"Mother thinks she is threatened with pleurisy, and she is trying the starvation cure," answered Emmy. "She hasn't eaten a bite since yesterday. I'm ashamed to be so late about my washing, but I've been cooking things all day, trying to tempt her--"

"Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh _dear_!" moaned the figure on the piazza.

Mrs. Conner put her arms akimbo. She looked steadfastly at the swaying and moaning shape. Mrs. Conner was a woman who had been known to fry fresh griddle-cakes for tramps. She drew in her breath and exhaled it explosively, as one that has been shocked out of speech.

"I've made her postum cereal coffee and cooked her granum, and I went out and begged dewberries from the Bigelows--she used to be fond of them--and I don't know how many times I've made toast. She says I just torment her."

"Won't she drink a little beef tea?"

"Oh-h! Oh-h! U-r-r-r! _Ug-h-h-h!_" shuddered the invalid.

"Didn't you know she thinks meat wicked? And milk's robbing the cow, and eggs robbing the hen, who wants to have a family as much as we do," said Emily, rather incorrectly.

"More'n some of us do, I guess," retorted Mrs. Conner, "and more'n folks _ought_ to if they ain't prepared to do their duty by them when they've got 'em." She launched a fiery glance at Mrs. Darter, who was now groaning vehemently. "Got it all turned on this afternoon, ain't she?"

"Dr. Abbie Cruller told her that it wasn't natural to suppress ourselves. If you feel like groaning you ought to groan--"

"And she eats sech queer stuff she's hungry most of the time," Mrs.

Conner interrupted, "so I expect she groans a lot. Say, Emmy, have you ever had anybody come in and give your ma a good hard--_blowing up_?"

The blood rushed to Emmy's face; her eyes sank. She answered, in a confused tone: "Aunt Lida Glenn was over yesterday. I don't know what she said to mother, but mother--mother told me the one thing she wanted on earth was to have me--send Albert away and have everything ended between us, for she never was so insulted in her life as she had been by Albert's mother."

"Albert's mother ain't Albert; though I don't blame her, Emmy, and Mrs.

Glenn is a awful nice woman. But it ain't fair to hold Albert for her opinions, right or wrong. As I said, she ain't Albert, nor Albert ain't her."

"So I told mother," said Emmy. "I did hate to be disrespectful to her, but I told her so; and she answered that Mrs. Glenn said Albert thought so too. Then when I tried to question her she was in so much pain and groaned so I hadn't the heart to bother her. She let me put hot cloths on her, and give her a Turkish bath over the alcohol-lamp; and I hoped she'd let me make her some water gruel, but she wouldn't touch a spoonful. Mrs. Conner, you don't suppose she--she will keep it up much longer?" Emmy's eyes dilated with an unspoken fear as she lifted them to the kind woman before her. "She said she felt herself growing weaker this morning. I--I told her I wouldn't go to the picnic with Bert, if she would only eat something. But she said that she couldn't eat anything. One time--one time she went three days. I didn't let the neighbors know; but I was 'most crazy, and poor little Jinny cried. She isn't one to cry, either."

"No," Mrs. Conner agreed, glancing at Jinny who was chattering volubly with the girl in the phaeton--"no, I'd say she'd be more likely to be sa.s.sy."

"I'm afraid she was that, too," suggested Emmy, with a dim smile, "but at last she got scared. It was some new books Bert brought, got mother out of that time; she was so anxious to read them."

"Yes, I know your ma's a great reader. Always was. She told me she fairly revelled in stories of high life and detective stories. She said she'd read every one of The d.u.c.h.ess's books--I guess 'twas a hundred.

And she said many and many a night she'd set up in bed reading half the night. 'It's so resting,' she says, 'to read 'bout murders and how they are tracked down.' It took up her mind from her sorrers, she says. And she told me she didn't know how she'd ever lived through losing your pa but for _Sherlock Holmes_. If I was you I'd jest try to stir her up with these books. I'll fetch 'em to her. I read the one of Ouida's and it's real good--and, come to think of it, brimful of eating. Who knows but it'll git her to wanting to eat herself. Why, when I think what kind of cook she was, it don't seem possible! But now don't you worry, Emmy; she'll come all right and she'll come all right 'bout Mrs. Glenn, good friends as they've always been. Why, she always has liked Lida Glenn better than all her other friends together! She'll _have_ to make up.

Don't you fret a bit." She said the words in a hearty voice, and she strode vigorously across the gra.s.s to the piazza and presented her package with a breezy cheer. "Here's two new books by Ouida, and one by Bertha M. Clay, and two by Maria Corelly, Mrs. Darter; and Emmy'll be ready to read them to you soon."

