Just how she was to do this, however, she could not see.  She talked to Mr. Pendleton about her aunt; and he listened, sometimes politely, sometimes irritably, frequently with a quizzical smile on his usually stern lips.  She talked to her aunt about Mr. Pendleton—­or rather, she tried to talk to her about him.  As a general thing, however, Miss Polly would not listen—­long.  She always found something else to talk about.  She frequently did that, however, when Pollyanna was talking of others—­of Dr. Chilton, for instance.  Pollyanna laid this, though, to the fact that it had been Dr. Chilton who had seen her in the sun parlor with the rose in her hair and the lace shawl draped about her shoulders.  Aunt Polly, indeed, seemed particularly bitter against Dr. Chilton, as Pollyanna found out one day when a hard cold shut her up in the house.

“If you are not better by night I shall send for the doctor,” Aunt Polly said.

“Shall you?  Then I’m going to be worse,” gurgled Pollyanna.  “I’d love to have Dr. Chilton come to see me!”

She wondered, then, at the look that came to her aunt’s face.

“It will not be Dr. Chilton, Pollyanna,” Miss Polly said sternly.  “Dr. Chilton is not our family physician.  I shall send for Dr. Warren—­if you are worse.”

Pollyanna did not grow worse, however, and Dr. Warren was not summoned.

“And I’m so glad, too,” Pollyanna said to her aunt that evening.  “Of course I like Dr. Warren, and all that; but I like Dr. Chilton better, and I’m afraid he’d feel hurt if I didn’t have him.  You see, he wasn’t really to blame, after all, that he happened to see you when I’d dressed you up so pretty that day, Aunt Polly,” she finished wistfully.

“That will do, Pollyanna.  I really do not wish to discuss Dr. Chilton—­or his feelings,” reproved Miss Polly, decisively.

Pollyanna looked at her for a moment with mournfully interested eyes; then she sighed: 

“I just love to see you when your cheeks are pink like that, Aunt Polly; but I would so like to fix your hair.  If—­Why, Aunt Polly!” But her aunt was already out of sight down the hall.

It was toward the end of August that Pollyanna, making an early morning call on John Pendleton, found the flaming band of blue and gold and green edged with red and violet lying across his pillow.  She stopped short in awed delight.

“Why, Mr. Pendleton, it’s a baby rainbow—­a real rainbow come in to pay you a visit!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together softly.  “Oh—­oh—­oh, how pretty it is!  But how did it get in?” she cried.

The man laughed a little grimly:  John Pendleton was particularly out of sorts with the world this morning.

“Well, I suppose it ‘got in’ through the bevelled edge of that glass thermometer in the window,” he said wearily.  “The sun shouldn’t strike it at all but it does in the morning.”

“Oh, but it’s so pretty, Mr. Pendleton!  And does just the sun do that?  My! if it was mine I’d have it hang in the sun all day long!”