"This is it!" said Solvei, and dragged the Young Doctor into the room.
"What?" screamed Mrs. Tome Gallien. 160
"It is for me! You understand?" beamed the girl.
In the convulsive laughter that overtook the Young Doctor he did not at the moment notice Mrs. Tome Gallien's face.
But there was no laughter of any kind in Mrs. Tome Gallien's face, only shock, and a most furious rage.
"So it is thus you have been deceiving me?" she cried out to Solvei. "All this time that you knew what my heart was fixed on, my hopes, my everything! All this time that you have been here a guest in my house! And quite safe I supposed from any such——"
"Oh, now really, Mrs. Gallien!" interposed the Young Doctor's grimmest, sternest voice.
"Oh, of what a nonsense!" laughed Solvei. "There is no blames anywhere—unless it should be to this Montessori theory! Out of the whole wide world is it not that a child must gravitate to his own wantings? It cannot be chosen for him?"
Then with all the young laughter gone from her face she reached out her slim brown hand to the Young Doctor's reassuring clasp and led him to the bed. 161
"Elizabeth," she said. "You are rich and you are sick and you are sometimes very cross. But you cannot buy the loving! Here then are two children who would love you all your life long— all their lives long. If you thus furiously so refuse the gift, who then is the stingy receiver?"