Bubble was highly delighted at the success of his ruse. He rubbed his hands and chuckled, then went down on all-fours and began picking up the pea-pods. "Sorry I made you upset the basket, Pink!" he said. "I say! how well you're looking! Isn't she, Miss Hilda? Oh! I didn't suppose you were as well as this."
He gazed with delighted eyes at his sister's face, on which the fresh pink and white told a pleasant tale of health and strength. She returned his look with one of such beaming love and joy that Hildegarde, in the midst of her own heartfelt pleasure, could not help feeling a momentary pang. "If my baby brother had only lived!" she thought. But the next moment she was shaking Bubble by both hands, and telling him how glad she was to see him.
"And now tell us!" cried both girls, pulling him down on the ground between them. "Tell us all about it! How did you get here? Where do you come from? When did you leave New York? What have you been doing? How is Dr. Flower?"
"Guess I've got under Niag'ry Falls, by mistake!" said Bubble, dryly. "Let me see, now!" He rumpled up his short tow-colored hair with his favorite gesture, and meditated. "I guess I'll begin at the beginning!" he said. "Well!" (it was observable that Bubble no longer said "Wa-al!" and that his speech had improved greatly during the year spent in New York, though he occasionally dropped back into his former broad drawl.) "Well! it's been hot in the city. I tell you, it's been hot. Why, Miss Hilda, I never knew what heat was before."
"I know it must be dreadful, Bubble!" said Hildegarde. "I have never been in town in August, but I can imagine what it must be."
"I really don't know, Miss Hilda, whether you can," returned Bubble, respectfully. "It isn't like any heat I ever felt at home. Can you imagine your brains sizzling in your head, like a kettle boiling?"
"Oh, don't, Bubble!" cried Rose. "Don't say such things!"
"Well, it's true!" said the boy. "That's exactly the way it felt. It was like being in a furnace,—a white furnace in the day-time, and a black one at night; that was all the difference. I had my head shaved,—it's growed now, but I'm going to have it done again, soon as I get back,—and wore a flannel shirt and those linen pants you made, Pinkie. I tell you I was glad of 'em, if I did laugh at 'em at first—and so I got on. I wrote you that Dr. Flower had taken me to do errands for him during vacation?" The girls nodded. "Well, I stayed at his house,—it's a jolly house!—and 't was as cool there as anywhere. I went to the hospital with him every day, and I'm going to be a surgeon, and he says I can."
Hildegarde smiled approval, and Rose patted the flaxen head, and said, "Yes, I am sure you can, dear boy. Do you remember how you set the chicken's leg last year?"
"I told the doctor about that," said Bubble, "and he said I did it right. Wasn't I proud! I held accidents for him two or three times this summer," he added proudly. "It never made me faint at all, though it does most people at first."