“In the way!” cried Madelene.  “Why, you’re the only one that can teach me how to take care of him.  He says you’ve always taken care of him, and I suppose he’s too old now to learn how to look after himself.”

“You wouldn’t mind coming here to live?” asked Ellen humbly.  She hardly dared speak out thus plainly; but she felt that never again would there be such a good chance of success.

It was full a minute before Madelene could trust her voice to make reply, not because she hesitated to commit herself, but because she was moved to the depths of her tender heart by this her first experience of about the most tragic of the everyday tragedies in human life—­a lone old woman pleading with a young one for a little corner to sit in and wait for death.  “I wish it weren’t quite such a grand house,” she said at last with a look at the old woman—­how old she seemed just then!—­a look that was like light.  “We’re too poor to have the right to make any such start.  But, if you’d let me—­if you’re sure you wouldn’t think me an intruder—­I’d be glad to come.”

“Then that’s settled,” said Mrs. Ranger, with a deep sigh of relief.  But her head and her hands were still trembling from the nervous shock of the suspense, the danger that she would be left childless and alone.  “We’ll get along once you’re used to the idea of having me about.  I know my place.  I never was a great hand at meddling.  You’ll hardly know I’m around.”

Again Madelene had the choke in her throat, the ache at the heart.  “But you wouldn’t throw the care of this house on my hands!” she exclaimed in well-pretended dismay.  “Oh, no, you’ve simply got to look after things!  Why, I was even counting on your helping me with my practice.”

Ellen Ranger thrilled with a delight such as she had not had in many a year—­the matchless delight of a new interest.  Her mother had been famous throughout those regions in the pioneer days for skill at “yarbs” and at nursing, and had taught her a great deal.  But she had had small chance to practice, she and her husband and her children being all and always so healthy.  All those years she had had to content herself with thinking and talking of hypothetical cases and with commenting, usually rather severely, upon the conduct of every case in the town of which she heard.  Now, in her old age, just as she was feeling that she had no longer an excuse for being alive, here, into her very house, was coming a career for her, and it the career of which she had always dreamed!

She forgot about the marriage and its problems, and plunged at once into an exposition of her views of medicine—­her hostility to the allopaths, with their huge, fierce doses of dreadful poisons that had ruined most of the teeth and stomachs in the town; her disdain of the homeopaths, with their petty pills and their silly notion that the hair of the dog would cure its bite.  She was all for the medicine of nature and common sense; and Madelene, able honestly