“Will you bring her again tomorrow?” invited David timidly.  “And let her stay long enough to tell me a story?”

“I should n’t wonder,” the Doctor promised.  And they left the boy smiling as he had not smiled since he had been in the hospital.

After that, Polly went every day to see David, until, one morning, Dr. Dudley told her that he was not quite well enough to have a visitor.  She had come to look forward to her quiet talks with the blue-eyed lad as the happiest portion of the whole day, for Miss Hortensia Price still stayed in the convalescent ward, and the Doctor had been too busy to take her out in his automobile.  Elsie and Brida and Aimee and the rest were all good comrades, yet none of them possessed David’s powers of quick comprehension.  Often Polly had to explain things to them; David always kept up with her thought—­there was the difference.  And David, notwithstanding his present proneness to discouragement, was a most winsome boy.

So the first day that she was not allowed to maker her customary visit seemed a long day indeed, and eagerly she awaited the next morning.  But several days passed before she again saw David.  Then it was but for a very few minutes, and he was so wan and weak that she went away feeling sorrowful and anxious.  Yet Dr. Dudley told her that she had done his patient good.  That was a slight comfort.

The next day, and the next, the lad was again too ill for company, and a few sentences which Polly overheard filled her with foreboding.  She was putting fresh sheets on one of the cots—­a task which she had learned to do well—­when she caught David’s name.

“His heart is very weak,” one of the stairs nurses was saying to Miss Price.  “He can’t stand many more such sinking spells.  Dr. Dudley has given orders to be called at once, day or night, if he should have another.”

Here the voice dropped, and Polly could not catch the words; but she had heard enough.  The sheet went on crookedly.  Polly did not know it, her eyes were so blurred with tears.  She kept the sorry news to herself, and all day long the children wondered what made Polly so sober.

If she could have seen Dr. Dudley she would have asked him about David; but for several days she caught only passing glimpses of him, when he was too busy to be questioned.  The little girl grew more and more anxious, but kept hoping that because she heard nothing David must be better.

It was during the short absence of Miss Price, one afternoon, that Elsie Meyer complained of the disagreeable liniment on her hip.

“It’s just horrid!  I can’t stand it a minute longer!” she fretted.  “Say, Polly, I wish you’d spray some of that nice-smellin’ stuff around—­what do you call it?”

“The resodarizer, I guess you mean,” responded Polly, with more glibness than accuracy.

“Yes, that’s it,” Elsie returned.  “Hurry up and use it, before High Price gets back!”