"You don’t say!" Evans exclaimed. "Well, it wouldn’t surprise me. I see ’em mighty often these days. Well, you’d better let me look at it. Stand thar in the door so I can get a good light. I’m wearing my wife’s specks. I don’t know whar I laid mine, but I hope I’ll get ’em back. I only paid twenty-five cents for ’em in Darley, and yet three of my neighbors has taken such a liking to ’em that I’ve been offered as high as three dollars for ’em, and they are only steel rims and are sorter shackly at the hinges at that. Every time Gus Willard wants to write a letter he sends over for my specks and lays his aside. I reckon he thinks I’ll get tired sendin’ back for ’em and get me another pair. Now, that’s right"—Mrs. Hemingway had taken a stand in one of the rear doors and unbuttoned her dress. Despite her stoicism, she found herself holding her breath in fear and suspense as to what his opinion would be. Virginia, pale and with a fainting sensation, sat on the edge of the nearest bed, her shapely hands tightly clasped in her lap. She saw Dr. Evans bend close to her mother’s breast and touch and press the livid spot. "Do you feel that?" he asked. "Yes, and it hurts some when you do that." "How long have you had it thar?" he paused in his examination to ask, peering over the rims of his spectacles. "I noticed it first about a year ago, but thought nothing much about it," she answered. "And never showed it to nobody?" he said, reprovingly. "I let a peddler, who had stuff to sell, see it awhile back." There was a touch of shame in Jane’s face. "He said his medicine would make it slough off, but—" "Slough nothing! That trifling skunk!" Evans cried. "Why, he’s the biggest fake unhung! He sold that same stuff over the mountain to bald-headed men to make hair grow. Huh, I say! they talk about handling _me_ by law, and kicking _me_ out of the country on account of my knowledge and skill, and let chaps like him scour the country from end to end for its last cent. What the devil gets into you women? Here you’ve let this thing go on sinking its fangs deeper and deeper in your breast, and only fertilizing it by the treatment he was giving you. Are you hankering for a change of air? Thar was Mrs. Telworthy, that let her liver run on till she was as yaller as a pumpkin with jaundice before she’d come to me. I give ’er two bottles of my purifier, and she could eat a barbecued ox in a month." "What do you think I ought to do about this?" asked Jane; and Virginia, with strange qualms at heart, thought that her mother had put it that way to avoid asking if the worst was really to be faced.