“Mary, dear,” said her sister, “you are excitable and intense. You have lived so long alone in the hills reading and thinking you are morbid. You should not have been left to yourself so long.”
“Then you must go with me to Portland to make up for neglecting me. You will go, won’t you, Abigail?”
“Indeed I will not,” cried the energetic Mrs. Tilton. “You shall go to Dr. Vail’s water-cure at Hill, which is a respectable sanitarium. I will hire you a nurse and rent you a cottage there. We shall see what a physician and hospital care can do for you.”
“But have I not faithfully taken medicine and lived according to hygienic rule for years?” asked Mary. Then turning suddenly to her sister, she asked, “Abigail, do you doubt the power of God?”
“I do not, but I believe God helps those who help themselves.”
“So He does, sister, when they come into harmony with His law; that I know,” answered Mary quietly.
Abigail Tilton’s words had a way of driving home and sticking there, like arrows shot into a target. She was a woman of common sense and she proposed to exercise common sense now for her sister. She would hear nothing of Quimby. When Mrs. Tilton had employed a young woman, named Susan Rand, to go to Hill with Mrs. Patterson, had engaged a conveyance to carry her there comfortably, and had instructed the driver to be most careful with his charge, then she supplied her sister with funds sufficient for her stay, felt that she had performed her duty, and washed her hands of the event.
