“I tell you what I’ll do,” he said, after a little. “I’ll drop Slocum a note to-night saying I’ve changed my mind, and shall not let him have the money. Perhaps, then, he won’t be so anxious to foreclose, and will give you time to look among your friends.”
Guy laid a little emphasis on that last word, and looking up quickly grandpa was about to say, “I am not so much a stranger as you think. I knew your father well;” but he checked himself with the thought, “No, that will be too much like begging pay for a deed of mercy done years ago.” So Guy never suspected that the old man before him had once laid his father under a debt of gratitude. The more he reflected the less inclined he was to lend the money, and as grandpa was too timid to urge his needs, the result was, that when at last the wheel was replaced, and Sorrel again trotted on toward Devonshire, he drew after him a sad, heavy heart, and not once until the village was reached did he hear the cheery chuckle with which his kind master was wont to encourage him.
“Poor Maddy! I dread tellin’ her the most, she was so sure,” grandpa whispered, as he stopped before the office, where Maddy waited for him.
But Maddy’s disappointment was keener than his own, and so, after the sorrowful words, “And I failed, too,” he tried to comfort the poor child, who, leaning her throbbing head against his shoulder, sobbed bitterly, as in the soft spring twilight they drove back to the low red cottage where grandma waited for them.
CHAPTER V.
THE RESULT.
It was Farmer Green’s new buggy and Farmer Green’s bay colt which, three days later, stopped before Dr. Holbrook’s office, and not the square-boxed wagon, with old Sorrel attached, for the former was standing quietly in the chip-yard, behind the low red house, while the latter, with his nose over the barn-yard fence, was neighing occasionally, as if he missed the little hands which had daily fed him the oatmeal he liked so much, and which now lay hot and parched and helpless upon the white counterpane which Grandma Markham had spun and woven herself.
Maddy might have been just as sick as she was if the examination had never occurred, but it was natural for those who loved her to impute it all to the effects of excitement and cruel disappointment, so there was something like indignation mingling with the sorrow gnawing at the hearts of the old couple as they watched by their fever-stricken darling. Farmer Green, too, shared the feeling, and numerous at first were his animadversions against that prig of a Holbrook, who was not fit to doctor a cat, much less “examine a school-marm.” But when Maddy grew so sick as not to know him or his wife, he laid aside his prejudices, and suggested to Grandpa Markham that Dr. Holbrook be sent for.
“He’s great on fevers,” he said, “and is good on curin’ sick folks, I s’pose;” so, though he would have preferred some one else should have been called, confidence in the young doctor’s skill won the day, and grandpa consented, and Farmer Green was sent for the physician, to whom he said, with his usual bluntness:
“Well, you nigh about killed our little Maddy t’other day, when you refused the stifficut, and now we want you to cure her.”