"Do you need my help, Uncle Hughie?" called the silvery voice behind him.
"Och, it's the good lassie you will be!" came from under the straw hat. "No, no. It is jist a poor tramp body, and the doctor will be curing him."
Gilbert reached the other side, and the queer little figure hobbled toward him with outstretched hand. He took off his hat and made a stately bow, and the young man looked at him with pleasure and surprise. The little old man's face was wrinkled and brown, and bore the marks of pain, but his eyes shone out with a warm, kind brilliancy that went straight to the stranger's heart. They were the girl's eyes, exactly, but with none of her lofty reserve.
"Ech! hech!" he cried, disappearing once more within the hat. "Indeed and indeed, and it's the new doctor! Hoch, yes, yes, it is welcome you will be to Elmbrook. Eh, and we would not be expecting such a fine-looking one. Indeed, no! And it would be a fine Scottish name, too, oh, a fine name indeed, Allen. And—you would not be hafing the Gaelic, I suppose?" His eyes gleamed wistfully from between the hat and the whiskers.
"No," said Gilbert, smiling. "My mother spoke it, but she did not teach us children."
"Och, och, well, well," he said, reassuringly. "It will not be the way of the young Canadians, and perhaps it is better. Come away, now, come away! I would be finding a poor tramp body down the glen here, ech, ech, the peety of it! The peety of it!"
He hobbled away ahead, talking volubly. Gilbert glanced back as he followed, but the princess in the violet gown had disappeared.
"Eh, now, it would jist be the good Lord that would be sending him to me, indeed. Eh, the Almighty would be giving me everything in the world that I could be wanting. But I will jist be an awful complainin' body, and sometimes I would be saying, if I would only have the chance to help some one. That's it!" he cried, turning a flashing eye upon Gilbert. "That will be the only thing worth while in this world. Eh, it is you that will be finding that out, Dr. Allen, and a happy man you will be, oh, yes, indeed. It is the doctor bodies that has the chance." He stopped and turned again. "Eh, did ye ever think He would be a doctor Himself?" he added, in an awed whisper. "Yes, yes, most folks now would be thinkin' He would jist be a preacher. But I would be rastlin' things out sometimes at night, when the rheumatics would be keeping me awake. The rheumatics would be a fine thing to make a body think, doctor, oh, yes, a fine thing, and I would be wishing one night that old Dr. Williams would be curing me, and then I would be rastlin' it out that He would jist be a doctor Himself. Oh, hoch, yes, yes, indeed it would be wonderful; yes, yes, wonderful!"
The young man regarded him curiously. Some strange emotion stirred in his heart: a memory of those days when his mother made the Great Physician a very real person to him. It seemed so long ago that he had almost forgotten, and yet he experienced a feeling as though he had suddenly come face to face with a long-lost friend.
"I am afraid such rheumatism as you must endure would keep me from thinking of anything but myself," he said, his professional eye taking in the signs of the painful disease in the old man's crippled frame.