For that lady had met with an unfortunate accident; while stepping from her phaeton she had fallen, no one knew how or why, and though the phaeton was low and the ground soft, she had injured one of her knees so seriously that it was feared that she would not be able to walk for some time. Once fairly in bed and obliged to remain there, other symptoms had developed themselves, so that she appeared to have, as the sympathetic Betty (who had hurried up from East Angels) expressed it, "a little, just a _little_, you know, of pretty much everything under the sun." In this condition of affairs Katrina Rutherford naturally required a good deal of waiting upon. And after the time had been divided between Margaret and Celestine for several days and nights, Dr. Kirby peremptorily intervened, and told Margaret to send for Looth Johnson, "the best nurse in Gracias--the best, in fact, south of the city of Charleston." Looth was Telano's mother: this was in her favor with Celestine. But when the poor Vermont spinster was actually face to face with her, it was difficult to believe that a person who danced with bare black legs in the dusty road in the middle of the day could be either the mother of the spotlessly attired Telano, or the sort of attendant required by Mrs. Peter Rutherford. Dr. Kirby's orders, peremptory as they were, Celestine would have freely disobeyed; but she did not dare disobey them when they had been repeated by Margaret Harold. "It's where your son is," she explained, desperately, forcing herself to think of Telano's snowy jackets as she caught another glimpse of his mother's toes. "I knows whar 'tis," replied Looth, who had risen and dropped a courtesy. And then, as Celestine departed, hurrying away with an almost agitated step, "Telano 'lows she's a witch," she said to Jinny, in a low voice, as the two looked after the spare erect figure in its black gown. "_I_ 'lows, howsumebber, it's juss ribs an' bones an' all knucklely up de back; nubbuddy 'ain't nebber _seed_ so many knucklelies! I say, Jinny, 'tain't much honeyin' roun' _she's_ eber been boddered wid, I reckon." And the two women laughed, though restraining themselves to low tones, with the innate civility of their race. Meanwhile it was taking Minerva Poindexter the entire distance of the walk home to compose herself after that dancing, and more especially after the unseemly amplitude of the two large, comely black women, an amplitude which she would have confined immediately, if she had had the power, in gowns of firm fibre made after a straight fashion she knew, in which, by means of a system of restrictive seams in unexpectcd places, the modeller was able to neutralize the effect of even the most expansive redundancy.