y father has
taken me to so many doctors that I'm sure he could not remember half
their names. But they all said the same thing--that I never would
walk like other children. Then a very great physician--Dr.
Greinschmidt--came from away across the sea, from Germany. He said he
could cure me and he did. I had to be operated on and--oh--I suffered
dreadfully. But you see that I'm all well now. I'm even losing my
limp. Now, I believe that Doctor Greinschmidt can cure you. The next
time my father comes home I'm going to ask him."

Dicky had stopped crying. He was drinking down everything that she
said. "Is he still here--that doctor?" he asked.

"No," Maida admitted sorrowfully. "But there must be doctors as good
as he somewhere. But don't you worry about it at all, Dicky. You
wait until my father sees you--he always gets everything made right."

"When's your father coming home?"

"I don't quite know--but I look for him any time now."

Dicky started to set the table. "I guess I wouldn't have cried," he
said after a while, "if I could have cried last night when I first
heard it. But of course I couldn't let mother or Doc O'Brien know
that I'd heard them--it would make them feel bad. I don't want my
mother ever to know that I know it."

After that, Maida redoubled her efforts to be nice to Dicky. She
cudgeled her brains too for new decorative schemes for his
paper-work. She asked Billy Potter to bring a whole bag of her books
from the Beacon Street house and she lent them to Dicky, a half dozen
at a time.

Indeed, they were a very busy quartette--the W.M.N.T.'s. Rosie went
to school every day. She climbed out of her window no more at night.
She seemed to prefer helping Maida in the shop to anything else.
Arthur Duncan was equally industrious. With no Rosie to play hookey
with, he, too, was driven to attending school regularly. His leisure
hours were devoted to his whittling and wood-carving. He was always
doing kind things for Maida and Granny, bringing up the coal,
emptying the ashes, running errands.

And so November passed into December.

CHAPTER XII: THE FIRST SNOW

"Look out the window, my lamb," Granny called one morning early in
December. Maida opened her eyes, jumped obediently out of bed and
pattered across the room. There, she gave a scream of delight,
jumping up and down and clapping her hands.

"Snow! Oh goody, goody, goody! Snow at last!"

It looked as if the whole wo