aid David
apologetically. "I just lit up a fire in the kitchen stove as quick's
I could and run. It rattled me to hear Zillah moaning so's you could
hear her all over the house."

"You need someone to look after you as bad as Zillah does," said
Josephine severely.

In a very few minutes she was ready, with a basket packed full of
homely remedies, "for like as not there'll be no putting one's hand on
anything there," she muttered. She insisted on wrapping her big plaid
shawl around David's head and neck, and made him put on a pair of
mittens she had knitted for Jack Sentner. Then she locked the door and
they started across the gleaming, crusted field. It was so slippery
that Josephine had to cling to David's arm to keep her feet. In the
rapture of supporting her David almost forgot everything else.

In a few minutes they had passed under the bare, glistening boughs of
the poplars on David's lawn, and for the first time Josephine crossed
the threshold of David Hartley's house.

Years ago, in her girlhood, when the Hartley's lived in the old house
and there were half a dozen girls at home, Josephine had frequently
visited there. All the Hartley girls liked her except Zillah. She and
Zillah never "got on" together. When the other girls had married and
gone, Josephine gave up visiting there. She had never been inside the
new house, and she and Zillah had not spoken to each other for years.

Zillah was a sick woman--too sick to be anything but civil to
Josephine. David started at once for the doctor at the Creek, and
Josephine saw that he was well wrapped up before she let him go. Then
she mixed up a mustard plaster for Zillah and sat down by the bedside
to wait.

When Mrs. Tom Sentner came down the next day she found Josephine busy
making flaxseed poultices, with her lips set in a line that betokened
she had made up her mind to some disagreeable course of duty.

"Zillah has got pneumonia bad," she said, in reply to Mrs. Tom's
inquiries. "The Doctor is here and Mary Bell from the Creek. She'll
wait on Zillah, but there'll have to be another woman here to see to
the work. I reckon I'll stay. I suppose it's my duty and I don't see
who else could be got. You can send Mamie and Jack down to stay at my
house until I can go back. I'll run over every day and keep an eye on
things."

At the end of a week Zillah was out of danger. Saturday afternoon
Josephine went over home to see how Mamie and Jack were getting on.
She fou