“You’d have hard work to find me in that bed,” said Billy to the nurse, “wouldn’t you?”
It was a beautiful room. One of the maids told Billy that it had been Mr. Prescott’s mother’s room, and that he had always kept it as she had left it.
For the first week Billy feasted his eyes on color.
The walls of the room were soft brown; the paint was the color of cream. There were two sets of curtains: one a soft old blue, and over that another hanging of all sorts of colors. It took Billy a whole day to pick out the pattern on those curtains.
There was a mahogany dressing table, and there was a wonderful rug—soft shades of rose in the middle, and ever so many shades of blue in the border.
There was a fireplace with a shining brass fender. And there were—oh, so many things!
Then Billy spent almost another week on the pictures. But when he wanted to rest his eyes he looked at his old friends, the mountains, lying far across the river.
Mr. Prescott, too, liked the mountains. He came to sit by him in the evening, and they had real friendly times together watching the mountains fade away into the night, and seeing the electric lights flash out, one after another, all along the river.
Finally the doctors took off the splints. They had a great time doing it, testing his joints to see whether or not they would work.
Then Billy found that, as the young doctor said, there had been a “tall lot of worrying done about those bones.”