"Depressants, to amount to anything, would kill her."
Dr. Lavendar looked up into the sky silently. Willy King gathered up the reins. "And Annie?" Dr. Lavendar said.
"She is just a poor, frantic child. I can't make her understand why Miss Harriet shouldn't have two powders, when one 'sugar,' as she calls it, gives her a little comfort for a little while. She says, 'Harriet wouldn't let a squirrel stay hurt.' Miss Harriet says she told her the other day that she wasn't a squirrel; but it didn't seem to make any difference to Miss Annie. She has a queer elemental reasonableness about her, hasn't she? Well, I must go. Dr. Lavendar, I—I hope you won't mind if I say that perhaps—I mean she doesn't want anybody to refer to—to anything religious."
"William," said the old man, mildly, "if you can mention anything which is not religious to a woman who is going to die within a very few weeks, I will consider it."
And William King had the grace to blush and stammer something about Miss Harriet's hating anything personal. Dr. Lavendar listened silently; then he went on up the path to the Stuffed-Animal House. Old Miss Annie let him into the darkened hall, a burst of western sunshine flooding in behind him and making the grim, dead creatures dart out of their shadows for a moment, and sink back into them again when the door was shut. The old child had been crying, for Miss Harriet had turned her out of her room, and so he had to sit there in the hall, under the shark, and try to comfort her and bid her go out and see her chickens. But for once Miss Annie would not be diverted:
"Harriet wants to go out-of-doors, and she can't. And she is hurt; and Willy King won't give her sugar in a paper to stop the hurting. He is wicked."
"By-and-by," said Dr. Lavendar, "Harriet will fall asleep and not be hurt any more."
"Not till she is dead," Miss Annie said; "Augustine told me so."
"I meant that," Dr. Lavendar said, stroking the poor, gray head grovelling against his knee.
"Then why didn't you say so? It is a story to say sleep when you mean dead."