Mrs. Darter had a delicate pale face, much like Emmy's in features, but etched with tiny wrinkles. The corners of her mouth dropped, and there was a habitual frown of pain on her pretty forehead. She did not look ungentle, only obstinate.

"Thank you," she murmured. Then she sighed.

Mrs. Conner opened her mouth, and shut it again, compressing the lips with unnecessary firmness.

Mrs. Darter laid her head back on her chair. She closed her eyes. A plaintive, sibilant noise hissed through her parted lips.

"Well, I'm real sorry you're sick," said Mrs. Connor, her voice again full of good-nature. "I guess what you need is a little nourishing food--"

Mrs. Darter screamed, and Mrs. Conner stood aghast. She was more aghast to behold all the apparent symptoms of a swoon in the invalid, and would have run for water--an act, however, prevented by the timely opening of Mrs. Darter's eyes. "Don't say the word!" she begged, shuddering. "I have to starve off a pleurisy. It would _kill_ me! And the books are no good; I'm too sick to hear reading. Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!"

Mrs. Conner backed off the piazza--she said she guessed she must go--and left Mrs. Darter moaning and rocking.

"And to tell you the truth, Miss Keith"--thus she ended a breathless narration to her new boarder--"I went quick, for I knew I couldn't hold in one minnit longer! And how'd it help poor Emmy to have her mother quarrel with Lida Glenn and me the same day? There's Susy Baker making eyes at Albert Glenn, this minnit; and if she ain't carrying Mrs. Glenn some of her ma's blueberry cake! Right by the Darters, too; and Emmy seeing her!"

"What is the matter with Mrs. Darter?"

"Well, old Dr. Potter says she's 'neurotic,' if you know what _that_ is.

I call it jest notions. What the doctors in my time called a hypo, that's what she is! She's always been the greatest hand to dose. Mr.

Conner will have it she kep' old Captain Darter poor buying patent medicines. And she run after every new cure-all going. It was electricity one year, and 'nother year it was blue gla.s.s, and one time I remember she had a woman come of the sort that used to call themselves bone-doctors when I was a girl and this country wasn't much settled, but now they're osteologists, or some sech funny name, and give out they can rub everything on earth out of you. Mrs. Darter had _her_ for a long spell, till she got pneumonia, and nigh died, and sickened of the osteologist; and I give her mustard plasters, good strong ones, myself.

All this time Emmy was engaged to Albert Glenn; but the old captain was real feeble, and Emmy wouldn't leave him to git married. I will say Mrs.

Darter was real devoted to him, though Emmy done all the night work and spared her all she could, give up her school, and spent every cent of the money she'd laid by school-teaching and working art embroidery for her clothes, when she'd be married--spent every cent on her pa. Got him a wheel chair, and if ever a man set the world by his daughter the captain done it. He liked Albert, too. I guess if captain had lived, sick's he was, he'd have found a way so's Emmy and Albert could git married. But he died. Then you'd 'a' s'posed they could marry, for his life was _well_ insured, and they got enough for the widder to be comfortable and keep a girl. But the minnit he died poor Mrs. Darter got nervous prostration, and she was a nervous prostrate for a year, and they had to spend money traveling, and of course Emmy couldn't git married. Mrs. Darter went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and she went to a sanitarium, and last she come home saying she was cured. But on the cars she made the acquaintance of a woman--well, I don't want to jedge--jedge not, and you won't git jedged, you know--and I know 'tis hard for a woman to make a living, but I guess that woman was a crank, and a designing one at that. But she went to Mrs. Darter's to board, and she never paid no board, but she preached to Mrs. Darter 'bout how all the diseases that we have come from eating wrong things; and she said we'd got to live 'cording to nature more; and eating meat made folks fierce like the carnivorous beasts, and things seasoned with salt was bad for you, and jest plain farnishous foods without salt--like we was _chickens_!--was best for us. I don't see how Mrs. Darter, who used to cook real well and liked to have the sewing society to tea, could stand sech sick stuff, but she did; and what's wuss, even after the fool critter ran away and married a magnetic healer who, they do say, has another wife, even to this day Abiel Darter believes in her and goes by what she says. And she ain't et any fit food for so long that if she ever does git coaxed to take a wholesome bite of beef or pie her stummick is so weak of course she cayn't stand it. Strong folks can eat strong vituals, and weak folks cayn't. Mrs. Glenn coaxed her in to a boiled dinner one day, and poor Mrs. Darter nearly died of it. Now you cayn't git her to budge from her gra.s.s and potato diet, as Conner calls it. And as for poor Emmy, when she can git married Lord only knows!"

Miss Keith had not interrupted the story by as much as a hum of a.s.sent.

She looked up with a queer smile. "Has Mrs. Darter ever tried Christian Science?"

