"There is Love, sitting crouched in the corner of the garden plot, his head on his knees, poor little Love!"
Constance broke into a run and knelt beside the little boy, who did not look up as she put her arms around him.
"Love, Love, dear child, if you can tell me what Damaris ate perhaps God will help me cure her," she said. "Look up, and be brave and help me. Did you see Damaris eat anything that you did not eat with her?"
"Little things that grow around the big tree where it is wetter, we picked for our furniture," Love said at once. "Damaris said you cooked them and they were good. So then she said we would play some of them was furniture, and some of them was our dinner. And I didn't eat them, for they were like thin leather, only soft, and I felt of them, and couldn't eat them. But Damaris did eat them."
"Toadstools!" cried Constance with a gasp. "Toadstools, Love! Did they look like little tables? And did Damaris call them mushrooms?"
"Yes, like little tables," Love nodded his head hard. "All full underneath with soft crimped----"
But Constance waited for no more. With a cry she was on her feet and running like the wind, calling back over her shoulder to Giles:
"I'll come quick! I know! I know! Tell Father I know!"
"She hath gone to Doctor Fuller's house," said Priscilla, watching Constance's flying figure, her hair unbound and streaming like a burnished banner behind her as she ran to get her weapon to fight with Death. "No girl ever ran as she can. Come, Giles; obey her. Tell your father and Mistress Hopkins that mayhap Constance can save the child."
They turned toward the house, and Constance sped on.
"Nightshade! The belladonna!" she was saying to herself as she ran. "I know the phial; I know its place. O, God, give me time, and give me wit, and do Thou the rest!" Past power to explain, she swept aside with a vehement arm the woman who found needed shelter for herself in Doctor Fuller's house, and kept it for him till his wife should come to Plymouth.
Into the crude laboratory and pharmacy--in which the doctor had allowed her to work with him, of the contents of which he had taught her so much for an emergency that she had little dreamed would so closely affect herself when it came--Constance flew, and turned to the shelf where stood, in their dark phials, the few poisons which the doctor kept ready to do beneficent work for him.