“Sharp, not sour. That is, none too sour. It doesn’t do to have everything sweet—like you.”
“I hate you! I want you to go out of this room.”
“I can’t. The doctor forbids me to walk, or even try.”
Melville fixed his eyes upon her face in a long, questioning gaze. Then he gave a great sigh—which was almost a sob. Octave’s own look did not falter, and out of the depths of her warm, wholesome heart she echoed the sigh.
“Well, and how—how do you like it?” Melville’s question came bitterly, fiercely.
Octave’s merry eyes filled with a sympathy that the boy could not fail to see was wholly genuine. “Cousin Melville, I do not like it at all. I can hardly bear it, even for these few days or weeks I shall have to endure it; and I cannot bear that you should submit to it so tamely. You must not—you shall not!” cried the girl, excitedly.
She understood perfectly, with the electric perception of youth, that the cripple had compared her temporary helplessness with his own, which he supposed incurable. She had been longing to have just this subject come up between them, for down in her heart she had hidden a daring thought.
The thought had been caused by a talk with her Uncle Fritz; which, however, that soft-hearted man had little intention should bear just such fruit.
He had said that he believed the boy could be helped, or that he could have been, by a difficult and painful operation which a celebrated surgeon of his own country, now inspecting the American hospitals, had once successfully performed.
The thought had come like a flash to Octave then and there; and, with a minuteness which her fond uncle thought an admirable thirst for knowledge pure and simple, she had questioned him of the operation in all its details. Now, Mr. Fritz Pickel always protested that a famous surgeon had been lost to the world when his father had apprenticed him to business; and it was his recreation, still, to “walk the hospitals” with his many friends among the doctors, and he would grow most enthusiastic over any difficult or particularly “beautiful” case which they reported to him or allowed him to see.