“Of course, Phyllis, it is an awful thing to give up a part of your inheritance like those papers are, but then Lovey’s eyes are still more valuable to the Byrd family,” Roxanne said, as we were discussing the sacrifice.  “He is going to be such a great doctor that he will make history himself and, of course, we will have copies of the originals; and when people are writing Douglass’s and Lovey’s biographies they can go and see the originals.  And after the eye-doctor is paid, we will have a lot left over for this new thing Douglass is inventing.  He just told me about it last night, and I can tell you now.”

“Don’t tell me, Roxanne, don’t!” I interrupted her quickly.  The blood dyed my face so red that I felt as if I could wipe it off with my handkerchief, if I tried.

And Roxanne, instead of blushing, got pale and put her arm around my neck.  Real love always has the right thing to say at the right time.

“Phyllis,” she whispered in a tickling fashion right against my ear, “when Douglass told me about it last night he came back in my room to say, ‘Don’t tell a single soul but Phyllis.’”

If some accident should happen to make me famous, I wish the person that writes my biography could put down how I felt when Roxanne whispered that to me.  I choked a little bit and Roxanne hugged the choke and was just beginning to tell me about the experiment when Lovelace Peyton called us to come to him.

He is dreadfully spoiled since he has had to keep so still all the time, but we try to do just as he says.  He lies there in bed and thinks up all the impossible things that might be done and then asks us to do them.  He longed so for “squirms” that Tony got a wooden box and made little divisions and brings him in a lot of new ones almost every day.  They fill Roxanne’s days and nights with terror.  And it is upsetting to see the fishing-worms in the dirt, while the hop-toad stays out on the bed a good deal of the time; but we have to stand it and smile at it in our voices while talking to him, even if we have terror in our faces.  Yesterday Uncle Pompey spent most of his time catching the chickens and bringing them in for him to feel, and Lovelace Peyton has a box of straw on a chair by the bed, with a hen tied in it, setting on a dozen eggs.

But a thing that stops my breath with pain is, that I am fraid that Lovelace Peyton is beginning to think about being blind, and my throat aches while I write what happened when Roxanne left him with me after he had called us.

“Do you want me to read the medicine book, now, Lovelace Peyton?  Mumps comes next,” I said, as I sat down by the head of the bed, nearer than I liked to the setting hen.

“No, Phyllie,” he answered in a queer, unlifelike way.  “Please find blind eyes and read all about them to me.”

“Oh, they are not interesting,” I said, and the lump rose so I could hardly breathe.  “Let me read measles, if you don’t think you will like mumps.  Do you remember that experiment about cutting away a piece of the heart itself that the man tried?  Let me read that again.”  I was pleading with him so that my voice began to tremble.