“Oh, Daddy Doctor!” she whispered. “I could never do a thing like that!”
“I should say not,” responded her father, quickly. “Don’t make this a personal matter, Kitten. You need every ounce of blood you’ve got for yourself. You have been perilously near the anæmic state yourself in times past. This athletic business and the resultant hearty appetite you maintain has been the salvation of you, Nellie girl.
“Ah! we need a robust, healthy young person who would be willing to give a quantity of blood and not miss it. And I venture to say it’s healthy blood that gives her that color, despite the fact that you Miss Namby-pambies consider it ‘coarse’ and ‘horrid’ to have a red face.”
“Hester!” exclaimed Nellie.
The doctor nodded, then fell into silence again.
It was the next afternoon that they proposed taking little Johnny Doyle to the hospital. The good doctor was at the widow’s waiting for the ambulance when Hester Grimes came in. The widow was wailing as though her heart were broken; for with people of this degree of intelligence, to take a patient to the hospital is equal to signing his death warrant.
“Ochone! Ochone! I’ll never see me little Johnny runnin’ around the flure again,” she said to Hester. “He’s goin’ jest like his poor feyther.”
“What nonsense you’re talking, Mrs. Doyle!” cried Hester, cheerfully. “He’ll come back to you as chipper as a sparrow. Won’t he, Dr. Agnew?”
“So I tell her—if God wills,” added the physician in a lower tone.
Hester glanced at him sharply and then walked to the front room window where Dr. Agnew sat.