"It will be all right, mother; it will be all right. Take it quietly; we shall have no trouble."
For two days she kept her bed, with a watchful eye over everything, directing all the household affairs.
"Don't be in the least anxious," her husband urged again and again. "There is hardly anything to be done in the house beyond the cooking, and Maria is quite fit to look after that—everything else too, by thunder! She is not a little child any longer, and is as capable as yourself. Lie there quietly, without stirring; and be easy in your mind, instead of tossing about all the time under the blankets and making yourself worse...."
On the third day she gave up thinking about the cares of the house and began to bemoan herself.
"Oh my God!" she wailed. "I have pains all over my body, and my head is burning. I think that I am going to die."
Her husband tried to cheer her with his Clumsy pleasantries. "You are going to die when the good God wills it, and according to my way of thinking that will not be for a while yet. What would He be doing with you? Heaven is all cluttered with old women, and down here we have only the one, and she is able to make herself a bit useful, every now and then ..." But he was beginning to feel anxious, and took counsel with his daughter.
"I could put the horse in and go as far as La Pipe," he suggested. "It may be that they have some medicine for this sickness at the store; or I might talk things over with the cure, and he would tell me what to do."
Before they had made up their minds night had fallen, and Tit'Bé, who had been at Eutrope Gagnon's helping him to saw his firewood, came back bringing Eutrope along with him.
"Eutrope has a remedy," said he. They all gathered round Eutrope, who took a little tin box from his pocket and opened it deliberately.
"This is what I have," he announced rather dubiously. "They are little pills. When my brother was bad with his kidneys three years ago he saw an advertisement in a paper about these pills, and it said they were the proper thing, so he sent the money for a box, and he declares it is a good medicine. Of course his trouble did not leave him at once, but he says that this did him good. It comes from the States ..."