There was another pause. Emboldened by consciousness of a change in the emotional atmosphere, I was moved to lay my hand upon my Aunt’s shoulder. The action did not seem to displease her, and we remained thus for some minutes, watching together this strange addition to our family party. Finally she told me to get on my cap, comforter, and mittens, and run over to Dr. Peabody’s and fetch him back with me. The purport of my mission oppressed me. “Is he going to die then?” I asked. Aunt Susan laughed outright. “You little goose,” she said; “do you think the doctors kill people _every_ time?” And, laughing again, with a trembling softness in her voice and tears upon her black eyelashes, she lifted her face to mine--and kissed me! ***** No fatality dogged good old Doctor Peabody’s big footsteps through the snow that night. I fell asleep while he was still at my Aunt’s house, but not before the stranger had recovered consciousness, and was sitting up in the large rocking-chair, and it was clearly understood that he was soon to be well again. The kindly, garrulous doctor did more than reassure our little household. He must have spent most of the night going about reassuring the other households of Juno Mills. At all events, when I first went out next morning--while our neighbors were still eating their buckwheat cakes and pork fat by lamplight--everybody seemed to know that my father, the distinguished Colonel Blodgett, had returned from the war on sick-leave, and was lying ill at the house of his sister-in-law. I felt at once the altered attitude of the village toward me. Important citizens who had never spoken to me before--dignified and portly men in blue cutaway coats with brass buttons, and high stiff hats of shaggy white silk--stopped now to lay their hands on the top of my head and ask me how my father, the Colonel, was getting along. The grocer’s hired man gave me a Jackson ball and two molasses cookies the very first time I saw him. Even the Perkins girls, during the course of the afternoon, strolled over to our front gate, and, instead of hurling enigmatic objurgations at me, invited me to come out and play. The butcher of his own accord came and finished cutting up the pig. These changes came back to me as one part of the great metamorphosis which the night’s events had wrought. Another part was the definite disappearance of the stern-faced, tirelessly toiling old maid I had known all my life as Aunt Susan. In her place there was now a much younger woman, with pleasant lines about her pretty mouth, and eyes that twinkled when they looked at me, and who paid no attention to the loom whatever, but bustled cheerily about the house instead, thinking only of good things for us to eat.