"Your pink rose-bush's come into blossom, Miss Mavis."
Here was news indeed! My unconcern took unto itself wings and flew away.
"Not really!" I cried, "Oh, Sarah, how perfectly darling of her to waken so early!"
Sarah, accustomed to my extravagant fashion of endowing all growing things with distinct personalities, nodded gravely. And then, with all the majesty of Jove—if one may picture that deity as female, fifty, and New England incarnate—she launched her thunderbolt of Green Hill gossip.
"That young doctor—him that was to come from the city to help Doctor McAllister with his patien's—he's here!"
There was more truth than enunciation in Sarah's neglect of that final "t" in patients. Our village doctor is long on wisdom, but short of temper. I reached out for the morning paper, lying on my bedside table, and rustled it in dismissal.
"How interesting!" I murmured, successfully concealing any concern at all.
Sarah swooped down upon my tray and bore it to the door, in a manner which carried conviction. But we can deceive each other so little, Sarah and I.
"Come last night," she volunteered, "from New York. And every girl in Green Hill is furbishing up her Sunday clothes, so Sammy said."
Sammy, surnamed Simpson, the freckled-faced Mercury who delivers the milk, and is in close touch with all the divers heart-throbs of Green Hill, holds a sentimental, if unacknowledged appeal for Sarah. A century or two ago, Sammy's father, in those days a gay and unencumbered spark, courted my Sarah, so runs the story, in the public manner of Green Hill. And Sarah, difficult to believe though it be, showed him no disfavor. There was, however, an obstacle to eventual union, in the person of Sarah's invalid mother, a querulous, ninety-pound tyrant. Upon this rock the frail bark of the Simpson affections shattered. This is of history, the most ancient, but had the far-reaching result that Sarah, whose lot seems ever cast among the stricken, now waits on me heart, hand, and foot, while over the Simpson hearthstone another goddess presides, and rigidly too, if one can judge from the harrassed expressions of Sammy, Sr., Sammy, Jr., and all the other innumerable Simpson olive branches.