For two weeks everything went as well as Kate hoped:  then Mrs. Holt began to show the results of having been partially bottled up, for the first time in her life.  She was careful to keep to generalities which she could claim meant nothing, if anything she said was taken up by either George or Kate.  George was too lazy to quarrel unless he was personally angered; Kate thought best to ignore anything that did not come in the nature of a direct attack.  So long as Mrs. Holt could not understand how some folks could see their way to live off of other folks, or why a girl who had a chance to marry a fortune would make herself a burden to a poor man, Kate made the mistake of ignoring her.  Thus emboldened she soon became personal.  It seemed as if she spent her spare time and mental force thinking up suggestive, sarcastic things to say, where Kate could not help hearing them.  She paid no attention unless the attack was too mean and premeditated; but to her surprise she found that every ugly, malicious word the old woman said lodged in her brain and arose to confront her at the most inopportune times —­ in the middle of a recitation or when she roused enough to turn over in her bed at night.  The more vigorously she threw herself into her school work, the more she realized a queer lassitude, creeping over her.  She kept squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin, and brushing imaginary cobwebs from before her face.

The final Friday evening of the month, she stopped at the post office and carried away with her the bill for her Leghorn hat, mailed with nicely conceived estimate as to when her first check would be due.  Kate visited the Trustee, and smiled grimly as she slipped the amount in an envelope and gave it to the hack driver to carry to Hartley on his trip the following day.  She had intended all fall to go with him and select a winter headpiece that would be no discredit to her summer choice, but a sort of numbness was in her bones; so she decided to wait until the coming week before going.  She declined George’s pressing invitation to go along to Aunt Ollie’s and help load and bring home a part of his share of their summer’s crops, on the ground that she had some work to prepare for the coming week.

Then Kate went to her room feeling faint and heavy.  She lay there most of the day, becoming sorrier for herself, and heavier every passing hour.  By morning she was violently ill; when she tried to leave her bed, dizzy and faint.  All day she could not stand.  Toward evening, she appealed to George either to do something for her himself, or to send for the village doctor.  He asked her a few questions and then, laughing coarsely, told her that a doctor would do her no good, and that it was very probable that she would feel far worse before she felt better.  Kate stared at him in dumb wonder.

“But my school!” she cried.  “My school!  I must be able to go to school in the morning.  Could that spring water have been infected with typhus?  I’ve never been sick like this before.”