"Sure! Want me to show you?"
"I should like it ever and ever so much if you would take a note there
for me. Could you do that? Is it too far?"
Mother Cary patted Yetta's dark hair. "She can go over with Pap, when
he goes to the store," she said. "She'll be real glad to; won't you,
Yetta?"
So it came to pass that in the late afternoon Eleanor came in Mrs.
Hetherbee's car. The boy Tim was resting so quietly that Rosamund had
gone outside; she went swiftly down the little red path to the gate,
and the two met, arms entwining, cheek to cheek, with little laughs and
questions and soft cries.
"Your note said there was an accident!" These were Eleanor's first
words. "Darling, that is not why you are here? You are not hurt?"
"Why I am here; but it was not I--I was not hurt! Look at me--feel me!"
"Nor Cecilia?"
"Nor anyone, you precious, that you know! A tiny mite of a boy,
Eleanor, and I stayed to take care of him."
"You?"
"Oh, don't say it like that! And yet I don't wonder!"
Eleanor's arm was about her at once. "Sweet, I was only wondering that
Cecilia let you!"
"Cecilia did not let me; and you were wondering, too, why I stayed,
what really kept me. You are quite right; of my own accord I shouldn't
have stayed. My own impulse would not have moved that way. I should
have taken the easy, the obvious course, if I had been left to choose.
But I wasn't, you see."
Eleanor looked at her keenly. This note of bitterness was quite new.
Suddenly she remembered Ogilvie; but almost on the instant Rosamund
spoke again.
"What manner of man do you find this red-headed doctor of yours?"
Eleanor laughed. "He gets his own way with people!" She looked at her
friend, but Rosamund's face was turned from her. "I have never met
anyone else like him. I thought at first that he was two people--a man
of heart and a man of science; you know his reputation, and yet he
stays up here mainly, I am told, to be near these mountain people. He
says that they trust him, and seems to think that excuse enough for
staying."
"I thought he stayed for the air or something?"
"He did, but now he is perfectly well again. And his character is not
dual; nothing so romantic. He is a man of science just because he is a
man of heart. He is one of the simplest people I have ever known."
"You seem to know him pretty well."
"Oh, he is the first object of interest to all his patients; we talk of
nothing else! I am only a case to him."
Rosamund laughed. "Very likely, dear! And what does he think of you,
as a case?"
Eleanor's face took on its shadow of sadness. "He--he does not know,"
she said; and Rosamund drew a swift breath of pain.
Eleanor came daily after that, Mrs. Hetherbee, a worn, eager little
woman with restless eyes, showing herself entirely complaisant when it
seemed likely that the very well known Miss Randall would return
Eleanor's visits. Her attitude towards her companion had been pleasant
enough before, but it certainly took on a new warmth after Rosamund's
arrival in the neighborhood, and when she learned that Mrs. Reeves was
one of Miss Randall's lifelong friends.
"You will have to drive over and call on Mrs. Hetherbee, Rose," Eleanor
assured her. "If you don't I shall feel that I'm using her car under
false pretenses!"
So Rosamund called, and Mrs. Hetherbee basked in the distinction of
being the only person at the Summit whom Miss Randall cared to know.
Thereafter Eleanor came daily across the valley, tenderly sweet as only
she knew how to be, almost at once becoming fast friends with Mother
Cary, and hanging over the boy with aching heart and arms weary of
their emptiness. Rosamund always felt as if a hand of pain clutched at
her heart as she watched them.
"Who is he?" Eleanor had asked the first day she saw him. "Is he the
child of these people?"
"He is a waif," Rosamund said, and told how Mother Cary made of the
little white house a refuge of love for the needy ones of the city.
"And this tiny boy, Doctor Ogilvie says, needs love more than most of
them. The Charities have tried to have him adopted; but most people do
not want boys--not homely little boys, whose fathers were not at all
good and whose mothers died very young and very forlorn. Timmy has
gone begging--and he will have to go back after his summer here is
over. The most to be hoped for is that he will go back stronger; then
perhaps he will be prettier, and some one may want him. It is really
unspeakably pathetic."
So Eleanor hung over the child, and gradually there grew up in
Rosamund's heart and mind a plan, which, as it matured, was to alter
the course of life for all of them.
But that was not until later; and while to her on the mountain the days
passed uneventfully enough, they were days of distressful change for
her sister. During the first week or two, Cecilia sent her four
letters and eleven telegrams--the telegrams being duly delivered with
the letters, whenever Father Cary drove across the valley to the store.
Rosamund read them all, pondered, smiled, and then sent off a
reassuring telegram by Eleanor. Later she wrote two letters; the first
was to her banker, and in the second she said: