"You get a doctor, Moses," Elizabeth said. "Tell him that I—Captain John Swift's granddaughter—will settle the bill."
"Oh, all right," Moses said.
"I don't know much about mediums," she explained to the sick woman, "but I know that a doctor would be able to help you right away."
"I—I don't believe in medical healing," the woman moaned, "but if you want to spend your money that way—the last time—I had a sick spell, Mis' Abithy Hawes, she's a fine medium, she—come here and went into a trance—and had me cured in half an—hour. No doctor—could do—do like that. Her control is—Little Eva."
"Don't try to talk," Elizabeth said, mystified.
The next half hour was one that she remembered all her life. The spasms of pain increased. Elizabeth's experience of acute illness was so limited that she earnestly believed she had a dying woman on her hands. Madget and Mabel came in whimpering and hungry, and Madget cried steadily and consistently from the moment when she caught her first glimpse of her mother's tortured face. Mrs. Steppe continued to call for Mis' Abithy Hawes, and Elizabeth finally thought of sending Mabel to look for that lady. Mabel returned from this quest with amazing promptitude.
"She had her hands in the flour dough," Mabel explained, "and she can't come. She sent word that she couldn't have no trances till she got her work done up, and then she'd see. She give me a cookie."
"Did you explain to her how sick your mother was?"
"Yes, she said she couldn't have no trances now. She said Little Eva was cranky to-day."
By the time Moses appeared, with the word that the doctor would follow him shortly, Elizabeth was at the limit of her endurance and her ingenuity. She had been heating water in a leaky lard pail, and stripping off her own white petticoat to make hot compresses to relieve the increasing pain of her patient, quieting the ubiquitous Madget for a few seconds at a time only to provoke the din again as soon as she set her down from her lap; and trying in the intervals to reduce the slovenly room to something like order.