"No, she ain't," snorted Mrs. Conner; "we've been spared _that_. The Bigelow girls--they're two single ladies, real nice girls, too, who live in that big brown house with a cupola and a hip-roof there, 'bout two doors up--they tried to get her into that way of thinking; they're at everybody. And they used to go over and set with her and give her 'silent treatment,' they called it, and try to think the dyspepsia out of her; but one of 'em got a fish-bone in her throat and they had to come to me to pull it out with a pair of tweezers. That sorter dampened 'em for a while and Mrs. Darter says, 'Why didn't you _think_ it out?'

And then Ann--she's the oldest--says they wasn't far enough advanced yet, Mrs. Darter told 'em then they wasn't far enough advanced to doctor _her_. And I guess they ain't been there sense."

"All the same," insisted Miss Keith, smiling, "I think Mrs. Darter needs mental healing or Christian Science, I don't care which."

Emmy put her mother to bed. She gave her the soothing drops which the vanished but still reverenced healer had left--drops which she was almost certain owed their potency to some alias of opium. In the morning Mrs. Darter came out of her drugged sleep with a deadly nausea that swathed her muscles and laid her rigid in its limp, devil-fish clutch.

The roof of her mouth was like leather; her head seemed to be pounded with hammers; she was burning with fever, and malign twitchings and itchings tormented her to rub her nose incessantly, when the least motion was fearsome to her. She had much more cause than ordinary to moan, and moan she did at every breath. Jinny had rushed away to a small chum the moment the dishes for her own breakfast had been washed; but Emmy couldn't run. She drank a cup of coffee; she had no heart to eat.

Jinny, however had eaten the dainty little meal that Emmy had prepared--a forlorn hope to tempt the invalid.

"Oh, my nose! my _nose_!" wailed Mrs. Darter. "Emmy, you've got to leave off staring out of that window at the Glenns', and come and scratch my nose! Ah-uh! Ah-u-h!"

Emmy silently sat down by the bedside. If Albert pa.s.sed the yard on his wheel, as he did every morning at half-past seven, he would not find her. Emmy had used no one knows how many devices to always be in the yard when Albert pa.s.sed, or, at least, in sight by a window. Bert used to say that glimpse of Emmy "was a bracer for the whole day." Thursday night was his night to visit her, but last night he hadn't come.

"Emmy, you ain't any account at all as a scratcher!" fretted her mother.

"You scratch where it ain't itching, and you don't scratch where it itches, and you're so mincing! Rub it _hard_! Oh-h! _why_ must I suffer so? It's hard enough to have a ungrateful child without having your nose itch!"

Emmy adventured a sentence long lurking in her mind, but which she never had the courage to push out into the air: "Mother, I think, I'm sure it is the soothing drops which make your nose itch so. There's opium--"

"There isn't a grain of opium in them," sobbed Mrs. Darter. "You know I always hated opium or morphine or anything of the sort; and doctor told me she wouldn't give the wicked drug. That's what Lida Glenn much as told me; much as told me, too, that I was putting on and wasn't real sick; and I told her--oh-h-h!--I told her--if she considered--_me_--that sort of woman she must feel awful bad to--oh-h-h!--to have her only child marry my daughter; and--I-thought--Oh-h! wuh-h-h! how awful sick I am!"

"You told Mrs. Glenn?" prompted Emmy, a flame in either cheek.

"I told her that--sss! sss!--I thought the sooner that engagement was broke the better it would be for--u-r-r-r!--all concerned--e-hee! ee-e!

ee-e-e-e! Oh my head! my head! Oh, I got to scratch my nose again. You ain't rubbing the right place!"

"And what did Mrs. Glenn say?" asked Emmy. A ripple ran over her face, and she swallowed before she spoke.

"She said you wouldn't give Albert up, real spiteful. Ah-rr-r! Oh, I _am_ so sick! I said you would ruther than have your mother so insulted--and if you don't I guess I'll give up trying to live. She was so topping. Much as telling me it would be better for my own child if I died. Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear! And Albert looked as cross last night--"

"Did Albert come last night?"

"Yes, he did. You needn't jump out of the chair! I told him you wasn't home, and you had gone out to the Collins spring. He said when would you be home, and I said I didn't know. And he went off mad. Oh-h! oh-h-h!

Jinny says Carrie March says she saw him down-town riding on his bicycle with Susan Baker. O-h-h-h-h! How can I talk when I'm so sick? Girls don't know about young men. Bert wouldn't like you to see him sometimes, be sure of that!" She paused to moan, and Emmy looked at her in a misery of doubt. Was she telling the truth? It had come to that, since Mrs.

Darter had grown to take her soothing drops in every ailment--there was no surety that she either saw things straight or told them straight.