She frowned. "I'm afraid it will. Of course, if he gets better, he can move over to Five Oaks, and anyway the authorities ought to make some kind of provision for him. We can't be expected to take over the poor farm." Her tone was suddenly bitter with memory; but she concluded hastily: "In the meantime, I'll warm the spare room and get it ready. If the doctor says he must have fresh air, we can move his bed out on the back porch." John Abner looked resentful. "I'm sorry for the poor devil, of course, even if he did drive his wife crazy; but I don't see the sense in turning the place upside down for somebody who hasn't the slightest claim on you. He isn't even a poor relation." "He isn't anybody's poor relation, that's the trouble." "I'm not so sure." John Abner could be brutally candid at times. "There are a lot of Idabella's mulatto children still hanging about Five Oaks." She shivered with disgust. "What the law doesn't acknowledge, I suppose it doesn't bother about." "Well, it isn't any business of mine," John Abner said, after deliberation. "If you choose to bring him here, of course you have the right. But I hope you aren't going to wear yourself out waiting on him. You've got no moderation in such things. After Snowbird's sickness last winter, you didn't look like yourself." She shook her head. "I'd do much more for Snowbird. But I shan't wait on him. I'll get Fluvanna's sister, Mirandy. She's an old woman, and a good hand with sick people, even if she hasn't any sense in the dairy." As she finished, she heard a voice in her mind asking distinctly, "Why am I doing this? Why should I take the trouble?" And there wasn't any answer. Even when she dragged her mind for an excuse or even an idea, she could not unearth one. She had stopped loving Jason thirty years ago; she had stopped hating him at an indefinite period; she had stopped even remembering that he was alive; yet she could not, without doing violence to her own nature, let him die in the poorhouse. After all, it was not her feeling or lack of feeling for him, it was the poorhouse and her horror of the poorhouse that decided his fate. "I'll have to go with you," John Abner was saying. "You can't manage it by yourself." "No. I'd rather have you. If we start right after dinner, that ought to bring us back before the milking is over. The road is rough, I'm afraid. We'll have to take some pillows in the back of the car." "If he's bad off, perhaps Doctor Stout won't let him come," John Abner suggested hopefully. "Well, we'll stop at the doctor's house on the way. That's why I want to start early."