I was glad to have Ruth with me during the Christmas vacation. Otherwise I should have been all alone. Early in December Will had gone to a medical conference of some kind in Chicago, and just as he was about to start for home, some big physician out there called him in, in consultation, on the case of a little boy, who had some awful thing the matter with his spine. He was the son of a millionaire, and experts and specialists from all over the country had given up hope of recovery. The father was just about crazy and when Will suggested some radical treatment of his own which he had tried out successfully on one of our little guinea-pigs, he wrote that that father simply clung to him bodily, got hold of him with his hands and told him he could have every cent of money that he possessed in the world if he'd only give him back his son. So Will stayed. He would have stayed if the man had been a pauper, if he'd loved his little boy like that. You see it is just the way Will would feel about _his_ son. He understood. I wanted him to stay too. I was only sorry that, after all the long nights he had to sit up by the little chap's bed (for first there was an operation before Will began his treatment; and Will wouldn't leave much to the nurses), after the weary nights, the doubtful dawns, the long uncertain journey to the day of the crisis, I was only sorry that Will couldn't bring the little boy he saved home with him (if he saved him) for ours to keep and love. He fought for the life of that child. He wanted it to live awfully; and I, hundreds of miles away, would wake often in the night during the long struggle--at three, at four, at seven when it grows light--and wonder, and hope, and, I suppose you'd call it, pray. It was just before Christmas that my dread and fear about that little boy's life in Chicago became intermingled with a thrilling hope that was very much nearer home. My startling realisation came so unexpectedly to me after all the waiting, so undreamed, so miraculously a gift of heaven, that I couldn't believe at first that there was any real substantial fact about it. I couldn't, or I wouldn't, I don't know which. I dreaded disappointment. But oh, the mere possibility of such a joy being mine at last, made me so happy that I couldn't help but show a jubilant spirit in my letters. I wrote to Will that somehow, suddenly, I felt that that little boy out there was going to get well; I'd been as doubtful as he last week, but now, unaccountably, I was sure that the dear little fellow was going to live to grow up. I didn't tell Will _why_ I felt so (it was such a silly woman's reason) but I kept on writing it over and over again, every day, as I woke each morning with the reassurance that the thing I wanted more than anything in the world was coming true.