"How good you are!" exclaimed Imogen, as Clover bent over for a good-night kiss. She put her arms round Clover's neck and held her tight for a moment.
"Yes, indeed," she sighed. "I don't deserve it after my bad behavior, but I shall be only too glad if I may be your friend. I don't believe any other girl in the world has two so good as you and Isabel."
"Don't lie awake to think over our perfections," said Clover, as she withdrew with the candle. "Go to sleep, and remember that you are coming down to the Hut with me for a visit, whenever I go."
Dr. Hope, however, negatived this suggestion decidedly. He was an autocrat with his sick people, and no one dared dispute his decisions.
"What your young woman needs is to get away from the Valley for a while into lower air; and what you need is to have her go, and forget that you have been nursing her," he told Clover. "There is a look of tension about you both which is not the correct thing. She'll improve much faster at St. Helen's than here, and besides, I want her under my eye for a while. Mary shall send up an invitation to-morrow, and mind that you make her accept it."
So the next day came the most cordial of notes from Mrs. Hope, asking Imogen to spend a fortnight with her.
"Dr. Hope wishes to consider you his patient a little longer," she wrote, "and says the lower level will do you good; and I want you as much as he does for other reasons. St. Helen's is rather empty just now, in this betwixt-and-between season, and a visitor will be a real God-send to me. I am so afraid that you will be disobliging, and say 'No,' that I have made the doctor put it in the form of a prescription; and please tell Clover that we count upon her to see that you begin to take the remedy without delay."
And sure enough, on the doctor's prescription paper, with the regular appeal to Jupiter which heads all prescriptions, a formula was enclosed setting forth with due professional precision that Miss Imogen Young was to be put in a carryall, "well shaken" on the way down, and taken in fourteen daily doses in the town of St. Helen's. "Immediate."
"How very good of them!" said Imogen. "Everybody is so wonderfully good to me! I think America must be the kindest country in the world!"
She made no difficulty about accepting the invitation, and resigned herself to the will of her friends with a docility that was astonishing to everybody except Clover, who was in the secret of her new-born resolves. They packed her things at once, and Lionel drove her down to St. Helen's the very day after the reception of Mrs. Hope's note. Imogen parted from the sisters with a warm embrace, but she clung longest to Clover.