was at some door. The rancor which possessed her father, the kicking
against the pricks, was possessing her. She felt a futile rage, like
that of some little animal trodden underfoot. A boy whom she knew ran
past whooping, with a tin-pail, after the milkman. Evidently his
mother wanted some extra milk. The sun was reflected on the sides of
the swinging pail, and the flash of light seemed to hurt her, and she
felt the same unreasoning wrath against the boy. Why was not Willy
Royce's mother desperately sick, like her mother, instead of simply
sending for extra milk? The health and the daily swing of the world
in its arc of space seemed to her like a direct insult.

At last it occurred to her that she ought to dress herself. She left
the window, brushed her hair, braided it, and tied it with a blue
ribbon, and put on her little blue gingham gown which she commonly
wore mornings. Then she sat by the window again. It was not very long
after that that she saw the doctor coming, driving fast. Her father
was with him, and between them sat a woman. She recognized the woman
at once. She was a trained nurse who lived in Edgham. "They have got
Miss Bell," she thought; "mother must be awful sick." She knew that
Miss Bell's wages were twenty-five dollars a week, and that her
father would not have called her in except in an extreme case. She
watched her father help out the woman, who was stout and middle-aged,
and much larger than he. Miss Bell had a dress-suit case, which her
father tugged painfully into the house; Miss Bell followed him. She
heard his key turn in the lock while the doctor fastened his horse.

She saw the doctor, who was slightly lame, limp around to the buggy
after his horse was tied, and take out two cases. She hated him while
he did it. She felt intuitively that something terrible was to come
to her mother because of those cases. She watched the doctor limp up