She spoke bravely, but her voice trembled a little.
"Good. Before I make my final examination, Miss Merriman and I have got to change our clothes. She will use your room and I the loft; but first let us bring Lou's bed out here by the fire."
It was done.
"Now," he continued, "while we are getting ready, there are a number of things which you have got to do, and you will have to work fast. First, make grandfather comfortable in his room, and build up this fire. Then heat up as much water as the big kettle will hold, and see that a smaller one is scoured absolutely clean. Start some water heating in that, too. Finally, undress Lou completely, and wrap her in a blanket. Can you remember all that?"
"Yes, Donald ... yes, doctor."
Donald smiled, and added, "One thing more. Partly fill a pillow-case with sand, or dirt, if it is possible to get any. Perhaps the ground in the wood-house isn't frozen so hard but that you can get it."
She nodded wonderingly.
In a quarter of an hour her duties were completed and Miss Merriman and Donald had appeared, clad in their spotless white garments of service. Rose, likewise, was in her play uniform, which was now considerably too small for her, and her appearance in it would have caused a smile if it had not been more provocative of tears.
Six months earlier the doctor and nurse, assisted by others of the most skilled and highly trained that the metropolis afforded, had prepared to perform the same desperate service in humanity's cause, within the perfectly appointed operating room of a modern city hospital. How different was the setting now!
In the rude, but homey room of the mountain cabin, lighted only by old-fashioned lamps and lanterns and the pulsating blaze of the fire in the cavernous fireplace, whose colorful gleam touched with gold the scoured copper of pot and kettle, the three workers, in the immaculate garments of a city sickroom, bent intently over the naked form of the nearly insensible child, to whose alabaster body the leaping flames imparted a simulated glow of warm tones.