And when Percy was better, and able to talk, what a great thing it was to tell her all about the strange thing that had happened!
"He's just as much your boy as mine," declared Reba, magnanimously, "and I wouldn't do or say anything about him till you were well enough to tell what you think best, Percy. Everything about the old church is half yours, and more than half, and we'll remember better than ever after this, won't we?"
What Percy advised was that Reba's father should be told the whole story, and taken properly in his capacity of Doctor to see the lame foot.
"Well, well, certainly the most unexpected call I ever had in my life," said the Doctor, when Reba proudly escorted him to the old church. "Who'd ever have thought of finding a patient here?"
But he took the kindest interest in the friendless orphan, carried him in his carriage to his own house, and ended by liking him so well for his plain, blunt, manly ways that, when the foot was healed, he engaged him as office-boy.
As long as the old church stood, Bob Sheffield used to look at it with gratitude; and years after a bolt of lightning had destroyed it during one summer night, Percy in her new home at the West, Reba in her stately house in an Eastern city, loved to tell the children stories of the good times two little country girls used to have under the roof of an old deserted church out in the woods.
