"Why, where have you been, Martie?" exclaimed the twins. "We were so frightened about you, because you didn't come home."
"You needn't have been; I've been talking with a Friend." And more than that she never said. The children's curiosity was roused, but when they told Rose and asked her what mother meant, Rose's eyes filled with tears, and she kept silence; for she alone knew with Whom her mother had talked that June afternoon.
"Run ahead, Budd, and tell Malachi to harness up Bess. I want him to take a letter down to the village so that it may go on the night mail." Budd flew rather than ran; for there was a look in his mother's face that he had never seen before, and it awed him.
That night a letter went to Doctor Heath, a famous nerve specialist of New York City. It was a letter from Mary Blossom, his old-time friend and schoolmate in the academy at Barton's River. In it she asked him if he would give her his advice in this case, saying she could not accept the decision of the physician and surgeon unless it should be confirmed by him.
"I cannot pay you now," she wrote, "but it was borne in upon me this afternoon to write to you, although you may have forgotten me in these many years, and I have no claim of present friendship, even, upon your time and service; but I must heed the inner command to appeal to you, whatever you may think of me,— if I disobeyed that, I should be disobeying God's voice in my life,"—and signed herself, "Yours in childhood's remembrance."
