“Don’t the chloroform smell good, Phyllie?” Lovelace Peyton whispered up to me as he floated off and his hands relaxed.

“That was the most remarkable performance I ever participated in,” said the doctor out in the hall after he had finished telling us how near the sight of both eyes had come to being destroyed from not being kept drained.  “And the two youngsters are the most remarkable I have yet encountered.  Miss Phyllis, let me congratulate you on a nerve and a talent for imaginative description the like of which I have never met before.  But please somebody explain that boy to me before I catch the train.”

I was glad Roxanne was the one to begin on the subject of Lovelace Peyton, for only she had enough rosy words to describe him.  She did better than I ever heard her before, and I could see how Father and the doctor both enjoyed it.

“We will take him right away to college where he can learn to read and write for himself, in just a few months, and then to operate in some big hospital before he comes down South to cure hookworm and pellagra and all the other things other doctors haven’t found out about.  What medical college would you advise, Doctor?” she ended by asking, and her face was so lovely and enthusiastic that it looked almost inspired.  There is no telling where Roxanne’s dreams will land the family now that they will have the money to start on them.

“Well, Miss Byrd,” answered the doctor in a tone of voice, that made me know that he appreciated Roxanne at her true worth, “right now, for about ten years, I would keep the small doctor in Byrdsville, mostly out grubbing for experiments and ‘squirms,’ as he calls them.  Then when the time comes we shall see—­we shall see.”

“Yes,” answered Father, dropping his head with the corner of his mouth screwed up.  “Yes, we shall see!”

And as he said it, somehow I felt that the Byrd family would never any more be unlooked after, and that it was good to have such a man as Father for a father and a neighbor.  And, Oh, I felt—­I can’t write it, I am so tired I will have to go to sleep with a “Thank God,” as big as can come from a heart the size mine is—­which feels bigger to-night than it ever did before.  Good-night, Louise of leather!

* * * * *

The quadratics were awful!  I got ninety-five by a lot of it being luck that I knew the questions, and Tony got eighty by the same process, he says; but Belle and Pink just squeezed through by the skin of their teeth.  Sam didn’t pass and neither did the tallest Willis.  The other one got seventy and the right to take another examination.  Cruelty to children like that kind of examination ought to be stopped by law.

And that is the reason I haven’t written in this leather confidante after that Saturday, into which at least four years of my life were crowded.  By the calendar I am still just sixteen, but I am twenty by actual count.