wanted her for my
own!"
"She's only a waif," said the Best Friend tersely.
"Waif?" cried the Young Doctor, "_waif_? No woman whom I love is a
_waif_!" His face blazed furiously. "The woman I _love_--that little
gentle girl--a waif?--without a home?--I would make a cool home for her
out of Hell itself, if it was necessary! Damn, damn, _damn_ the brute
that deserted her, but _home is all around her_ NOW! Do I think the Old
Doctor guessed about it? _N-o!_ Nobody could have guessed about it.
Nobody could have known about it much before this. You say _again_ she
isn't _anybody's_? I'll prove to you as soon as it's decent that she's
_mine_."
His Best Friend took him by the shoulder and shook him roughly.
"It is no time," he said, "for you to be courting a woman."
"I'll court my Sweetheart when and where I choose!" the Young Doctor
answered defiantly, and left the house.
The night seemed a thousand miles long to him, but when he slept at
last and woke again, the air was fresh and hopeful with a new day. He
dressed quickly and hurried off to the scene of last night's tragedy,
where he found the Old Housekeeper arguing in the doorway with a small
boy. She turned to the Doctor complacently. "He's begging for the
postage stamp off the Japanese letter," she exclaimed, "and I'm just
telling him I sent it to my Sister's boy in Montreal."
There was no slightest trace of self-consciousness in her manner, and
the Young Doctor could not help but smile as he beckoned her into the
house and shut the door.
Then, "Have you told her?" he asked eagerly.
The Old Housekeeper humped her shoulders against the door and folded her
arms sumptuously. "No, I haven't told her," she said, "and I'm not going
to. I don't dar'st! I help you out about your business same as I helped
the Old Doctor out about his business. That's all right. That's as it
should be. And I'll go skipping up those stairs to tell the little lady
any highfaluting, pleasant yarn that you can invent, but I don't budge
one single step to tell that poor, innocent, loony Lamb--the _truth_. It
isn't ugliness, Doctor. I haven't got the strength, that's all!"
Just then the little silver bell tinkled, and the Doctor went heavily up
the few steps that swung the Sick-A-Bed Lady's room just out of line of
real upstairs or downstairs.
The Sick-A-Bed Lady was lying in glorious state, arrayed in a wonderful
pale green kimono with shimmering silver birds on it.
"You stayed too long downstairs," she asserted and went on trying to cut
out pictures from a magazine.
The Young Doctor stood at the window looking out to sea as long as his
legs would hold him, and then he came back and sat down on the edge of
the bed.
"What's your name, Honey?" he asked with a forced smile.
"Why, 'Dear,' of course," she answered and dropped her scissors in
surprise.
"What's my name?" he continued, fencing for time.
"Just '_Boy_,'" she said with sweet, contented positiveness.
The Young Doctor shivered and got up and started to leave the room, but
at the threshold he stopped resolutely and came back and sat down again.
This time he took his Mother's wedding ring from his little finger and
twirled it with apparent aimlessness in his hands.
Its glint caught the Sick-A-Bed Lady's eye, and she took it daintily in
her fingers and examined it carefully. Then, as though it recalled some
vague memory, she crinkled up her forehead and started to get out of
bed. The Young Doctor watched her with agonized interest. She went
direct to her bureau and began to search diligently through all the
drawers, but when she reached the lower drawer and found some
bright-colored ribbons she forgot her original quest, whatever it was,
and brought all the ribbons back to bed with her.
The Young Doctor started to leave her again, this time with a little
gesture which she took to be anger, but he had not gone further than the
head of the stairs before she called him back in a voice that was
startlingly mature and reasonable.
"Oh, Boy, come back," she cried. "I'll be good. What do you want?"
The Young Doctor came doubtfully.
"Do you understand me to-day?" he asked in a voice that sent an ominous
chill to her heart. "Can you think pretty clearly to-day?"