Page 230 - pollyanna

about—and Pollyanna needed new things to think about.
Once she had seen John Pendleton, and twice she had
seen Jimmy Bean. John Pendleton had told her what a fine
boy Jimmy was getting to be, and how well he was doing.
Jimmy had told her what a first-rate home he had, and what
bang-up ‘folks’ Mr. Pendleton made; and both had said that
it was all owing to her.
‘Which makes me all the gladder, you know, that I HAVE
had my legs,’ Pollyanna confided to her aunt afterwards.
The winter passed, and spring came. The anxious watch-
ers over Pollyanna’s condition could see little change
wrought by the prescribed treatment. There seemed every
reason to believe, indeed, that Dr. Mead’s worst fears would
be realized—that Pollyanna would never walk again.
Beldingsville, of course, kept itself informed concern-
ing Pollyanna; and of Beldingsville, one man in particular
fumed and fretted himself into a fever of anxiety over the
daily bulletins which he managed in some way to procure
from the bed of suffering. As the days passed, however, and
the news came to be no better, but rather worse, something
besides anxiety began to show in the man’s face: despair, and
a very dogged determination, each fighting for the mastery.
In the end, the dogged determination won; and it was then
that Mr. John Pendleton, somewhat to his surprise, received
one Saturday morning a call from Dr. Thomas Chilton.
‘Pendleton,’ began the doctor, abruptly, ‘I’ve come to you
because you, better than any one else in town, know some-
thing of my relations with Miss Polly Harrington.’
John Pendleton was conscious that he must have started