old her that she hadn't any
business to think of another man after she'd been married to one that
had died for her: that she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that's
true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it--if
she wa'n't like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin' everybody
without knowin' what it was doin'.

"Luella she kept gettin' paler and paler, and she never took her eyes
off my face. There was somethin' awful about the way she looked at me
and never spoke one word. After awhile I quit talkin' and I went home.
I watched that night, but her lamp went out before nine o'clock, and
when Doctor Malcom came drivin' past and sort of slowed up he see there
wa'n't any light and he drove along. I saw her sort of shy out of
meetin' the next Sunday, too, so he shouldn't go home with her, and I
begun to think mebbe she did have some conscience after all. It was
only a week after that that Maria Brown died--sort of sudden at the
last, though everybody had seen it was comin'. Well, then there was a
good deal of feelin' and pretty dark whispers. Folks said the days of
witchcraft had come again, and they were pretty shy of Luella. She
acted sort of offish to the Doctor and he didn't go there, and there
wa'n't anybody to do anythin' for her. I don't know how she DID get
along. I wouldn't go in there and offer to help her--not because I was
afraid of dyin' like the rest, but I thought she was just as well able
to do her own work as I was to do it for her, and I thought it was
about time that she did it and stopped killin' other folks. But it
wa'n't very long before folks began to say that Luella herself was
goin' into a decline jest the way her husband, and Lily, and Aunt Abby
and the others had, and I saw myself that she looked pretty bad. I
used to see her goin' past from the store with a bundle as if she could
hardly crawl, but I remembered how Erastus used to wait and 'tend when
he couldn't hardly put one foot before the other, and I didn't go out
to help her.

"But at last one afternoon I saw the Doctor come drivin' up like mad
with his medicine chest, and Mrs. Babbit came in after supper and said
that Luella was real sick.

"'I'd offer to go in and nurse her,' says she, 'but I've got my
children to consider, and mebbe it ain't true what they say, but it's
queer how many folks that have done for her have died.'

"I didn't say anythin', but I considered how she had been Erastus's
wife a