Of all his former skill but little remained now except his wonderful presence in the sick-room.

He could still inspire the greatest confidence and hope.  Still at his coming a sick man’s fears fell away from him, and in their stead came hope and good cheer.  This was the old man’s good gift that even his years of sinning could not wholly destroy.  God had marked him for a great physician.

CHAPTER III THE PINK LADY

When Mrs. Francis decided to play the Lady Bountiful to the Watson family, she not only ministered to their physical necessity but she conscientiously set about to do them good, if they would be done good to.  Mrs. Francis’s heart was kind, when you could get to it; but it was so deeply crusted over with theories and reflections and abstract truths that not very many people knew that she had one.

When little Danny’s arms were thrown around her neck, and he called her his dear sweet, pink lady, her pseudo-intellectuality broke down before a power which had lain dormant.  She had always talked a great deal of the joys of motherhood, and the rapturous delights of mother-love.  Not many of the mothers knew as much of the proper care of an infant during the period of dentition as she.  She had read papers at mothers’ meetings, and was as full of health talks as a school physiology.

But it was the touch of Danny’s soft cheek and clinging arms that brought to her the rapture that is so sweet it hurts, and she realised that she had missed the sweetest thing in life.  A tiny flame of real love began to glimmer in her heart and feebly shed its beams among the debris of cold theories and second-hand sensations that had filled it hitherto.

She worried Danny with her attentions, although he tried hard to put up with them.  She was the lady of his dreams, for Pearl’s imagination had clothed her with all the virtues and graces.

Hers was a strangely inconsistent character, spiritually minded, but selfish; loving humanity when it is spelled with a capital, but knowing nothing of the individual.  The flower of holiness in her heart was like the haughty orchid that blooms in the hothouse, untouched by wind or cold, beautiful to behold but comforting no one with its beauty.

Pearl Watson was like the rugged little anemone, the wind flower that lifts its head from the cheerless prairie.  No kind hand softens the heat or the cold, nor tempers the wind, and yet the very winds that blow upon it and the hot sun that beats upon it bring to it a grace, a hardiness, a fragrance of good cheer, that gladdens the hearts of all who pass that way.

Mrs. Francis found herself strongly attracted to Pearl.  Pearl, the housekeeper, the homemaker, a child with a woman’s responsibility, appealed to Mrs. Francis.  She thought about Pearl very often.

Noticing one day that Pearl was thin and pale, she decided at once that she needed a health talk.  Pearl sat like a graven image while Mrs. Francis conscientiously tried to stir up in her the seeds of right living.