ogen, as Clover bent over for a
good-night kiss. She put her arms round Clover's neck and held her tight
for a moment.

"Yes, indeed," she sighed. "I don't deserve it after my bad behavior,
but I shall be only too glad if I may be your friend. I don't believe
any other girl in the world has two so good as you and Isabel."

"Don't lie awake to think over our perfections," said Clover, as she
withdrew with the candle. "Go to sleep, and remember that you are coming
down to the Hut with me for a visit, whenever I go."

Dr. Hope, however, negatived this suggestion decidedly. He was an
autocrat with his sick people, and no one dared dispute his decisions.

"What your young woman needs is to get away from the Valley for a while
into lower air; and what you need is to have her go, and forget that you
have been nursing her," he told Clover. "There is a look of tension
about you both which is not the correct thing. She'll improve much
faster at St. Helen's than here, and besides, I want her under my eye
for a while. Mary shall send up an invitation to-morrow, and mind that
you make her accept it."

So the next day came the most cordial of notes from Mrs. Hope, asking
Imogen to spend a fortnight with her.

"Dr. Hope wishes to consider you his patient a little longer," she
wrote, "and says the lower level will do you good; and I want you as
much as he does for other reasons. St. Helen's is rather empty just now,
in this betwixt-and-between season, and a visitor will be a real
God-send to me. I am so afraid that you will be disobliging, and say
'No,' that I have made the doctor put it in the form of a prescription;
and please tell Clover that we count upon her to see that you begin to
take the remedy without delay."

And sure enough, on the doctor's prescription paper, with the regular
appeal to Jupiter which heads all prescriptions, a formula was enclosed
setting forth with due professional precision that Miss Imogen Young was
to be put in a carryall, "well shaken" on the way down, and taken in
fourteen daily doses in the town of St. Helen's. "Immediate."

"How very good of them!" said Imogen. "Everybody is so wonderfully good
to me! I think America must be the kindest country in the world!"

She made no difficulty about accepting the invitation, and resigned
herself to the will of her friends with a docility that was astonishing
to everybody except Clover, who was in the secret of her new-born
resolves. They packed her t