“’Specially when you’ve lived in the country and have all the big outdoors to remember.  Now while I’m so hot I love to count up all the cool things I can remember.  I like to pretend that I’m down in the orchard, way early in the morning, with a fresh breeze blowing through the apple-blossoms and the dewdrops shining on every blade of grass.  Oh, it smells so fresh and sweet and delicious!  Now I’m in the corn-fields and the tall green corn is rustling in the wind, and the morning-glories climb up every stalk and shake the dew out of their purple bells.  Now I can hear the bucket splash down in the well, and come up cold and dripping.  And now I’m dabbling my fingers in the spring down in the old stone spring house, and standing on the cold, wet rocks in my bare feet.  And there’s the winter mornings, Eliot, when the trees are covered with sleet till every twig twinkles like a diamond.  And the frost on the window-panes—­oh, if I could only lay my face against the cold glass now, how good it would feel!”

Eugenia could bear no more.  She turned away from the door, and, meeting Mrs. Sherman on the threshold of her room, threw herself into her arms, sobbing:  “Oh, Cousin Elizabeth, I can’t stand it.  If Betty goes blind it will be all my fault!  She never would have had the measles if it hadn’t been for me.  But I would go, and I made the others go, too.  And when Betty refused I was so mean and hateful to her!  Oh, Cousin Elizabeth, what can I do?”

Mrs. Sherman drew Eugenia into her room and comforted her the best she could, but her own heart was heavy.  She knew that Doctor Fuller had little hope of saving Betty’s sight.

That knowledge threw a shadow over the entire household.  The great oculist came, and gravely shook his head over the case.  “There is one chance that she may see again,” he said, “one in a hundred.  That is all.  Now if she could have a trained nurse who could watch her eyes constantly and follow directions to the letter—­”

“She shall have anything!” interrupted Mrs. Sherman.  “Everything that would help in the smallest degree.”

“And it would be best not to let the child know,” he continued.  “It would probably excite her, and, above all things, that must be guarded against.”

But Betty, lying with bandaged eyes, caught a whisper, felt the suppressed sympathy in the atmosphere, as one feels the tingle of electricity in the air before a storm, and began to guess the truth.  When the trained nurse came and gave such careful attention to the treatment of her eyes, she was sure of it.  But she said nothing of her suspicions, and they thought she had none.

One day Lloyd came into the room with a newspaper in her hand.  Eugenia and Joyce followed softly.  Lloyd tried to speak calmly, but there was a suppressed excitement in her voice as she exclaimed, “Betty, I’ve got the loveliest thing to show you.  Mothah said I might be the one to tell, ’cause I’m so glad and proud, I don’t know what to do.  You know that little poem that you gave to mothah, called ‘Night?’ Well, she sent it away to an editah, and he has published it in this papah with yo’ name at the bottom,—­Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis!  Now aren’t you stuck up?  We are all so proud of you we don’t know what to do.”