She had scarcely turned the bend in the path, and was barely out of Ann's view, when she had to lower her bundle and rest. Seated on a moss-grown stone near the dry bed of the stream which had fed Ann's pool before the drought, she found herself taking the most morbid view of her condition. The delicate roots of the livid growth on her breast seemed to be insidiously burrowing more deeply towards her heart than ever before. Ah, what a fool she had been at such a crisis to listen to an idle tramp, who had not only given her a stone when she had paid for bread, but had revealed her secret to the one person she had wished to keep it from! But she essayed to convince herself that all hope was not gone, and the very warning Ann had angrily uttered might be turned to advantage. She would now be open about her trouble, since Ann knew it, anyway, and perhaps medical skill might help her, even yet, to triumph. Under that faint inspiration she shouldered her burden and crept slowly homeward.

Reaching her cottage, she dropped the ball of clothes at the door and went into the sitting-room, where Virginia sat complacently sewing at a window on the shaded side of the house. The girl had only a few moments before washed her long, luxuriant hair, and it hung loose and beautiful in the warm air. She was merrily singing a song, and hardly looked at her mother as she paused near her.

"Hush, for God's sake, hush!" Jane groaned. "Don't you see I'm unable to stand?"

In sheer astonishment Virginia turned her head and noticed her mother's pale, long-drawn face. "What is it, mother, are you sick?"

By way of reply the old woman sank into one of the hide-bottomed chairs near the open doorway and groaned again. Quickly rising, and full of grave concern, the girl advanced to her. Standing over the bowed form, she looked out through the doorway and saw the bundle of clothes.

"You don't mean to tell me, mother, that you have carried that load all about looking for water to wash in!" she exclaimed, aghast.

"Yes, I took them to the rock-pool and back; but that ain't it," came from between Jane's scrawny hands, which were now spread over her face. "I am strong enough bodily, still, but I met Ann Boyd down there. She had all the place there was, and had muddied up the water. Virginia, she knows about that spot on my breast that the medicine peddler said was a cancer. She wormed it out of him. He told her more than he did me. He told her it would soon drag me to the grave. It's a great deal worse than it was before I began to rub his stuff on it. He's a quack. I was a fool not to go to a regular doctor right at the start."

"You think, then, that it really is a cancer?" gasped the girl, and she turned pale.

"Yes, I have no doubt of it now, from the way it looks and from the way that woman gloated over me. She declared she knew all about it, and that nothing on earth had made her so glad. I want to see Dr. Evans. I wish you'd run over to his house and have him come."

"But he's not a regular doctor," protested the girl, mildly. "They say he is not allowed to practise, and that he only uses remedies of his own making. The physicians at Darley were talking of having him arrested not long ago."

"Oh, I know all that," Jane said, petulantly, "but that's because he cured one or two after they had been given up by licensed doctors. He knows a lots, and he will tell me, anyway, whether I've got a cancer or not. He knows what they are. He told Mrs. Hiram Snodgrass what her tumor was, and under his advice she went to Atlanta and had it cut out, and saved her life when two doctors was telling her it was nothing but a blood eruption that would pass off. You know he is good-hearted."

With a troubled nod, Virginia admitted that this was true. Her sweet mouth was drawn down in pained concern, a stare of horror lay in her big, gentle eyes. "I'll go bring him," she promised. "I saw him pass with a bag of meal from the mill just now."

"Well, tell him not to say anything about it," Jane cautioned her. "Evidently Ann Boyd has not talked about it much, and I don't want it to be all over the neighborhood. I despise pity. I'm not used to it. If it gets out, the tongues of these busy-bodies would run me stark crazy. They would roost here like a swarm of buzzards over a dying horse."

Virginia returned in about half an hour, accompanied by a gray-headed and full-whiskered man of about seventy years of age, who had any other than the look of even a country doctor. He wore no coat, and his rough shirt was without button from his hairy neck to the waistband of his patched and baggy trousers. His fat hands were too much calloused by labor in the field and forest, and by digging for roots and herbs, to have felt the pulse of anything more delicate than an ox, and under less grave circumstances his assumed air of the regular visiting physician would have had its comic side.

"Virginia tells me you are a little upset to-day," he said, easily, after he had gone to the water-bucket and taken a long, slow drink from the gourd. He sat down in a chair near the widow, and laid his straw hat upon the floor, from which it was promptly removed by Virginia to one of the beds. "Let me take a look at your tongue."

"I'll do no such of a thing," retorted Jane, most flatly. "There is nothing wrong with my stomach. I am afraid I've got a cancer on my breast, and I want to make sure."

"You don't say!" Evans exclaimed. "Well, it wouldn't surprise me. I see 'em mighty often these days. Well, you'd better let me look at it. Stand thar in the door so I can get a good light. I'm wearing my wife's specks. I don't know whar I laid mine, but I hope I'll get 'em back. I only paid twenty-five cents for 'em in Darley, and yet three of my neighbors has taken such a liking to 'em that I've been offered as high as three dollars for 'em, and they are only steel rims and are sorter shackly at the hinges at that. Every time Gus Willard wants to write a letter he sends over for my specks and lays his aside. I reckon he thinks I'll get tired sendin' back for 'em and get me another pair. Now, that's right"—Mrs. Hemingway had taken a stand in one of the rear doors and unbuttoned her dress. Despite her stoicism, she found herself holding her breath in fear and suspense as to what his opinion would be. Virginia, pale and with a fainting sensation, sat on the edge of the nearest bed, her shapely hands tightly clasped in her lap. She saw Dr. Evans bend close to her mother's breast and touch and press the livid spot.

"Do you feel that?" he asked.

"Yes, and it hurts some when you do that."

"How long have you had it thar?" he paused in his examination to ask, peering over the rims of his spectacles.

"I noticed it first about a year ago, but thought nothing much about it," she answered.

"And never showed it to nobody?" he said, reprovingly.

"I let a peddler, who had stuff to sell, see it awhile back." There was a touch of shame in Jane's face. "He said his medicine would make it slough off, but—"

"Slough nothing! That trifling skunk!" Evans cried. "Why, he's the biggest fake unhung! He sold that same stuff over the mountain to bald-headed men to make hair grow. Huh, I say! they talk about handling me by law, and kicking me out of the country on account of my knowledge and skill, and let chaps like him scour the country from end to end for its last cent. What the devil gets into you women? Here you've let this thing go on sinking its fangs deeper and deeper in your breast, and only fertilizing it by the treatment he was giving you. Are you hankering for a change of air? Thar was Mrs. Telworthy, that let her liver run on till she was as yaller as a pumpkin with jaundice before she'd come to me. I give 'er two bottles of my purifier, and she could eat a barbecued ox in a month."

"What do you think I ought to do about this?" asked Jane; and Virginia, with strange qualms at heart, thought that her mother had put it that way to avoid asking if the worst was really to be faced.

Evans stroked his bushy beard wisely. "Do about it?" he repeated, as he went back to his chair, leaving the patient to button her dress with stiff, fumbling fingers. "I mought put you on a course of my blood purifier and wait developments, and, Sister Hemingway, if I was like the regular run of doctors, with their own discoveries on the market, I'd do it in the interest of science, but I'm not going to take the resk on my shoulders. A man who gives domestic remedies like mine is on safe ground when he's treating ordinary diseases, but I reckon a medical board would decide that this was a case for a good, steady knife. Now, I reckon you'd better get on the train and take a run down to Atlanta and put yourself under Dr. Putnam, who is noted far and wide as the best cancer expert in the land."

"Then—then that's what it is?" faltered Mrs. Hemingway.

"Oh yes, that's what you've got, all right enough," said Evans, "and the thing now is to uproot it."

"How—how much would it be likely to cost?" the widow asked, her troubled glance on Virginia's horror-stricken face.

"That depends," mused Evans. "I've sent Putnam a number of cases, and he would, I think, make you a special widow-rate, being as you and me live so nigh each other. At a rough guess, I'd say that everything—board and room and nurse, treatment, medicines, and attention—would set you back a hundred dollars."

"But where am I to get that much money?" Jane said, despondently.

"Well, thar you have me," Evans laughed. "I reckon you know your resources better than anybody else, but you'll have to rake it up some way. You ain't ready to die yet. Callihan has a mortgage on your land, hain't he?"

"Yes, and on my crop not yet gathered," Jane sighed; "he even included every old hoe and axe and piece of harness, and the cow and calf, and every chair and knife and fork and cracked plate in the house."

"Well," and Evans rose and reached for his hat, "as I say, you'll have to get up the money; it will be the best investment you could make."

When he had left, Virginia, horror-stricken, sat staring at her mother, a terrible fear in her face and eyes.

"Then it really is a cancer?" she gasped.

"Yes, I was afraid it was all along," said Jane. "You see, the peddler said so plainly, and he told Ann Boyd about it. Virginia, she didn't know I knew how bad it was, for she hinted at some awful end that was to overtake me, as if it would be news to me. Daughter, I'm going to try my level best to throw this thing off. I always had a fear of death. My mother had before me; she was a Christian woman, and was prepared, if anybody was, and yet she died in agony. She laid in bed and begged for help with her last breath. But my case is worse than hers, for my one foe in this life is watching over me like a hawk. Oh, I can't stand it! You must help me study up some way to raise that money. If it was in sight, I'd feel better. Doctors can do wonders these days, and I'll go to that big one if I possibly can."