through and through. Dr. Archie could not help thinking how he would
cherish a little creature like this if she were his. Her hands, so
little and hot, so clever, too,—he glanced at the open exercise book on
the piano. When he had stitched up the flaxseed jacket, he wiped it
neatly about the edges, where the paste had worked out on the skin. He
put on her the clean nightgown he had warmed before the fire, and tucked
the blankets about her. As he pushed back the hair that had fuzzed down
over her eyebrows, he felt her head thoughtfully with the tips of his
fingers. No, he couldn’t say that it was different from any other
child’s head, though he believed that there was something very different
about her. He looked intently at her wide, flushed face, freckled nose,
fierce little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin—the one soft touch
in her hard little Scandinavian face, as if some fairy godmother had
caressed her there and left a cryptic promise. Her brows were usually
drawn together defiantly, but never when she was with Dr. Archie. Her
affection for him was prettier than most of the things that went to make
up the doctor’s life in Moonstone.
The windows grew gray. He heard a tramping on the attic floor, on the
back stairs, then cries: “Give me my shirt!” “Where’s my other
stocking?”
“I’ll have to stay till they get off to school,” he reflected, “or
they’ll be in here tormenting her, the whole lot of them.”
II
For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that his patient might
slip through his hands, do what he might. But she did not. On the
contrary, after that she recovered very rapidly. As her father remarked,
she must have inherited the “constitution” which he was never tired of
admiring in her mother.
One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the doctor found
Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed in the parlor. The sunlight
was pouring in over her shoulders, the baby was asleep on a pillow in a
big rocking-chair beside her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand
and rocked him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy forehead
and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The door into her mother’s
room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up in bed darning
stockings. She was a short, stalwart woman, with a short neck and a
determined-looking head. Her skin was very fair, her face calm and
unwrinkled, and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay in
bed, still looked like a girl’s. She was a woman whom Dr. Archie
respected; active, practical, unruffled; goodhumored, but determined.
Exactly the sort of woman to take care of a flighty preacher. She had
brought her husband some property, too,—one fourth of her father’s
broad acres in Nebraska,—but this she kept in her own name. She had
profound respect for her husband’s erudition and eloquence. She sat
under his preaching with deep humility, and was as much taken in by his
stiff shirt and white neckties as if she had not ironed them herself by
lamplight the night before they appeared correct and spotless in the
pulpit. But for all this, she had no confidence in his administration of
worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning prayers and grace at
table; she expected him to name the babies and to supply whatever
