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Miss Keith had not interrupted the story by as much as a hum of assent. 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 passed 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 passed, 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!”