Loveliness Part 3

"Has the knife touched him--anywhere?" asked the professor, choking.

"No, thank G.o.d!" replied the demonstrator, turning around timidly; "and I a.s.sure you--our regrets--such a mistake"--

"That will do, doctor," said the professor. "Gentlemen, let me pa.s.s, if you please. I have no time to lose. There is one waiting for this little creature who"--

He did not finish his sentence, but went out from among them. As he pa.s.sed with the shorn and quivering dog in his arms, the students rose to their feet.

He stopped the cab a hundred feet away, went across a neighbor's lot, and got into the house by the back door, with the Yorkshire hidden under his coat. The doctor's buggy stood at the curbstone in front. The little girl was so weak that morning--what might not have happened?

The father felt, with a sudden sickness of heart, that time had hardly converged more closely with fate in the operating room than it was narrowing in his own home. The cook shrieked when she saw him come into the kitchen with the half-hidden burden in his arms; and Kathleen ran in, panting.

"Call the doctor," he commanded hoa.r.s.ely, "and ask him what we shall do."

All the stories that he had ever read about joy that killed blazed through his brain. He dared neither advance nor retreat, but stood in the middle of the kitchen, stupidly. Then he saw that the quick wit of Kathleen had got ahead of him; for she was on her knees arranging the crimson blankets in the empty basket. Between the three, they gently laid the emaciated and disfigured dog into his own bed. Nora cried into the milk she was warming for the little thing. And the doctor came in while Loveliness feebly drank.

"Wait a minute," he said, turning on his heel. He went back to the room where the child lay among the white pillows, with her hand upon the empty gray satin cushion. Absently she stroked one of the red puppies whose gold eyes gazed forever at the saucer of green milk. She lay with her lashes on her cheeks. It was the first day that she had not watched the street. Her mother, sitting back at the door, was fanning her.

"Adah!" said the doctor cheerily. "We've got something good to tell you.

Your father has found--there, there, my child!--yes, your father has found him. He looks a little queer and homesick--guess he's missed you some--and you mustn't mind how he looks, for--you see, Adah, we think he has lived with a--with a barber, and got shaved for nothing!" added the doctor stoutly.

The doctor had told his share of professional fibs in his day, like the most of his race; but I hope he was forgiven all the others for this one's merciful and beautiful sake.

"Come, professor!" he called, courageously enough. But his own heart beat as hard as the father's and the mother's, when the professor slowly mounted the stairs with the basket bed and the exhausted dog within it.

"LOVE-_li-ness_!" cried the child. It was the first loud word that she had spoken for months.

Then they lifted the dog and put him in her arms; and they turned away their faces, for the sight of that reunion was all the nerve could bear.

So it was as it has been, and ever will be, since the beginning to the end of time. Joy, the Angel of Delight and Danger, the most precious and the most perilous of messengers to the heart that loves, came to our two little friends, and might have destroyed, but saved instead.

The child was strong before the dog was; but both convalesced rapidly and sweetly enough. In a week Adah threw away her little crutch. Her lost voice returned, to stay. The pearl and the rose of her soft, invalid skin browned with the summer sun. Peals of laughter and ecstatic barks resounded through the happy house. Little feet and little paws trotted together across the dew-touched lawn. Wonderful neck ribbons,--a new color every day,--tied by eager, small fingers upon the silver-gray throat of the Yorkshire, flashed through the bending shrubbery in pursuit of a little glancing white figure in lawn dresses, with shade hat hanging down her back. The satin cushion with the embroidered puppies was carried out among the blushing weigelia bushes; and the twain lived and loved and played, from day-start to twilight, in the live, midsummer air.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THROUGH THE BENDING SHRUBBERY]

Sometimes she was overheard conversing with the terrier,--long, confidential talks, with which no third person intermeddled.

"Dearness! Daintiness! Loveliness! Did you have a little baxet with blankets while you were away? Preciousness! Did they cut you meat and warm you soup for you, and comfort you? Did they ever let you out to shi-shiver in 'e wet and cold? Tell me, Dearest-in-'e-World! Tell me, Love-li-ness! Tell me all about it. Tell me about 'e barber who shaved you hair so close,--was he _kind_ to you?"

When Commencement was over, and the town quiet and a little dull, something of a festive nature was thought good for Adah; and the doctor, who came only as a matter of occasional ceremony now, to see his patient running away from him, proposed a party; for he was not an imaginative man, and could only suggest the conventional.

"Something to take her mind off the dog for a little," he said. "We must avoid anything resembling a fixed idea."

"Love is always a fixed idea," replied the professor of psychology, smiling. "But you may try, doctor."

"I will arx Loveliness," said the child quietly. She ran away with the Yorkshire, and they sat among the reddening weigelia bushes for some time, conversing in low tones. Then they trotted back, laughing and barking.

"Yes, Papa, we'll have a party. But it must be a _Love_liness party, Mamma. And we've decided who to arx, and all about it. If you would like to know, I'll whisper you, for it's a secret to Loveliness and me, until we think it over."

Merrily she whispered in her mother's bending ear a list of chosen guests. It ran on this wise:--

The family.

The carrier.

Kathleen and Nora.

The newsboy.

The cabman.

The doctor.

Some of the neighbors' little dogs and girls.

Not boys, because they say "Sister boy!" and "Sick.u.m!"

The president's white puppy.

The president.

n.o.body else.

Not the barber.

"Here's 'e invitation," she added with dignity, "and we'll have a picture of him printed on his puppy cushion at 'e top, Papa."

She put into her father's hand a slip of paper, on which she had laboriously and irregularly printed in pencil the following legend:--