It was not until the next evening that Emily saw the doctor. She was lying in bed, weak and limp, red as a beet with the measles rash, but quite herself again. Allan Burnley stood by the bed and looked down at her.
“Emily—dear little child—do you know what you have done for me? God knows how you did it.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Emily, wonderingly.
“You have given me back my faith in Him, Emily.”
“Why, what have I done?”
Dr. Burnley saw that she had no remembrance of her delirium. Laura had told him that she had slept long and soundly after Elizabeth’s promise and had awakened with fever gone and the eruption fast coming out. She had asked nothing and they had said nothing.
“When you are better we will tell you all,” he said, smiling down at her. There was something very sorrowful in the smile—and yet something very sweet.
“He is smiling with his eyes as well as his mouth now,” thought Emily.
“How—how did she know?” whispered Laura Murray to him when he went down. “I—can’t understand it, Allan.”
“Nor I. These things are beyond us, Laura,” he answered gravely. “I only know this child has given Beatrice back to me, stainless and beloved. It can be explained rationally enough perhaps. Emily has evidently been told about Beatrice and worried over it—her repeated ‘she couldn’t have done it’ shows that. And the tales of the old Lee well naturally made a deep impression on the mind of a sensitive child keenly alive to dramatic values. In her delirium she mixed this all up with the well-known fact of Jimmy’s tumble into the New Moon well—and the rest was coincidence. I would have explained it all so myself once—but now—now, Laura, I only say humbly, ‘A little child shall lead them.’”