And, after a time, Maddy did awaken, but in the eyes fixed, for a moment, so intently on him, there was no look of recognition, and the doctor was half glad that it was so. He did not wish her to associate him with her late disastrous failure; he would rather she should think of him as some one come to cure her, for cure her he would, he said to himself, as he gazed into her childish face and thought how sad it was for such as she to die. When he first entered the cottage he had been struck with the extreme plainness of the furniture, betokening the poverty of its inmates; but now he forgot everything except the sick girl, who grew more and more restless, and kept talking of him and the Latin verb which meant _to love_, and which was not in the grammar. “Guy was a fool and I was a brute,” the doctor mattered, as he folded up the bits of paper whose contents he hoped might do much toward saving Maddy’s life. Then, promising to come again, he rode rapidly away, to visit other patients, who that afternoon were in danger of being sadly neglected, so constantly was their physician’s mind dwelling upon the little, low chamber where Maddy Clyde was lying. As night closed in she awoke to partial consciousness, and heard that Dr. Holbrook had been there prescribing for her. Turning her face to the wall, she seemed to be thinking; then calling her grandmother to her she asked “Did he smooth my hair and say, ‘poor child?’” Her grandmother hardly thought he did, though she was not in the room all the time. “He had staid a long while and was greatly interested,” she said. Maddy had a vague remembrance of such an incident, and in her heart forgave the doctor for his rejection, and thought only how handsome he had looked, even while tormenting her with such unheard-of questions, and how kind he was to her now. The sight of her grandfather, who came in to see her, awoke a new train of ideas, and bidding him to sit beside her, she asked if their home must be sold. Maddy was not to be put off with an evasion, and so grandpa told her honestly at last that Slocum would probably foreclose and the place be sold. “But never you mind, Maddy,” he said, cheerily, when he saw how excited she seemed; “we shall manage somehow. I can rent two or three rooms cheap of Mr. Green—he told me so—and with old Sorrel I can work on the road, and fetch things from the depot, and in the winter I can shovel snow, and clean roofs. We shall not starve—not a bit of it—so don’t you worry, it will make you wus, and I’d rather lose the old homestead a thousand times over than lose you.”