"It will make it easier for Eunice in one way," the neighbours said to one another. "Eunice could hardly have gone away while her grandfather lived, and this has made the path of duty plain before her." But whether "the path of duty" was rough or smooth to the weary feet of Eunice no one ever knew from her lips. She was not unhappy, that was certain. She had the daily and hourly care of her grandfather to fill her thoughts and occupy her hands, and when he died she had an easier time and could rest. And she had Fidelia. She had an easier life; but she could not sit idle at home, or go elsewhere for change or pleasure, as others might who had not their daily bread to earn. The means which her grandparents had provided for their old age had been nearly spent during their long illness. There was the house and garden and a field or two, and that was almost all; and Eunice chose to stay at home and make the best of them, rather than do any of the things which her friends were so ready to advise, and which she might have done. She might have nursed the sick, or taught a school, or worked with her capable hands or her clear head in one of the many ways open to New England girls; but she would not be separated from her sister, and she chose to stay at home. "I will stay for awhile at least," she said to Dr Everett when he spoke to her about her plans, and hinted that a change might be desirable for various reasons. "There is no hurry about it, I think; and just for the present I would rather stay at home." And the time had never come for her to go elsewhere, or to change her manner of life in any way, and it had lately been gradually revealing itself to her that the time could never come. She was beginning to say to herself: "That which I greatly feared has come upon me." All the long suffering through which she had seen her grandmother pass seemed to lie like a thick darkness upon her. Even before the departure of her sister for school she had felt or imagined symptoms, which she thought she could not mistake, of the terrible disease which had appeared at intervals in some member of her mother's family for several generations; and there is no wonder that for a time her courage, and even her faith, failed her. She was wrong to conceal her fears from Dr Everett. But she said to herself: "He cannot help me. If I am mistaken--if I am only nervous and over-anxious, it will pass away in time, with suffering to no one but myself. If the danger is real, nothing--no one can help me, not even my dear old friend."