"He's fine," responded Billy. "Maybe I'll be a doctor, Ruth, if I don't keep a store."
"Oh, I'd rather you'd keep the store," decided Ruth, "for then you won't ever have to go without your dinner."
The doctor stayed for an hour or more and then it was bedtime for Ruth. She would fain have taken Hetty to bed with her, but at the dreadful suggestion from Billy that she might roll over on her in the night, she concluded that Hetty would be safer elsewhere, so a bed was made for her on a chair by Ruth's bedside so that she could be near at hand.
"I thought of taking her up to see poor Henrietta," Ruth told Miss Hester, "but then I thought she might feel too badly to see how dreadful she looks after all these years, and so I am not going to let her know where she is. Please, Aunt Hester, I want to say God bless Billy over again. I didn't say it slowly enough, and maybe He'll think I didn't mean it."
So she added to her prayer: "Please God, bless Billy a great deal more than you did before and make him grow up to be like Dr. Peaslee, only let him keep a store, please."
She was not usually so expansive, and Miss Hester realized that her heart was very full, and that into it she had taken for all time, not only herself, but Billy Beatty and Dr. Peaslee.
[CHAPTER VII]
A Surprise Party
THE news was soon noised abroad among Ruth's playmates that she had another doll "zackly like Henrietta," and, because there was some mystery about it as well as because the doll was unlike others of the period, Hetty was quite a belle for a time, though Ruth determined never to take her to school again, lest Nora's spite should work her ill.
She did take her over to Annie Waite's one day where she found Nora, who, with some other little girls, had been invited to spend the afternoon. Perceiving her enemy, Ruth ran home again after a whispered consultation with Annie. Nora looked rather shamefaced when Ruth returned without her doll, but she said nothing, and, as Annie lent Ruth one of her dolls to play with, every one was supplied.