“I will take you to him now. He is in the orchard, or what we call the orchard, for our trees are young and are not bearing yet. This is the way.” She led him by the path along the slope of the hill to where the young trees were being tended by Fergus Kennedy. The man looked up with his pleasant, childlike smile as he saw his daughter approaching. “This is Dr. Flint, father,” said Agnes.
The doctor greeted him cordially, eyeing him keenly all the while, “Tell me all you can about his hurt; you were there, I am told,” he said in an aside to Agnes. She obeyed, answering his rapidly put questions. At the close of the recital the doctor made a rapid examination of the healed wound. “A slight pressure still,” he said. “You say he gets better. The nervous shock was great, and as time has gone on, and he has had peaceful and happy surroundings, it has done much to overcome that condition. I think a very slight operation could be performed with safety. We will speak of it later.”
“And could you do it? There would be no danger?”
“No more than we usually take in such cases, and I think we might venture to assert there would be none at all.”
“Will you tell mother? She will be so happy; it is the one thing to make her perfectly content; she misses father so much.”
“I know that. Parker told me; it was he who first interested me in the case.”
Mr. Kennedy had returned to his work; he had submitted patiently to the examination, answering the questions put him by the doctor, but he took no part in the conversation that followed. It made him rather unhappy to be an object of attention, for he was dimly conscious that all was not right, and he whispered to Agnes, “What is he going to do?”
“Make you well and happy, dear dad, I hope,” Agnes returned, giving him an affectionate pat.
After a long consultation with Mrs. Kennedy it was decided that an operation should take place a little later, and the hope which the promise of it brought gave a new light to Mrs. Kennedy’s eyes. The doctor stayed to dinner, but shortly after he took his departure, and then Agnes went to her mother. “I promised Carter I’d go rowing with him this afternoon,” she said. “He wants to go up the river to one of the islands and have a little picnic.”
Her mother smiled. “You and Carter seem to have a great many expeditions. What does Archie say?”