“I don’t quite understand it,” the doctor said, with a questioning look. “The nursing—that’s been good? Dr. Black tells me so.”
“Yes, Jane and Selina are both good nurses, better’n what I am, if it wasn’t that Ma’s used to me.”
“And there’s no obstacle to her recovery that you know of?” Mary Ann shook her head. “Well, Miss Mary Ann, we must just conclude that it’s the natural wearing out of a good machine. And we’ll do what we can.”
When Mary Ann went back to her mother’s room, she found her a little roused from the stupor in which she had been lying. The visit of her own doctor, the accustomed tendance, had touched some spring that set old wheels running. With the clairvoyance love so often gives to the sick-nurse, Mary Ann knew that she had something to say to her.
She sat by the bed and waited. A fluttering whisper came at last.
“Did you see Jane’s hands?”
Mary Ann’s mind, seeking desperately for a clue, flashed from the stains on her sister’s hands, which she had vaguely set down to black currant jelly, to the acid smell in the kitchen—to the black sewing—to the forgotten shock of a year ago.
“They asked me where I’d like to lie—beside Pa or in the cemetery in town.”
“It’s their forehandedness, Ma. I never did know such a forehanded pair. Talk about meeting trouble half way—Selina’n’Jane don’t wait for it to start out at all.”
“Selina read out of the paper that bronchitis was nearly always fatal after seventy.”