“Are we there?” Lee asked, bending over the slight figure.  “Open your eyes, dear.”

Jeff jumped out and ran to the house.  He burst in upon Charlotte and Andy.  “Your friends are here!” he shouted.  “I had to meet ’em myself.”

Doctor Churchill and Charlotte were at the door before the words were out of Jeff’s mouth, and in a moment more Andy was lifting Evelyn Lee’s light figure in his arms, thanking heaven inwardly as he did so for his young wife’s wholesome weight.  At the same moment words of of eager, cheery welcome for his old friend were on his lips: 

“Thorne Lee, I’m gladder to see you than anybody in the world!  Miss Evelyn, here’s Mrs. Churchill.  She’s not an old married woman at all—­she’s the dearest girl in the world.  She’s going to seem to you like one of your schoolfellows.  Charlotte, here she is; take good care of her.”

Thorne Lee stood looking on, a relieved smile on his lips as his old friend’s wife took his sick little sister into her charge.  It was not two minutes before he saw Evelyn, lying pale and mute on the couch, yet smiling up at Charlotte’s bright young face.

Charlotte administered a cup of hot bouillon talking so engagingly meanwhile that Evelyn was beguiled into taking without protest the whole of the much-needed nourishment.  Then he saw the young invalid carried off to bed, relieved of the necessity of meeting any more members of the household.  He learned, as Charlotte slipped into the room after an hour’s absence, that Evelyn had already dropped off to sleep.  He leaned back in his chair with a long breath.

“What kind of a girl is this you’ve married, Andy?” he asked, with a smile and a look from one to the other.  The three were alone, Mrs. Peyton and her children having gone out to some sort of entertainment.

“Just what she seems to be,” replied Doctor Churchill, smiling back, “and a thousand times more.”

“I might have known you would care for no other,” Lee said.  “And you two ’live in your house at the side of the road, to be good friends to man,’—­if I may adapt those homely words.”

“We haven’t been at it very long, but we hope to realize an ambition of the sort.  It doesn’t take much philanthropy to welcome you.”

“You can’t think what a relief it is to me to get that little sister of mine under your wing, even for a few hours.”

“Tell us all about her.”

Lee had not meant to begin at once upon his troubles, but his friend drew him on, and before the evening ended the doctor and Charlotte had the whole long, hard story of Lee’s guardianship of several young brothers and sisters, his struggle to get established in his profession and make money for their support, his many anxieties in the process, and this culminating trouble in the breakdown of the younger sister, just as he thought he had her safely established in a school where she might have a happy home for several years.