“Yes, better, better!” was the faint reply. “My boy,—where is my boy? Freddy! Freddy!” He stretched out his feeble hand. But it was met by a firm, gentle grasp that was not Freddy’s.
“No boys now,” said Miss Stella in the soft, steady voice of one used to such commands. “There must be no seeing, no talking, even no thinking, my patient. You must take this powder I am putting to your lips. Close your eyes again and go to sleep.—Now please everybody go away and leave him to me,” was the whispered ukase, that even Father Tom obeyed without protest; and Miss Stella began her reign at Killykinick.
It was a triumphant reign from the very first. Old and young fell at once under her gentle sway, and yielded to her command without dispute. The cabin of the “Lady Jane” was given to her entirely; even Brother Bart taking to the upper deck; while a big, disused awning was stretched into a shelter for the morning and the noontime mess.
And, to say nothing of her patient—who lay, as Brother Bart expressed it, “like a shorn lamb” under her gentle bidding, gaining health and strength each day,—every creature in Killykinick was subservient to Miss Stella’s sweet will. Freddy was her devoted slave; lazy Jim, ready to move at her whisper; even Dud, after learning her father’s rank in the army, was ready to oblige her as a gentleman should. But it was Dan, as she had foreseen from the first, who was her right-hand man, ready to fetch and carry, to lift any burden, however heavy, by day and night; Dan who rowed or sailed or skimmed to any point in the motor boat Father Tom kept waiting at her demand; Dan who, when the patient grew better, and she had an hour or two off, was her willing and delighted escort over rocks or sea.
And as they sailed or rowed or loitered by beach and shore, Miss Stella drew from Aunt Winnie’s boy the hopes and fears he could not altogether hide. She learned how Aunt Winnie was “pining” for her home and her boy; she read the letters, with their untold love and longing; she saw the look on the boyish face when Dan, too mindful of his promise to Father Mack to speak plainly, said he ‘reckoned she wouldn’t be here long if he didn’t get her somehow home.’ She learned, too, all Dan could tell about poor old Nutty’s medal.
“Get it for me the next time you go to town, Danny,” she said to him. And Danny drew it from old Jonah’s junk shop and put it in Miss Stella’s hand.
And then, when at last her patient was able to sit up in Great-uncle Joe’s big chair in the cabin doorway and look out at the sea, Miss Stella wrote to dad and Polly to come and take her home.
“Lord, but we’ll all miss her!” Captain Jeb voiced the general sentiment of Killykinick when this decision was made public. “I ain’t much sot on women folks when you’re in deep water, but this one suttenly shone out like a star in the dark.”
“And kept a-shining,” added Neb,—“a-shining and a-smiling straight through.”
“She’s a good girl,” said Brother Bart. “And I’m thinking—well, it doesn’t matter what I’m thinking. But it’s a lonely time laddie’s poor father will be having, after all his wild wanderings; and it will be hard for him to keep house and home. But the Lord is good. Maybe it was His hand that led Miss Stella here.”