“It certainly is, Carolyn May.”
“Well—but,” returned the little girl, “wouldn’t something else do me good—only, maybe, slower—that wasn’t so awfully bitter? I—I’m afraid I’ll never learn to like this boneset tea—not really, Aunty Rose.”
“We are not supposed to like medicine,” declared Aunty Rose, being a confirmed allopath.
“Oh, aren’t we?” the little girl cried. “I ’member being sick once—at home, with my mamma and papa—and a doctor came. A real nice doctor, with eyeglasses. And he gave me cunning little pills of different colours. I didn’t mind taking them; they were like candy.”
Aunty Rose shook her head decidedly and negatively.
“I do not believe in such remedies,” she said. “Medicine is like punishment—unless it hurts, of what use is it?”
Therefore three times a day Carolyn May was dosed with boneset tea. How long the child’s stomach would have endured under this treatment will never be known. Carolyn May got no better, that was sure; but one day something happened.
Winter had moved on in its usual frosty and snowy way. Carolyn May had kept up all her interests—after a fashion. She went to school, and she visited Miss Amanda, and her sailor man held her attention. But they were just surface interests. “Inside” she was all sick, and sorry, and prone to tears; and it was not altogether the boneset tea that made her feel so unsettled, either.
Benjamin Hardy had gone to Adams’ camp to work. It seemed he could use a peavy, or canthook, pretty well, having done something besides sailing in his day. Tim, the hackman, worked at logging in the winter months, too. He usually went past the Stagg place with a team four times each day.
There was something Carolyn May wished to ask Benjamin Hardy, but she did not want anybody else to know what it was—not even Uncle Joe or Aunty Rose. Miss Amanda had gone across town to stay with a lady who was ill, so the little girl could not take her into her confidence, had she so wished.