"Dear me, how cosy it looks!" exclaimed Constance, involuntarily, her drooping muscles tautening to welcome the brightness waiting for her. "It does not seem as though there ever could come a sorrow to threaten a hearthstone so shut in, so well tended as this one!"
"It did not come, my dear; it only looked in at the window, and when it saw the tended hearth, and how well-armed you were to grapple with it, off it went!" cried Priscilla, drawing Constance into the high-backed chair. "Feet on this stool, my pretty, and this napery over your knees! That's right! Now this bowl and spoon, and then your Pris will pour her hot posset into your bowl, and you must shift it into your sweet mouth, and we'll be as right as a trivet, instanter!"
Priscilla acted as she chattered, and Constance gladly submitted to being taken care of, lying back smiling in weary, happy acquiescence.
Priscilla's posset was a heartening thing, and Constance after it, munched blissfully on a biscuit and sipped the wine that had been made of elder too brief a time before, yet which was friendly to her, nevertheless.
Constance's lids drooped in the warmth, her head nodded, her fingers relaxed. Priscilla caught her glass just in time as it was falling, and Constance slept beside the fire while John and Priscilla crept away, and Giles came to take their place, to keep up the blaze in case a kettle of hot water might be needed when Damaris wakened from her first restoring sleep.
At dawn Doctor Fuller came in and Constance aroused to welcome him.
"Child, what an experience you have borne!" the good man said, bending with a moved face to greet Constance. "To think that I should have been absent! Your practice was more successful than mine; the squaw is dead. And you remembered my teaching, and saved the child with the nightshade we gathered and distilled that fair day, more than two months ago! 'Twas a lesson well conned!"
"'Twas a lesson well taught," Constance amended. "Sit here, Doctor Fuller, and let me call my father. You will see Damaris? And her mother is in need of a quieting draught, I think. The poor soul was utterly spent when last I saw her, though I've selfishly slept, nor known aught of what any one else might be bearing."
Constance slipped softly through the door as she spoke, into the bedroom where Damaris lay. The little girl was sleeping, but her mother lay across her feet, her gloomy eyes staring at the wall, her face white and mournful.
"Doctor Fuller is come, Stepmother," whispered Constance. "Shall he not see Damaris? And you, have you not slept?"