"I don't know, grandmother," answered Ethel cheerfully. "As soon as he's well enough to be moved, they're going to take him to the county hospital. I guess that's the poorhouse. But Rob says he's so old they're afraid the bone won't knit; he suffers like everything. Poor old man, I'm awful sorry for him. Rob has to do all the cooking."
The old woman pushed back her chair and brushed the crumbs from her apron.
"I guess I'll go upstairs and lay down awhile, Emma. I been kind of light-headed all afternoon. I guess I set too long over them carpet rags."
She got up and crossed the room hurriedly. Her son looked after her with anxious eyes. Presently they heard her toiling up the stairs with the slow, inelastic tread of infancy and old age.
"I don't know what's come over your mother, Jason," said his wife. "She hasn't been herself all summer. Sometimes I think I'd ought to write to the girls."
"Oh, I guess she'll be all right," said Jason, with masculine hopefulness. "Dot, you'd better go up by and by and see if grandmother wants anything."
Safe in her own room, Mrs. Moxom sank into a chair with a long breath of relief and dismay.
"The poorhouse!" she gasped. "That seems about as mortifying as to own up to your girls that you wasn't never rightly married to their father."
She got up and wandered across the room to the bureau. "I expect he's changed a good deal," she murmured. She took a daguerreotype from the upper drawer, and gazed at it curiously. "Yes, I expect he's changed quite a good deal," she repeated, with a sigh.