Maddy had gained rapidly the last three days. Good nursing and the
doctor's medicines were working miracles, and on the morning when the
doctor, with Guy's bouquet, was riding rapidly toward Honedale, she
was feeling so much better that in view of his coming she asked if she
could not be permitted to receive him sitting in the rocking-chair,
instead of lying there in bed, and when this plan was vetoed as
utterly impossible, she asked, anxiously: "And must I see him in this nightgown? Can't I have on my pink gingham
wrapper?"
Hitherto Maddy had been too sick to care at all about her personal
appearance, but it was different now. She did care, and thoughts of
meeting again the handsome, stylish-looking man who had asked her to
conjugate _amo_ and whom she fully believed to be Dr. Holbrook,
made her rather nervous. Dim remembrances she had of some one gliding
in and out, and when the pain and noise in her head was at its
highest, a hand, large, and, oh! so cool had been laid upon her
temples, quieting their throbbings and making the blood course less
madly through the swollen veins. They had told her how kind, how
attentive he had been, and to herself she had said: "He's sorry about
that certificate. He wishes to show me that he did not mean to be
unkind. Yes; I forgive him: for I really was very stupid that
afternoon."
And so, in a most forgiving frame of mind, Maddy submitted to the
snowy robe which grandma brought in place of the coveted gingham
wrapper, and which became her well, with its daintily-crimped ruffles
about the neck and wrists. Those wrists and hands! How white and small
they had grown! and Maddy sighed, as her grandmother buttoned together
the wristbands, to see how loose it was.
"I have been very sick," she said. "Are my cheeks as thin as my arms?"
They were not, though they had lost some of their symmetrical
roundness. Still there was much of childish beauty in the young, eager
face, and the hair had lost comparatively none of its glossy
brightness.
"That's him," grandma said, as the sound of a horse's gallop was
heard, and in a moment the doctor reined up before the gate.
From Mrs. Markham, who met him in the door, he learned how much better
she was; also how "she has been reckoning on this visit, making
herself all a-sweat about it."
Suddenly the doctor felt returning all his old dread of Maddy Clyde.
Why should she wrong herself into a sweat? What was there in that
visit different from any other? Nothing, he said to himself, nothing;
and yet he, too, had been more anxious about it than any he had ever
paid. Depositing his hat and gloves upon the table, he followed Mrs.
Markham up the stairs, vaguely conscious of wishing she would stay
down, and very conscious of feeling glad; when just at Maddy's door
and opposite a little window, she espied the hens busily engaged in
devouring the yeast cakes, with which she had taken so much pains, and
which she had placed in the hot sun to dry. Finding that they paid no
heed to her loud "Shoo, shoos," she started herself to drive them
away, telling the doctor to go right on and to help himself.