ss Mary Ann, we must just conclude that it's
the natural wearing out of a good machine. And we'll do what we can."

When Mary Ann went back to her mother's room, she found her a little
roused from the stupor in which she had been lying. The visit of her
own doctor, the accustomed tendance, had touched some spring that set
old wheels running. With the clairvoyance love so often gives to the
sick-nurse, Mary Ann knew that she had something to say to her.

She sat by the bed and waited. A fluttering whisper came at last.

"Did you see Jane's hands?"

Mary Ann's mind, seeking desperately for a clue, flashed from the
stains on her sister's hands, which she had vaguely set down to black
currant jelly, to the acid smell in the kitchen--to the black
sewing--to the forgotten shock of a year ago.

"They asked me where I'd like to lie--beside Pa or in the cemetery in
town."

"It's their forehandedness, Ma. I never did know such a forehanded
pair. Talk about meeting trouble half way--Selina'n'Jane don't wait
for it to start out at all."

"Selina read out of the paper that bronchitis was nearly always fatal
after seventy."

"Well, now, what will those papers say next? Do you know what I read
out of our own _Advertiser_ the other day? That every woman over
thirty has had at least one offer of marriage. Now, that's a lie, for
I never had an offer in my life. I'm kind of glad I didn't, Ma, for I
suppose I'd have took it; and you and me do have an awfully good time
together, don't we?"

But her mother was not listening now; it had been a flash merely of
the old self. Mary Ann looked around the room until she found Jane's
lap-board with a pile of black sewing on it. She gathered up the
carefully pressed pieces and poked them roughly in between a large
clothes cupboard and the wall.

"There!" she said to herself, "it will be a while before they find
that, and when they do they can call it Mary Ann's flighty way of
redding up a room."

She heard her sisters whispering in the hall and went out to them.
Selina was tying her bonnet-strings.

"I'm going home to do a lot of cooking," she said in an important
undertone. "John's wrote to Ma's relatives in Iowa, and some of them's
sure to come."

Mary Ann looked into the wrinkled face; the past weeks had added new
lines of genuine grief to it, yet she could not help seeing that
Selina found some strange pleasure in all these incidents of a last
illness. The words she had meant to