Her heart was heavy as she walked into the office where the doctor sat alone at his desk.

“Good-day, my dear!” he said cordially, as he looked up, for she was one of his prime favorites.  “Bless my soul, how you do grow, child!  Why you are almost a woman!”

“I am quite a woman,” said Polly, with a choking sensation in her throat; “and you have something to say to me, Dr. George, or you would n’t have asked me to leave mamma and come here this stifling day; you would have sent the medicine by your office-boy.”

Dr. George laid down his pen in mild, amazement.  “You are a woman, in every sense of the word, my dear!  Bless my soul, how you do hit it occasionally, you sprig of a girl!  Now, sit by that window, and we ’ll talk.  What I wanted to say to you is this, Polly.  Your mother must have an entire change.  Six months ago I tried to send her to a rest-cure, but she refused to go anywhere without you, saying that you were her best tonic.”

Two tears ran down Polly’s cheeks.

“Tell me that again, please,” she said softly, looking out of the window.

“She said—­if you will have the very words, and all of them—­that you were sun and stimulant, fresh air, medicine, and nourishment, and that she could not exist without those indispensables, even in a rest-cure.”

Polly’s head went down on the windowsill in a sudden passion of tears.

“Hoity-toity! that ’s a queer way of receiving a compliment, young woman!”

She tried to smile through her April shower.

“It makes me so happy, yet so unhappy, Dr. George.  Mamma has been working her strength away so many years, and I ’ve been too young to realize it, and too young to prevent it, and now that I am grown up I am afraid it is too late.”

“Not too late, at all,” said Dr. George cheerily; “only we must begin at once and attend to the matter thoroughly.  Your mother has been in this southern climate too long, for one thing; she needs a change of air and scene.  San Francisco will do, though it ’s not what I should choose.  She must be taken entirely away from her care, and from everything that will remind her of it; and she must live quietly, where she will not have to make a continual effort to smile and talk to people three times a day.  Being agreeable, polite, and good-tempered for fifteen years, without a single lapse, will send anybody into a decline.  You ’ll never go that way, my Polly!  Now, pardon me, but how much ready money have you laid away?”

“Three hundred and twelve dollars.”

“Whew!”

“It is a good deal,” said Polly, with modest pride; “and it would have been more yet if we had not just painted the house.”

“‘A good deal!’ my poor lambkin!  I hoped it was $1012, at least; but, however, you have the house, and that is as good as money.  The house must be rented, at once, furniture, boarders, and all, as it stands.  It ought to bring $85 or $95 a month, in these times, and you can manage on that, with the $312 as a reserve.”