“I bet if I ever get a good sharp knife, I could stick it right in the pain place in Uncle Pompey’s heel so it would bleed all the sore away,” he said with keen enjoyment, as I read to him about the lancing of carbuncles.

“Oh, Lovey, I almost get the diseases while Phyllis reads about them,” said Roxanne with a shudder.  “Do you like to hear about such awful things?”

“Yes, I do,” answered Lovelace Peyton decidedly.  “And I wisht you would get every one of the diseases in that book, Rosy, so I could cure you like Phyllis reads—­and Uncle Pompey and Doug, too.  Only not Phyllis, ’cause I need her to read the cure to me, while I do it.”

While we were all laughing at Lovelace Peyton and talking about the operations he is going to perform on the inhabitants of Byrdsville as soon as he gets grown, and deciding what each one is going to have, the Idol came in and stayed with us until the soft gray twilight began to come in the windows.  He was so lovely and interesting that it was quite dark when I remembered that I must go home.  Then he walked over through the garden with me, and out there under the stars he told me what the doctor had told him in the afternoon.  Old Dr. Hughes is afraid to experiment with Lovelace Peyton’s eyes, and says that a specialist must come from Cincinnati to examine them when they take off the bandages next week.  Mr. Douglass has written to the doctor to see what it will cost, and he doesn’t want Roxanne to know about it until he hears whether the doctor will come and give him time to pay for it.

“Oh, I don’t believe the bug-hunter is going to have any trouble with seeing all right again and we’ll get the big doctor down here to see him some way or other.  Don’t you worry, Miss Phyllis; I just told you because you are the best friend of all concerned, and I couldn’t do anything without consulting you.  See?” he asked, in the same protecting tone of voice that Tony had used in the afternoon when Belle and Mamie Sue did me that way.

After I was undressed I felt that I just must go into my mother’s room for a minute; and I begged so hard that the night nurse who is a very kind lady, let me creep in for just a few seconds.  I have got a theory about Mother and myself.  I believe she knows when I am in the room, even if she can’t show it by moving or even opening her eyes, and it is a comfort to her and me both to have me come and kneel at the foot of her bed well out of sight.  I did get comforted to-night, too, and the thought that did it was this.  If Father and I don’t do as well as other people in the world, and get rich and do things that we ought not to, we have not had her to direct and control and comfort us like she would have done if she could; and no wonder we have strayed.  A motherless girl and a wifeless man ought not to be judged in the same way other people are.  I feel better now, and I’m leaving it all to God, who understands such situations as mine and Father’s.  Good-night, leather friend.