“You are a persevering child, Medoline—­but still only a child in heart.”

“I am over eighteen, Mrs. Flaxman.  I wonder why you and Mr. Winthrop persist in making me out a child.  When will I be a woman?”

“Not till your heart gets wakened.”

“I wonder when that will be.  Does it mean love and marriage, Mrs. Flaxman?”

“It means the former; the latter may not follow with you.”

“Why not?  But there, I do not want to leave you and Mr. Winthrop and Oaklands.  No man could tempt me from you.  But what did you mean by saying that I might love and yet not marry?”

“Because you are too true to your woman’s instincts to marry any one unless it was the man you loved.”

I fell into a brown study over her words, and the conversation was not again resumed.

CHAPTER XVI.

Hope realized.

Mrs. Larkum’s recovery was slow, and it required all the nourishing food we could provide to start the springs of life working healthfully.  Her mind had dwelt so long upon her bereavement, and dark outlook into the future that a naturally robust, and well-fed person might have succumbed, but when to a delicate organization had been added the most meagre fare possible to support human existence, it was no wonder nature rebelled.  It was a new experience to me, and a very agreeable one, to watch the pinched faces of the children grow round and rosy, and to hear their merry laughter.

The mother waited with feverish anxiety for tidings from her father, but for several weeks no word came; at last she began to fear he might have died under the strain of the operation.  Mrs. Blake began to get anxious too, while there flitted before her fancy gruesome thoughts as to what might have been done to the poor body left to the care of those heartless doctors.

“I can’t see why they take such delight in mangling dead people to see how they are put together.  With all their trying they’ll never be able to make a body themselves.”

“It is in that way they have learned how to cure diseases and relieve pain,” I assured her.  “We ought to be grateful to them for taking so much trouble to relieve us of our miseries.”

“I dare say we’d ought, I never thought of it that way before; in fact I’ve been rather sot ag’in doctors.  Perhaps if they hadn’t cut into dead folks’ eyes, they couldn’t have done for the likes of Mr. Bowen.”

“Assuredly not; and sometimes the very greatest doctors bequeathe their own bodies to the dissecting room; especially if they die of some mysterious disease.”

“That is good of them.  I’ve always reckoned doctors a pretty tight lot, who worked for their money jest the same’s the Mill hands.”

“No doubt many of them do; but some of them are almost angelic in their sympathy for the suffering, and their longing to lessen it.”