THE new doctor from the new town on the new railroad came not only once, but many times to call upon Marcia Haddon, seriously ill at Granny Williams’ home. A high fever held her by the time she had arrived in the night after that terrible day upon the river. By the next day delirium had its will of her. The kindly inhabitants called it “chills and fever.” It was a chilled heart, a fevered mind. Granny Williams was wholly contemptuous of the new doctor, or of any doctor. It was Joslin who insisted that the old-woman remedies should not be trusted, who sent for the only modern physician thus far known in that portion of the world. The presence of the latter was accepted only grudgingly by Granny Williams, who insisted that camomile and boneset was all the “furrin woman” needed. But the new doctor, himself a voice in the wilderness, was a young man who understood many things. When after many days his patient had worn out the fever and showed certain signs of convalescence, she lay a long time with mind apparently a blank, inquiring nothing as to her surroundings, and equally incurious in regard to herself. “Where is he?” she asked at length, upon one day when Joslin had come to find how she was progressing. She had come, weakly, to look forward to these daily visits, although often she did not speak to him at all. “We cared for him,” answered he. “When you are well enough we’ll show you. We sent out a man with a telegram. We have word for you.” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “Poor boy,” she said, “poor boy! Well, it’s over for him. I wish it were for me.” For the time she did not speak further. But slowly, under inexorable nature’s rule, the duty of living came forward to her consciousness, insistent, imperative. Marcia Haddon, little by little, undertook once more to knit the raveled sleeve. The strangeness of her new surroundings proved of itself a benefit. The faces that she saw about her, kindly as they were, were faces as of another world. Those who attended her spoke a language which at first she scarcely understood. For days she lay and looked at them with not even a smile upon her face to thank them, passive, incurious, but after a time observing and questioning. “She’s powerful weak,” said old Granny Williams to a neighbor, shaking her head now and then. “Them furrin women kain’t stand nothin’. To look at her ye’d think she was the one that got drownded in the Narrers, not him. “They say he was moughty rich,” she continued. “They say he owned all the land acrosst the river from here, an’ him an’ his Company owns half of Hell-fer-Sartin, an’ most on Newfound. Well, I reckon it won’t do him no sight of good right now—nor her neither, onlessen she gets pearter right soon. If she hain’t better in a week or so, we’d e’en about as well measure her.”