The modest business in herbs and simples had led its votary to pursue her botany a little further, and make a special study of medicinal plants. She was often discovered hidden away in a corner of Doctor Brown’s office, eagerly comparing “Gray” with the “Materia Medica;” and she found, too, that Grandma Brown was more than ready to impart the neglected virtues of mullein and catnip, dock and sassafras, some of which Stella tested by personal experiment, while the girls began teasingly to call her the “Yarb-Doctor.”
Doctor Brown secretly believed nothing beyond the capacity of his favorite, but he conscientiously meant not to encourage ambitions that it might be impossible to realize.
“Those hands of Stella’s,” he impulsively remarked one day, when her future was under discussion, letting his sage eyes rest meditatively upon the long, supple, sensitive members—“well, they do say such hands can only belong to a doctor or a musician.”
“Or a mother,” unexpectedly murmured his wife.
He gave her a quick, approving look, and again the warm blood glowed in the Indian girl’s dark cheek. She suddenly remembered how Ethan had been telling her of his plans to study medicine the next year, and how she had listened with all her heart in her face, and at last cried out without thinking:
“Oh, I wish, how I wish I could be a doctor, too!”
She remembered vividly the peculiar look in his eyes as he gently answered:
“I could wish it too—unless—unless you were meant for something even better, Stella.”
And she had not understood at all.
Before the March sun began to melt the snow-drifts, Stella’s friends got together privately and laid their plans to present her with her Commencement Day outfit. She had worn all winter the trim suit and modest hat purchased with her summer’s work in the fields, after the rows of drying shelves in Miss Sophia’s garret had been cleared of their aromatic burden. And oddly charming she looked in them—like a symphony in browns, with her gleaming agate skin and the intense black of hair and eyes for contrast. But the “weed money” was all gone, and there was no time for extra earning that last, busy year. Surely she could not be so wickedly proud as to reject an offering of true love.