“And Jane? They didn’t go very far apart, did they?”
“No, Jane died eleven months before Eliza; and their mother went three years 133 before that, and their father when Dan was a baby; that’s goin’ on sixteen years.”
“Well, you have had a hard time, I will say!” exclaimed Mrs. Dodge. “Your Martha losing her little girl, and John’s wife breaking her collar-bone, and all, and now this to be gone through with! I should think you’d feel discouraged!”
“I do; real discouraged. But I s’pose it’s no more than I’d ought to expect, with such an inheritance.”
“Have there been many cases of lung-trouble on your side of the family, Mrs. Lapham?” Miss Bailey inquired with respectful interest.
“No; Sister Fitch was the first case.”
For a few seconds, conversation languished, and only the snip of Mrs. Royce’s scissors could be heard, and the soft rustle of cotton cloth. The sewing-circle was going on in the church vestry where there was a faint odour from the kerosene lamps, which had just been lighted. The Widow Criswell was the first to break the silence. 134
“Polly ain’t showed no symptoms yet, has she?” she asked, testing one of the buttons as if sceptical of her thread.
“Well, no; not yet. But then Dan seemed as smart as anybody six months ago, and just look at him to-day!”
The mental eyes of a score of women were turned upon Dan, as he was daily seen, round-shouldered and hollow-chested, toiling along the snowy country roads to and from school, coughing as he went. The topic was not an uncongenial one to the members of the sewing-circle, who had really very little to talk about. So absorbed were they, indeed, in the discussion of poor Dan’s fate, and of the long list of casualties that had preceded it, that no one noticed the entrance of a young girl, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, who had come to help with the supper. There was an air of peculiar freshness about her, and as she stood in her blue dress and white apron near the door, her ruddy brown hair shining in the lamp-light, the effect was like the opening of a window in a close room. Her step was arrested in 135 the act of coming forward, and, as she paused to listen, the pretty colour was quite blotted out of her cheeks.