dn't mind coming here to live?" asked Ellen humbly. She hardly
dared speak out thus plainly; but she felt that never again would there
be such a good chance of success.

It was full a minute before Madelene could trust her voice to make reply,
not because she hesitated to commit herself, but because she was moved to
the depths of her tender heart by this her first experience of about the
most tragic of the everyday tragedies in human life--a lone old woman
pleading with a young one for a little corner to sit in and wait for
death. "I wish it weren't quite such a grand house," she said at last
with a look at the old woman--how old she seemed just then!--a look that
was like light. "We're too poor to have the right to make any such start.
But, if you'd let me--if you're sure you wouldn't think me an
intruder--I'd be glad to come."

"Then that's settled," said Mrs. Ranger, with a deep sigh of relief.
But her head and her hands were still trembling from the nervous shock
of the suspense, the danger that she would be left childless and alone.
"We'll get along once you're used to the idea of having me about. I
know my place. I never was a great hand at meddling. You'll hardly know
I'm around."

Again Madelene had the choke in her throat, the ache at the heart. "But
you wouldn't throw the care of this house on my hands!" she exclaimed in
well-pretended dismay. "Oh, no, you've simply got to look after things!
Why, I was even counting on your helping me with my practice."

Ellen Ranger thrilled with a delight such as she had not had in many a
year--the matchless delight of a new interest. Her mother had been famous
throughout those regions in the pioneer days for skill at "yarbs" and at
nursing, and had taught her a great deal. But she had had small chance to
practice, she and her husband and her children being all and always so
healthy. All those years she had had to content herself with thinking and
talking of hypothetical cases and with commenting, usually rather
severely, upon the conduct of every case in the town of which she heard.
Now, in her old age, just as she was feeling that she had no longer an
excuse for being alive, here, into her very house, was coming a career
for her, and it the career of which she had always dreamed!

She forgot about the marriage and its problems, and plunged at once into
an exposition of her views of medicine--her hostility to the allopaths,
with their huge, fierce doses of dreadful pois