into their shoes and stockings. Mrs. Carr, still in her flannel wrapper,
with her little flat gray curls screwed up on pins for the night, and
her thin ankles showing pathetically above her felt slippers, ran
nervously to and fro with mustard plasters and bottles of hot water
which she continually refilled from the kettle on the fender.
Occasionally she paused long enough to hold the camphor to Jane's nose
or to lift the quilt from the bottom of the bed and then put it
carefully back in the very spot where it had lain before she had touched
it. And because she was born to take two steps to every one that was
necessary, because she could not accomplish the simplest act without a
prodigious waste of energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths
over the slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last
person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and hard
work and an unhappily married daughter--because of all these things Mrs.
Carr wore herself to a shadow in the quarter of an hour they spent
waiting for the doctor and Charley Gracey.

Though she had brought Jane through at least a dozen "attacks," she
still lost her presence of mind as completely as on that January night
when, utterly distraught, she had hurried Gabriella to the first
death-bed scene of her sister; she still grew as forgetful of herself
and her own feelings, and, in obedience to some profound law of her
nature, she still as confidently "expected the worst." For Mrs. Carr's
philosophy, like Jane's, was of that active but dreary sort that thrives
best upon misery. Just as Jane, who had lost every illusion about
Charley, went on loving him in spite of it, so Mrs. Carr, having lost
her illusions about life, retained a kind of wistful fondness for the
thing that had wounded her.

The door-bell rang sharply, and Gabriella went to let in the doctor, a