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“It is won,” said the doctor in great delight to the women, who, deeply moved, were looking on at the mother and boy.

Then the doctor opened the door of the next room and beckoned Elsbeth to go in there with Toni. He thought it would be good for both to be alone for a while. In there after a while Toni began to talk quite naturally with his mother and asked her:

“Are we going home, Mother, to the stone hut? Shan’t I have to go up on the mountain any more?”

And she quieted him and said she would now take him right home, and they would stay there together. Soon all Toni’s thoughts came back again quite clearly, and after a while he said:

“But I must earn something, Mother.”

“Don’t trouble about that now,” said Elsbeth quietly; “the dear Lord will show a way when it is time.”

Then they began to talk about the goat, how pretty and fat she had grown, and Toni gradually became quite lively.

After an hour the doctor brought them both into the living-room back to the ladies. Toni was entirely changed, his eyes had now an earnest but quite different expression. The lady from Geneva was indescribably delighted. She sat down beside him at once, and he had to tell her where he had been to school and what he had liked to study.

But the doctor beckoned to Elsbeth to come to him.

“Listen, my good woman,” he began, “the words which you repeated made a deep, penetrating impression on the boy’s heart. Did he know the hymn already?”

“Oh, my Lord,” exclaimed Elsbeth, “many hundred times I have repeated it beside his little bed, when he was very small, often with many tears, and he would weep too, when he didn’t know why.”

“He wept because you wept, he suffered because you suffered,” said the doctor. “Now I understand how he was aroused by these words. With such impressions in early childhood it is no wonder he became a quiet and reserved boy. This explains to me much in the past.”

Then the lady from Geneva came up for she wanted to talk with the mother.

“My dear, good woman, he certainly must not go up on the mountain again. He is not fit for it,” she said in great eagerness. “We must find something different for him. Has he no taste for some other occupation? But it must be light, for he is not strong and needs care.”

“Oh, yes, he has a great desire to learn something,” said his mother. “From a little boy he has wished for it, but I hardly dare mention it.”

“There, there, my good woman, tell me right away about it,” said the lady encouragingly, expecting something unheard-of.

“He wants so much to be a wood-carver, and has a good deal of talent for it, but the cost of board and instruction together is more than eighty francs.”

“Is that all?” exclaimed the lady in the greatest surprise, “is that all? Come, my boy,” and she ran to Toni again, “would you really like to become a wood-carver–better than anything else?”

The joy which shone in Toni’s eyes, when he answered that he would, showed the lady what she had to do. She had such a longing to help Toni, that she wanted to act immediately that very hour.

“Would you like to learn at once, go to a teacher right away?” she asked him.

Toni gladly replied that he would.

But now came a new thought. She turned to the doctor. “Perhaps he ought to recover his health first?”

The doctor replied that he had been already thinking about that. The mother had told him that she knew a very good master up in Frutigen. “Now I think,” he went on to say, “that carving is not a strenuous work, and one of the most important things for Toni is to have for some time good, nourishing food. In Frutigen there is a very good inn, if he only could–“