“Being lost at sea is such a dreadful unsatisfactory way of having your folks dead.” Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose loved her and were kind to her. But that feeling of “emptiness” that had at first so troubled Carolyn May was returning. Kind as her new friends here at The Corners and at Sunrise Cove were, there was something lacking in the little girl’s life. Nothing could make up to her for the jolly companionship of her father. Even while his health was declining, he had made all about him happier by his own cheerful spirit. And the little girl longed, more and more, for her mother. She had followed her father’s axiom to “look up” and had benefited by it; but, at last, her loneliness and homesickness had become, it seemed, too great to endure. She began to droop. Keen-eyed Aunty Rose discovered this physical change very quickly. “She’s just like a droopy chicken,” declared the good woman, “and, goodness knows, I have seen enough of them.” So, as a stimulant and a preventive of “droopiness,” Aunty Rose prescribed boneset tea, “plenty of it.” Now, she loved Carolyn May very much, even if she could not bring herself to the point of showing her affection before others; but boneset tea is an awful dose! Carolyn May took the prescribed quantity and shook all over. She could not bear the taste of bitter things, and this boneset, or thoroughwort, had the very bitterest taste she had ever encountered. “Do—do you think it’s good for me, Aunty Rose?” she asked quaveringly. “It certainly is, Carolyn May.” “Well—_but_,” returned the little girl, “wouldn’t something else do me good—only, maybe, slower—that wasn’t so awfully bitter? I—I’m afraid I’ll never learn to like this boneset tea—not really, Aunty Rose.” “We are not supposed to like medicine,” declared Aunty Rose, being a confirmed allopath. “Oh, aren’t we?” the little girl cried. “I ’member being sick once—at home, with my mamma and papa—and a doctor came. A real nice doctor, with eyeglasses. And he gave me cunning little pills of different colours. I didn’t mind taking them; they were like candy.” Aunty Rose shook her head decidedly and negatively. “I do not believe in such remedies,” she said. “Medicine is like punishment—unless it hurts, of what use is it?” Therefore three times a day Carolyn May was dosed with boneset tea. How long the child’s stomach would have endured under this treatment will never be known. Carolyn May got no better, that was sure; but one day something happened. Winter had moved on in its usual frosty and snowy way. Carolyn May had kept up all her interests—after a fashion. She went to school, and she visited Miss Amanda, and her sailor man held her attention. But they were just surface interests. “Inside” she was all sick, and sorry, and prone to tears; and it was not altogether the boneset tea that made her feel so unsettled, either.