Nettie, with her fresh face and dimpled cheeks, was standing timidly at the outside door. Patty took the jelly from her hand and sent a note to the Doctor:
"The patient is doing well every way, and I am in the safest place in the world—doing my duty."
And when the doctor read it he said, in his nervously abrupt fashion: "Perfect angel!"
CHAPTER XXIX.
PATTY'S JOURNEY.
Even wounds and bruises heal more rapidly when the heart is cheered, and as Patty, after spending Saturday and Sunday with the patient, found time to come in and give him his breakfast every morning before she went to school, he grew more and more cheerful, and the doctor announced in his sudden style that he'd "get along." In all her interviews Patty was not only a woman but a Methodist. She read the Bible and talked to the man about repentance; and she would not have been a Methodist of that day had she neglected to pray with him. She could not penetrate his reserve. She could not guess whether what she said had any influence on him or not. Once she was startled and lost faith in any good result of her labors when she happened, in arranging things about the room, to come upon a hideous wolf-skin cap and some heavy false-whiskers. She had more than suspected all along that her patient was a highwayman, but upon seeing the very disguises in which his crimes had been committed, she shuddered, and asked herself whether a man so hardened that he was capable of theft—perhaps of murder—could ever be any better. She found herself, after that, trying to imagine how the wounded man would look in so fierce a mask. But she soon remembered all that she had learned of the Methodist faith in the power of the Divine Spirit working in the worst of sinners, and she got her testament and read aloud to the highwayman the story of the crucified thief.
It was on Thursday morning, as she helped him take his breakfast—he was sitting propped up in bed—that he startled her most effectually. Lifting his eyes, and looking straight at her with the sort of stare that comes of feebleness, he asked:
"Did you ever know a young Methodist circuit rider named Goodwin?"
Patty thought that he was penetrating her secret. She turned away to hide her face, and said:
"I used to go to school with him when we were children."