“I have been very sick,” she said. “Are my cheeks as thin as my arms?”
They were not, though they had lost some of their symmetrical roundness. Still there was much of childish beauty in the young, eager face, and the hair had lost comparatively none of its glossy brightness.
“That’s him,” grandma said, as the sound of a horse’s gallop was heard, and in a moment the doctor reined up before the gate.
From Mrs. Markham, who met him in the door, he learned how much better she was; also how “she has been reckoning on this visit, making herself all a-sweat about it.”
Suddenly the doctor felt returning all his old dread of Maddy Clyde. Why should she wrong herself into a sweat? What was there in that visit different from any other? Nothing, he said to himself, nothing; and yet he, too, had been more anxious about it than any he had ever paid. Depositing his hat and gloves upon the table, he followed Mrs. Markham up the stairs, vaguely conscious of wishing she would stay down, and very conscious of feeling glad; when just at Maddy’s door and opposite a little window, she espied the hens busily engaged in devouring the yeast cakes, with which she had taken so much pains, and which she had placed in the hot sun to dry. Finding that they paid no heed to her loud “Shoo, shoos,” she started herself to drive them away, telling the doctor to go right on and to help himself.
The perspiration was standing under Maddy’s hair by this time, and when the doctor stepped across the threshold, and she knew he really was coming near her, it oozed out upon her forehead in big, round drops, while her cheeks glowed with a feverish heat. Thinking he should get along with it better if he treated her just as he would Jessie, the doctor confronted her at once, and asked:
“How is my little patient to-day?”
A faint scream broke from Maddy’s lips, and she involuntarily raised her hands to thrust the stranger away. This black-eyed, black-haired, thick-set man was not Dr. Holbrook, for he was taller, and more slight, while she had not been deceived in the dark brown eyes which, even while they seemed to be mocking her, had worn a strange fascination for the maiden of fourteen and a half. The doctor fancied her delirious again, and this reassured him at once. Dropping the bouquet upon the bed, he clasped one of her hands in his, and without the slightest idea that she comprehended him, said, soothingly:
“Poor child, are you afraid of me—the doctor, Dr. Holbrook?” Maddy did not try to withdraw her hand, but raising her eyes, swimming in tears, to his face, she stammered out:
“What does it mean, and where is he—the one who—asked me—those dreadful questions? I thought that was Dr. Holbrook.”