An undercurrent of excitement colored her tone. I looked upon her with suspicion. But I know my Sarah. Like Fate, and the village fire-company, she is not to be hurried. Very casually, I reached for my glass of milk. Years of lying comparatively flat on a useless back tend to the development of patience as a necessity.

"What time is it?" I inquired conversationally.

"Past nine."

I set the glass aside, and bit reflectively into a crisp triangle of toast. Since I've become so clever at eating and drinking, there's a sense of adventure about these commonplace functions which no whole person could ever comprehend. Sarah, busying herself with details of window-shades and counterpanes, watching me meanwhile from the corner of her eye, waited until I had turned indifferently 2 to my pillows again, before making the following terse but thrilling remark.

2

"Your pink rose-bush's come into blossom, Miss Mavis."

Here was news indeed! My unconcern took unto itself wings and flew away.

"Not really!" I cried, "Oh, Sarah, how perfectly darling of her to waken so early!"

Sarah, accustomed to my extravagant fashion of endowing all growing things with distinct personalities, nodded gravely. And then, with all the majesty of Jove—if one may picture that deity as female, fifty, and New England incarnate—she launched her thunderbolt of Green Hill gossip.

"That young doctor—him that was to come from the city to help Doctor McAllister with his patien's—he's here!"

There was more truth than enunciation in Sarah's neglect of that final "t" in patients. Our village doctor is long on wisdom, but short of temper. I reached out for the morning paper, lying on my bedside table, and rustled it in dismissal.

"How interesting!" I murmured, successfully concealing any concern at all.

Sarah swooped down upon my tray and bore it to the door, in a manner which carried conviction. But we can deceive each other so little, Sarah and I.

"Come last night," she volunteered, "from New York. And every girl in Green Hill is furbishing up her Sunday clothes, so Sammy said."

Sammy, surnamed Simpson, the freckled-faced Mercury who 

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