Amanda went home, and Mrs. Field went back to the kitchen to put away the dinner dishes. She had eaten nothing herself, and now she poured some of the broth into a cup, and drank it down with great gulps without tasting it. It was simply filling of a necessity the lamp of life with oil.
After her housework was done, she sat down in the kitchen with her knitting. There was no sound from the other room.
The latter part of the afternoon Amanda came past the window and entered the back door. She carried a glass of foaming beer. Amanda was famous through the neighborhood for this beer, which she concocted from roots and herbs after an ancient recipe. It was pleasantly flavored with aromatic roots, and instinct with agreeable bitterness, being an innocently tonic old-maiden brew.
“I thought mebbe she'd like a glass of my beer,” whispered Amanda. “I came round the house so's not to disturb her. How is she?”
“I guess she's asleep. I ain't heard a sound.”
Amanda set the glass on the table. “Don't you think you'd ought to have a doctor, Mis' Field?” said she.
It seemed impossible that Lois could have heard, but her voice came shrilly from the other room: “No, I ain't going to have a doctor; there's no need of it. I sha'n't like it if you get one, mother.”
“No, you sha'n't have one, dear child,” her mother called back. “She was always jest so about havin' a doctor,” she whispered to Amanda.
“I'll take in the beer if she's awake,” said Amanda.
Lois looked up when she entered. “I don't want a doctor,” said she, pitifully, rolling her blue eyes.