A Prairie Infanta

Jane, when she heard the pony cross the bridge, ran to the door, as she had run so many times during the long, anxious day. She took the girl from Gribble without a word, and bore her into the house from which she had fled with so much loathing.

"Don't look so scared!" said Gribble, kindly. "It's only a broken bone or so." As this consoling assurance seemed not to lessen Jane's alarm, he went on cheerfully to say, "There isn't one in my body hasn't been splintered by these broncos! Tinker 'em up and they're better than new. Here's doc coming lickety-switch! He'll tell you the same."

But the doctor was less encouraging. "It isn't merely a question of bones," he said, observing his patient finally in her splints and bandages. "It's the nervous strain she's lately undergone. She's been overtaxed with so much excitement and sorrow. If she pulls through, it'll be the nursing."

Jane drew a deep breath. "She won't die if nursing can save her!" said she. Her face shone with grave sacrificial tenderness, in the light of which the shortcomings of her uncouth dress and looks were for once without significance.

"She's a good woman," said the doctor, as he rode away, "though she wears her womanhood so ungraciously – as a rough husk rather than a flower. All the same, she's laying up misery for herself in her devotion to this fractious child; I wish I'd had no hand in it!"

Jane early came to feel what burs were in the wind for her. Lola soon returned to the world, staring wonderingly about; but even in the first moment she winced and turned her face away from Jane's eager gaze. As the girl shrank back into the pillows, Jane's lips quivered.

"Goose that I am!" she thought. "Of course my looks are strange to her! It'd be funny if she took to me right off. I aint good-looking. And her ma was real handsome!" For once in her life Jane sighed a little over her own plainness. "Children love their mothers even when they're plumb homely!" she encouraged herself. "Maybe Lola'll like me, in spite of my not being well-favored, when she finds how much I think of her."