“Luella she kept gettin’ paler and paler, and she never took her eyes off my face.  There was somethin’ awful about the way she looked at me and never spoke one word.  After awhile I quit talkin’ and I went home.  I watched that night, but her lamp went out before nine o’clock, and when Doctor Malcom came drivin’ past and sort of slowed up he see there wa’n’t any light and he drove along.  I saw her sort of shy out of meetin’ the next Sunday, too, so he shouldn’t go home with her, and I begun to think mebbe she did have some conscience after all.  It was only a week after that that Maria Brown died—­sort of sudden at the last, though everybody had seen it was comin’.  Well, then there was a good deal of feelin’ and pretty dark whispers.  Folks said the days of witchcraft had come again, and they were pretty shy of Luella.  She acted sort of offish to the Doctor and he didn’t go there, and there wa’n’t anybody to do anythin’ for her.  I don’t know how she did get along.  I wouldn’t go in there and offer to help her—­not because I was afraid of dyin’ like the rest, but I thought she was just as well able to do her own work as I was to do it for her, and I thought it was about time that she did it and stopped killin’ other folks.  But it wa’n’t very long before folks began to say that Luella herself was goin’ into a decline jest the way her husband, and Lily, and Aunt Abby and the others had, and I saw myself that she looked pretty bad.  I used to see her goin’ past from the store with a bundle as if she could hardly crawl, but I remembered how Erastus used to wait and ’tend when he couldn’t hardly put one foot before the other, and I didn’t go out to help her.

“But at last one afternoon I saw the Doctor come drivin’ up like mad with his medicine chest, and Mrs. Babbit came in after supper and said that Luella was real sick.

“‘I’d offer to go in and nurse her,’ says she, ’but I’ve got my children to consider, and mebbe it ain’t true what they say, but it’s queer how many folks that have done for her have died.’

“I didn’t say anythin’, but I considered how she had been Erastus’s wife and how he had set his eyes by her, and I made up my mind to go in the next mornin’, unless she was better, and see what I could do; but the next mornin’ I see her at the window, and pretty soon she came steppin’ out as spry as you please, and a little while afterward Mrs. Babbit came in and told me that the Doctor had got a girl from out of town, a Sarah Jones, to come there, and she said she was pretty sure that the Doctor was goin’ to marry Luella.

“I saw him kiss her in the door that night myself, and I knew it was true.  The woman came that afternoon, and the way she flew around was a caution.  I don’t believe Luella had swept since Maria died.  She swept and dusted, and washed and ironed; wet clothes and dusters and carpets were flyin’ over there all day, and every time Luella set her foot out when the Doctor wa’n’t there there was that Sarah Jones helpin’ of her up and down the steps, as if she hadn’t learned to walk.