THE SICK-A-BED LADY
And I guess this present case was a stump fast enough. Why, she was raging like a prairie fire when they brought her here. No other man would have dared to travel. And they put her down in a great silk bed like a fairy-story, and the Old Doctor sat and watched her night and day studying her like a fiend, and she got better after a while: not keen, you know, but funny like a child, cooing and crooning over her pretty room, and tickled to pieces with the ocean, and vain as a kitten over her pink ribbons—the Old Doctor would n't let them cut her hair—and everything went on like that, till in a horrid flash the Old Doctor dropped dead that morning at the breakfast table, the little girl went loony again, and every possible clew to her identity was wiped off the earth!"
"No baggage?" suggested the Best Friend.
"Why, of course, there was baggage!" the Young Doctor exclaimed, "a great trunk. Have n't the Housekeeper and I rummaged and rummaged it till I can feel the tickle of lace across my wrists even in my sleep? Why, man alive! she's a rich girl. There never were such clothes in our town before. She's no free hospital pauper whom the Old Doc tor obligingly took off their hands. That is, I don't see how she can be!
"Oh, well," he continued bitterly, "everybody in town calls her just the Sick-A-Bed Lady, and pretty
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