Her eyes were bright with appeal. Len was straining anxiously over her shoulder. What could I do but beat down my anti-Samaritan intellect and surrender them to their own undoing? I don’t remember what I said, but when they left me, and I held the lamp to light them across the little bridge in the yard, I saw that they were walking hand in hand, as they liked to do when sharing a supreme pleasure. IV I went to see Viny. They had helped her from her bed to the fireside, and she talked, softly eager, while her slim hands were busy with a needle and Serena’s quilt-scraps. Without a knowledge of her age, I should have taken her for a frail girl in her twenties. She had the profound gentleness and mystic smile of one recently released from intolerable pain. They were all proud of her. Lonie took her advice as to the pattern of a new dress. Ned brought her an enormous apple whose keeping qualities he had been testing. Len came to the house for a drink when he could more easily have gone to the spring, because he had thought of something that would make Viny laugh. Her illness was not mentioned until some one spoke of her mother’s long devotion. Then her warm, hazel eyes were lit with idolatry. “At first,” she said, “my attacks come hit or miss, and it was awfully hard for mother to plan her work. She had everything to do at home, and no help except father. They were all married off but me. I prayed fer my spells to come reg’lar, and after a while they did. Then mother could lay out her work, and get on all right.” Her disease was terribly real, there was no doubt of that; but I wondered if, through concern for her mother, she had actually psychologized her crises into periodicity. When I left the house Serena accompanied me a few steps. Len joined us, eager to know what I thought of Viny, and it was easy to say all that they were longing to hear. “I knowed you’d like her,” said Serena. “She offered me one of her five-dollar gold pieces to-day, an’ I was ashamed to look at it, knowin’ all about her savin’ up fer the hospital. I made her put it back in that little bag she carries her money in. She don’t eat but onct a day. Then it’s only a little butter an’ a ’tater. I couldn’t think o’ chargin’ her fer a ’tater. Sometimes she’ll taste an egg, but she brought three hens, an’ I git more o’ the eggs than she does. She brought her own bed an’ kivers, so I kain’t charge her fer sleepin’. She lays there, not botherin’ anybody, an’ ever’ other day when she’s not out of her mind, she heps me piece quilts, an’ I kain’t tell you the things she’s patched.” “Perhaps you ought to pay _her_, Serena,” I said, but the irony did not penetrate. “She wouldn’t let me do that. She says it’s only right fer her to hep me. No, she wouldn’t take pay fer piecin’ an’ patchin’.” I was about to ask Serena why she couldn’t let Viny pay her for the service she received, but happily for me, I was forestalled by Len.