The widow leaned despondently against the fence and watched him as he ploughed his way through the tall grass and weeds of the intervening marsh towards Ann Boyd’s house. The assurance that the spot on her breast was an incipient cancer was bad enough without the added fear that her old enemy would possibly gloat over her misfortune. She remained there till she saw the vender approach Ann’s door. For a moment she entertained the mild hope that he would be repulsed, but he was not. She saw Ann’s portly form framed in the doorway for an instant, and then the peddler opened the gate and went into the house. Heavy of heart, the grim watcher remained at the fence for half an hour, and then the medicine-vender came out and wended his way along the dusty road towards Wilson’s store. Jane went into the house and sat down wearily. Virginia was sewing at a western window, and glanced at her in surprise. "What’s the matter, mother?" she inquired, solicitously. "I don’t know as there is anything wrong," answered Jane, "but I am sort o’ weak. My knees shake and I feel kind o’ chilly. Sometimes, Virginia, I think maybe I won’t last long." "That’s perfectly absurd," said the girl. "Don’t you remember what Dr. Evans said last winter when he was talking about the constitutions of people? He said you belonged to the thin, wiry, raw-boned kind that never die, but simply stay on and dry up till they are finally blown away." "He’s not a graduated doctor," said Jane, gloomily. "He doesn’t know everything." VI A week from that day, one sultry afternoon near sunset, a tall mountaineer, very poorly clad, and his wife came past Wilson’s store. They paused to purchase a five-cent plug of tobacco, and then walked slowly along the road in a dust that rose as lightly as down at the slightest foot-fall, till they reached Ann Boyd’s house. "I’ll stay out here at the gate," the man said. "You’ll have to do all the talking. As Willard said, she will do more for Luke King’s mother than she would for anybody else, and you remember how she backed the boy up in his objections to me as a step-daddy." "Well, I’ll do what I can," the woman said, plaintively. "You stay here behind the bushes. I don’t blame you for not wanting to ask a favor of her, after all she said when we were married. She may spit in my face—they say she’s so cantankerous." Seating himself on a flat stone, the man cut the corner off of his tobacco-plug and began to chew it, while his wife, a woman about sixty-five years of age, and somewhat enfeebled, opened the gate and went in. Mrs. Boyd answered the gentle rap and appeared at the door. "Howdy do, Mrs. Boyd," the caller began. "I reckon old age hasn’t changed me so you won’t know me, although it’s been ten years since me ’n’ you met. I’m Mrs. Mark Bruce, that used to be Mrs. King. I’m Luke’s mother, Mrs. Boyd."