When she bade him enter she saw he had in his hand a saucepan full of some steaming broth. She wondered how he had made it in such a hurry, but after he poured it into a granite ware cup and offered it to her, she took it without question. It was thick, warming and nourishing. He stood by her and insisted that she take more and more. Finally she rebelled.
"Well, perhaps that will do for to-night," he said, "now let's have a look at your foot."
She observed that he had laid on the table a long roll of white cloth; she could not know that he had torn up one of his sheets to make bandages, but so it was. He took the little foot tenderly in his hands.
"I am going to hurt you," he said, "I am going to find out if there is anything more than a bruise, any bones broken."
There was no denying that he did pain her exquisitely.
"I can't help it," he said as she cried aloud. "I have got to see what's the matter, I am almost through now."
"Go on, I can bear it," she said faintly. "I feel so much better anyway now that I am dry and warm."
"So far as I can determine," said the man at last, "it is only a bad ugly bruise; the skin is torn, it has been battered, but it is neither sprained nor broken and I don't think it is going to be very serious. Now I am going to bathe it in the hottest water you can bear, and then I will bandage it and let you go to sleep."
He went out and came back with a kettle of boiling water, with which he laved again and again, the poor, torn, battered little member. Never in her life had anything been so grateful as these repeated applications of hot water. After awhile he applied a healing lotion of some kind, then he took his long roll of bandage and wound it dexterously around her foot, not drawing it too close to prevent circulation, but just tight enough for support, then as he finished she drew it back beneath the cover.
"Now," said he, "there is nothing more I can do for you to-night, is there?"