“‘Do you know that handwriting, Kit?’
“I felt like an awful little liar, but I had promised you. I stretched out my hand for it, and said carelessly,—
“‘Why, ain’t it Sue’s?’
“Sue is his sister, you know. So he thought I did not know who it came from, and he changed his mind, and put it into his pocket, and went off. When I teased him afterward to let me see it, he said,—
“‘No; there are some things a fellow would be a cad to show.’
“So I saw it hit home, and well it might. It was a tremendous letter, Nelly.”
And Kitty ended with a hug and a kiss, and a look of that loyal admiration which a girl can give another girl now and then.
When the spring came Joe Greene went away from Chester, and did not come back there any more. No doubt Nelly Hunt would have forgotten his very existence but for the valentine, which she could not forget. She used to blush, as she grew older, to think how “bumptious” it was, as she used to call it to herself. What was she, that she should have undertaken to preach a sermon to that boy? What if he remembered it only to think how presuming it was, and to laugh at it? But, luckily, he did not know from whom it came; and with that thought she cooled her blushes.
Nelly was twenty when Joe Greene came back to Chester again. And now he came as a physician, just through his studies, and anxious to build up a practice. Soon his fame grew. His patients were among the poor at first, and he cured them; and then richer people heard of it, and sent for him. But, while he took all the patients that came, he never gave up his practice among those who most needed him. His praise was in all their mouths. There had never been any doctor like this one.