“I haven’t any friends except you—you two,” he said.
“Haven’t you? Perhaps you have more than you think. Do you remember who jumped through a window to give you a bunch of roses one day? It is he, and he wants to see you. Do you think you feel well enough to-day?”
“Oh no!” exclaimed Creepy, shrinking back among his pillows with almost a look of terror, and a hot flush coming up to his face, “don’t let any one come here! Don’t let any one come to see me ever again, as long as I live!” and the doctor saw the slender fingers tremble as he shut them tightly together.
“Well, well,” said the doctor quickly, “no one shall come until you wish it, but perhaps you will think differently before long. You will be tired of Joan and me some day;” and he turned off to talking of something else.
But he would not leave it so long.
“This will never do,” he said, when he had waited a few days more and Creepy was regularly established on the lounge; “the child must have his medicines, however bitter the first taste may be, and he needs just what he did need when I sent him to school. If he had found companions then, instead of a set of wild animals—” The doctor stopped, for he didn’t like to finish the sentence, even in his thoughts. The contrast of what might have been, with what was likely to be, was too sharp.
So he turned suddenly and lifted Creepy in his arms. “Look here, little man,” he said, “whose word would you take first, mine or the first person’s you might happen to come across?”
Creepy hesitated.
The recollection of the whispering he had heard as he lay under the old rock, shot through him. “The doctor had been mocking him with all the rest;” but he could not think so; he knew it was a lie—and yet!