an ulcer in her child’s side from the doctor because it did not look pretty!  What else are you planning to do?  What would you think of a nurse who put paint and powder on her patient’s face, to cover up a filthy skin disease?  What else are you planning to do ... you with your plan to put court-plaster over one pustule in ten million and thinking you are helping cure the patient!  You are planning simply to please yourself, you cowardly ... and you are an idiot too ...” he beat his hands on the door-jambs, “... if you had the money of forty millionaires, you couldn’t do anything in that way ... how many people are you thinking to help ... two, three ... maybe four!  But there are hundreds of others ... why, I could read you a thousand stories of worse—­”

Cousin Tryphena’s limit had been reached.  She advanced upon the intruder with a face as excited as his own. ...  “Jombatiste Ramotte, if you ever dare to read me another such story, I’ll go right out and jump in the Necronsett River!”

The mania which had haunted earlier generations of her family looked out luridly from her eyes.

I felt the goose-flesh stand out on my arms, and even Jombatiste’s hot blood was cooled.  He stood silent an instant.

Cousin Tryphena slammed the door in his face.

He turned to me with a bewilderment almost pathetic so tremendous was it—­“Did you hear that ... what sort of logic do you call—­”

“Jombatiste,” I counseled him, “if you take my advice you’ll leave Miss Tryphena alone after this.”

Cousin Tryphena started off on her crack-brained expedition, the very next morning, on the six-thirty train.  I happened to be looking out sleepily and saw her trudging wearily past our house in the bleak gray of our mountain dawn, the inadequate little, yellow flame of her old fashioned lantern like a glowworm at her side.  It seemed somehow symbolical of something, I did not know what.

It was a full week before we heard from her, and we had begun really to fear that we would never see her again, thinking that perhaps, while she was among strangers, her unsettled mind might have taken some new fancy which would be her destruction.

That week Jombatiste shut the door to his house.  The children reported that he would not even let them in, and that they could see him through the window stitching away in ominous silence, muttering to himself.

Eight days after Cousin Tryphena had gone away, I had a telegram from her, which read, “Build fires in both my stoves to-morrow afternoon.”

The dark comes early in the mountains, and so, although I dare say there was not a house in the village without a face at the pane after the late evening train came up, none of us saw anything but our usual impenetrable December darkness.  That, too, seemed, to my perhaps overwrought consciousness of the problem, highly suggestive of the usual course of our lives.  At least, I told myself, Cousin Tryphena had taken her absurd little lantern and gone forth.