Elmira assented, with wide, scared, piteous eyes on her brother.

“Go now and get the dinner,” said Jerome.

“There’s lots left over from yesterday,” said Elmira, forlornly.  “Shall we have anything after that’s gone?”

“Have enough while I’ve got two hands,” returned Jerome, gruffly.  “Get some potatoes and boil ’em, and have some of that cold meat, and make mother the gruel.”

Elmira obeyed, finding a certain comfort in that.  Indeed, she belonged assuredly to that purely feminine order of things which gains perhaps its best strength through obedience.  Give Elmira a power over her, and she would never quite fall.

Elmira went about getting dinner, tiptoeing around her mother, who still sat sunken in her strange apathy of melancholy or exhaustion, it was difficult to tell which, while Jerome spaded and dug in the garden, in the fury of zeal which he had inherited from her.

Elmira had dinner ready early, and called Jerome.  When he went in he found her trying to induce her mother to swallow a bowl of gruel.  “Won’t you take it, mother?” she was pleading, with tears in her eyes; but her mother only lifted one hand feebly and motioned it away; she would not raise her head or open her eyes.

“Give me that bowl,” said Jerome.  He held it before his mother, and slipped one hand behind her neck, constraining her gently to raise her head.  “Here, mother,” said he, “here’s your gruel.”

She resisted faintly, and shook her weak, repelling hand again.  “Sit up, mother, and drink your gruel,” said Jerome, and his mother’s eyes flew wide open at that, and stared up in his face with eager inquiry; for again she had that wild surmise that her lost husband spoke to her.

“Drink it, mother,” said Jerome, again meeting her half-delirious gaze fully; and Ann seemed to see his father looking at her from his son’s eyes, through his immortality after the flesh.  She raised herself at once, held out her trembling hands for the bowl, and drank the gruel to the last drop.  Then she gave the empty bowl to Jerome, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes again.

After dinner Jerome changed his clothes for his poor best for the second time, and set forth to Doctor Prescott’s.  Elmira’s wistful eyes followed him as he went out, but he said not a word.  He threw back his shoulders and stepped out with as much boldness of carriage as ever.

“How smart he is!” Elmira thought, watching him from the window.

However, it was true that his heart quaked within him, supported as he was by the advice and encouragement of Squire Merritt.  Doctor Prescott had been the awe and the terror of all his childhood.  Nobody knew how in his childish illnesses—­luckily not many—­he had dreaded and resented the advent of this great man, who represented to him absolute monarchy, if not despotism.  He never demurred at his noxious doses, but swallowed them at a gulp, with no sweet after-morsel as an inducement, yet, strangely enough, never from actual submissiveness, but rather from that fierce scorn and pride of utter helplessness which can maintain a certain defiance to authority by depriving it of that victory which comes only from opposition.