“Yes, Polly, yes, dear.”
“You were there, father, and you let her die.”
Dr. Maybright put his arm round the trembling child, and drew her and the baby too close to him.
“Not willingly,” he said, in a voice which Polly had never heard him use before. “Not willingly, my child. It was with anguish I let your mother go away. But Polly, there was another physician there, greater than I.”
“Another?” said Polly.
“Yes, another—and He prescribed Rest, for evermore.”
All her life afterwards Polly remembered these words of her father’s. They calmed her great sorrow, and in many ways left her a different child.