My knees shook under me, and my eyes couldn’t take in the letters well, but I asked Roxanne, who was standing waiting to hear what the telegram could be about, just as a friend should feel over a telegram, to run out to the shed and get our Idol quick, and I would tell them all about it together.  He came in looking perfectly beautiful with his coat off and a big apron on him.  His eyes were just as excited as mine felt, now that the mist had cleared, and it seemed to me even in that moment that no other thousand dollars in the world could have brought so much suspense and excitement as this one had.

But I knew that I might have a battle to fight in which I must win, and I steadied my nerves and made myself feel like Father looks when he reads important letters and begins to dictate answers in telegrams.

“Mr. Douglass Byrd,” I said, perfectly coolly over my own inward volcano, “you remember you promised me that if I could use my own brains on a plan to get the doctor here for Lovelace Peyton’s eyes, you would let me do it?”

“Yes, I said just about that,” he answered me, and he looked in my eyes in a depending way that was so like Lovelace Peyton used to do that again the mist came over my eyes.  I am getting to have that proper mist now instead of the choke, and I am glad, because it can be hid better than a choke.

“Well, I found the plan and worked it for us, and I will have the thousand dollars by night-time, and we can get the doctor from Cincinnati by to-morrow, and have it all over before the algebra examination on Monday,” I answered.

Then, in very many less words than I have used to tell about it to you, Louise, I told him what I had done, with Roxanne standing with her arm across my shoulders, that trembled with excitement.  To cap off the climax of the story in proper fashion, as we are taught in the rhetoric to do, I handed him the telegram—­and I felt like the Colonel looks when I did it.  He stood for what seemed hours, with the telegram in his hand, and something makes me suspect that he was having the same hard time as I was having with a choke, only this was the first time and it came very near resulting in weeping, which I had never done up to that time.

“It is a wonderful thing for you to have done, dear,” he said at last, with a look that got down to the core of my inexperienced heart and made it thump uncomfortably.  “And if there were no other way to get the doctor for the kiddy’s eyes I would accept this loan gladly, but I have heard in the morning mail, that I can sell the Washington letters and I am going immediately to arrange about it that way.  You know, though, how great it was of you to do this, and how it makes us all love you.  We don’t have to tell—­”