To-day, when people inquired for Lois, her mother no longer gave her customary replies. She said openly that her daughter was real miserable, and she was worried about her.
“I guess she's beginning to realize it,” the women whispered to each other with a kind of pitying triumph. For there is a certain aggravation in our friends' not owning to even those facts which we deplore for them. It is provoking to have an object of pity balk. Mrs. Field's assumption that her daughter was not ill had half incensed her sympathizing neighbors; even Amanda had marvelled indignantly at it. But now the sudden change in her friend caused her to marvel still more. She felt a vague fear every time she thought of her. After Lois had gone to bed that Sunday night, her mother came into Amanda's room, and the two women sat together in the dusk. It was so warm that Amanda had set all the windows open, and the room was full of the hollow gurgling of the frogs—there was some low meadow-land behind the house.
“I want to know what you think of Lois?” said Mrs. Field, suddenly; her voice was high and harsh.
“Why, I don't know, hardly, Mis' Field.”
“Well, I know. She's runnin' down. She won't ever be any better, unless I can do something. She's dyin' for the want of a little money, so she can stop work an' go away to some healthier place an' rest. She is; the Lord knows she is.” Mrs. Field's voice was solemn, almost oratorical.
Amanda sat still; her long face looked pallid and quite unmoved in the low light; she was thinking what she could say.
But Mrs. Field went on; she was herself so excited to speech and action, the outward tendency of her own nature was so strong, that she failed to notice the course of another's. “She is,” she repeated, argumentatively, as if Amanda had spoken, or she was acute enough to hear the voice behind silence; “there ain't any use talkin'.”
There was a pause, a soft wind came into the room, the noise of the frogs grew louder, a whippoorwill called; it seemed as if the wide night were flowing in at the windows.
“What I want to know is,” said Mrs. Field, “if you will take Lois in here to meals, an' look after her a week or two. Be you willin' to?”
“You ain't goin' away, Mis' Field?” There was a slow and contained surprise in Amanda's tone.