“I know,” she said. “She did it for me once, too. I don’t wonder that you remember how good she was.”
The little worried wrinkle had gone from between her eyes. In some inexplicable way she seemed to be getting across to him the warmth of her sympathy, and he felt for the first time the full wonder of it. What a treasure would be there for some man to explore, and how blind and ungrateful he had been all along. He had never done anything but go to her for help. Even now she looked tired enough to go into hysterics instead of troubling to think about him, and he felt he had been nothing less than brutal. She was gathering up her irons.
“When you get that done will you come?” he begged. “We’ll drive around till you get rid of the ether you’ve been breathing all day. I didn’t think what I was getting you into.”
“But, you see, it’s a pretty bad case, and I’m going to stay all night with the boy.”
“Why can’t some of his own people stay?”
“He hasn’t any people, nor evidently any friends. He’s a boy from the Home, who works somewhere around. He came in alone at the last minute, and you could see it had been pretty
hard for him. We want to make it as easy as we can.”
She went away smiling, and Billy went out, bitterly ashamed of himself. It had been hard for the boy to come, and he hadn’t done anything to help him.
An hour later the doctor came out.
“I suppose we’re late,” he grumbled. “I don’t know whether to curse that girl or go down on my knees and worship her. I’d had about enough bad tonsils to-day without this last case, and there was no reason under the sun why we should take an outsider like that in a school clinic, but she held me right to it. Now she’s going to see him through the night.”