Maddy had gained rapidly during the last three days. Good nursing and the doctor’s medicines were working miracles, and on the morning when the doctor, with Guy’s bouquet, was riding rapidly toward Honedale, she was feeling so much better that in view of his coming she asked if she could not be permitted to receive him in the rocking-chair, instead of lying there in bed; and when this plan was vetoed as utterly impossible, she asked anxiously:
“And must I see him in this night-gown! Can’t I have on my pink gingham wrapper?”
Hitherto Maddy had been too sick to care at all about her personal appearance, but it was different now; and thoughts of meeting again the handsome, stylish-looking man, whom she fully believed to be Dr. Holbrook, made her rather nervous. Dim remembrances she had of some one gliding in and about the room, and when the pain and noise in her head was in its highest, a hand large and cool had been laid upon her temples, quieting the throbbing, and making the blood course less madly through the swollen veins. They had told her how kind, how attentive he had been, and to herself she had said: “He’s sorry about that certificate. He wishes to show me that he did not wish to be unkind. Yes, I forgive him; for I really was very stupid that afternoon.”
And so, in a most forgiving frame of mind, Maddy submitted to the night dress which grandma brought in place of the gingham wrapper, and which became her well, with its daintily-crimped ruffles about the neck and wrists, which had grown so small that Maddy sighed to see how loose they were as her grandmother buttoned together the wristbands.
“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 Maddy was; and also how, as grandma expressed it, “She had been reckoning on this visit, making herself all a sweat about it.”
Suddenly the doctor felt all his old dread of Maddy Clyde returning. Why should she worry 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 out of the room, 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 in by 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 better if he treated her just as he would Jessie, the doctor confronted her at once, and asked: