Katherine, Chapters XVII-XX [pp. 394-416]

404 KATIrARIKE. [Dec.,
to live for her child's sake was so great, that the burden of responsibility and nervous worry was really wearing on her to an
extent of which she was quite unconscious. She had always
exijoyed singularly good health, but she had owed it, in a measure
of which she was naturally unaware, to the peaceful and even
tenor of her way of life. She had neither muscular strength nor
powers of sustained physical endurance, and, though the household tasks she had now assumed for the first time were not
heavy in themselves, they were adding the little strain under
which she might some day suddenly succumb. But of this
neither she nor her daughter had any suspicion. The latter,
although her solicitude was real, still spoke under the impulse
of affection rather than of actual fear, while the mother,~nghtly
attributing her frequent languors to their first source in her
anxiety and grief, knew too little of herself to suspect that her
mental troubles were reacting on her body, and that she was
abetting their insidious attack upon her vital forces by the slight
but constant privations to which she daily subjected herself.
But when she fell down in a dead faint one morning in Christmas
week, just as they were about to sit down to a late breakfast,
the family doctor put his hand at once on the real difficulty.
Both she and Katharine had been alarmed beyond measure, each
of them seeing a "stroke" in the attack, though neither owned
her suspicion to the other.
"Not a bit of it," said the doctor; "there is nothing in the
world the matter but nerves and stomach. What do you eat
nowadays? Bread and coffee, bread and tea, gingerbread and
pickles and preserves! These girls don't owe their red cheeks
to such trash as that, I'll~be bound. And how often do you take
this hearty food? Humph! I thought so. Where is Hannah?"
Katharine explained the situation. The doctor, an old-fashioned practitioner, who had not yet given in to the custom of
written prescriptions, weighed out a dose or two from the wallet
he always carried, and then beckoned the girl to follow him from
the room.
"From all I can make out," he said, laying a heavy, kindly
hand upon her shoulder- as she stood beside him in the lower
hall over the closed register, "there is no necessity for your
mother's either starving or worrying herself into her grave."
He pushed aside the grating with his foot as he spoke, and a
blast of cold air came rushing up. "Freezing herself too, eh?
Well, there is no need of it-but that is what she is doing. She
is nothing but a bundle of nerves, and those of her stomach are