They drove quietly through the dusty, sultry streets, and came in a few minutes to Lammermoor. Mrs. Raymond conversed all the time in a low, monotonous voice, like the tones of some one talking in their sleep, chiefly in defence of her husband, though Jeannie had said no word about him.

“Colonel Raymond is so very strong himself,” she said, “and I think sometimes that he doesn’t quite make allowance for the children. But he disagrees with me, and I dare say he is right. He always finds a good walk, he says, the best cure for a headache or a feeling of tiredness; he says such things are best walked off. But with children, you know, it may be different; they are so easily tired, and the Colonel always walks very fast. But Maria’s walk yesterday certainly did her no good, and my husband was as anxious as myself to-day that some one should see her,[249] and the doctors were all out. That was why I came for you, and it is so good of you to come. Colonel Raymond is terrified for the child; he does not at all like illness in the house. He has seen so much illness in In—in his service. And here we are!”

Jeannie followed Mrs. Raymond up the narrow gravel walk and up the three stone steps, with balls at the top and bottom, into Lammermoor. A strong smell of tobacco and camphor was apparent in the hall.

“Colonel Raymond says smoking is the best disinfectant,” explained his wife, “and he has been sprinkling camphor about in the study and in the dining-room. He says camphor is a good disinfectant, too.”

Jeannie sniffed.

“I should recommend you to open all the doors and windows in the house and let in some fresh air,” she said. “Fresh air is better than either camphor or tobacco.”

“I will tell my husband what you say,” said Mrs. Raymond. “Will you step into the drawing-room a moment, Miss Avesham? I know Robert would like to see you.[250]”

“I really haven’t time,” said Jeannie. “I must be back at the hospital at three.”

“Then perhaps you will come upstairs straight?” said the other.

The house reeked of the Colonel’s disinfectants as they mounted the stairs. On the first floor the door into his dressing-room was just open, disclosing a view of him putting some clothes into a small valise, with a cigar in his mouth, and in his shirt-sleeves.

“Oh, here is Robert,” said Mrs. Raymond, in her thin voice. “Robert, here is Miss Avesham very kindly come to see Maria. What are you doing, dear?”

The Colonel treated Jeannie to his best military bow, and took the cigar out of his mouth, but his usual heartiness was absent from his greeting.

“Very kind of you, very kind, I am sure, Miss Avesham,” he said, “to come and see our poor little Maria. The hot weather—she feels the hot weather, poor child.”

A curious, grim look came into Jeannie’s face. Like most people who have the salt of courage necessary for the conduct of life she felt unkindly toward cowardice. She noticed[251] also that this bluff and gallant gentleman did not advance to meet her, but rather retreated farther into his room. She remembered also the confidence that Miss Clifford had made her on the stair-case, and she hardened her heart.

“How do you do, Colonel Raymond?” she said, still advancing toward him, but the Colonel retreated behind his open luggage.

“What are you doing, Robert?” asked his wife again, in the same voice.

Colonel Raymond did not reply at once, and Jeannie did not break his silence.

“Well, I’m packing,” he said, at length. “If there’s illness in the house a man is only in the way. Better make myself scarce, you know; better make myself scarce.”

Jeannie looked at him fixedly for a moment. Then, breaking into a smile:

“You need not be frightened,” she said. “For any one well over forty there is really no risk, even when typhoid is about. And I thought you said it was only the hot weather that had tried your daughter. Well, Mrs. Raymond, I have to be back at the hospital[252] very soon, and I think we had better go and see your daughter at once.”

She turned her back on the Colonel, and followed Mrs. Raymond to a higher story.

“My husband is very careful about infection,” said the latter as they mounted the stairs. “That is so right, is it not? But I did not know he was thinking of going away.”

“He is quite right to be careful of infection,” said Jeannie. “But there is no need for him to go; and, indeed, we do not know if there is any reason yet.”

Maria slept in the same room with one of her sisters, the eldest having the dignity of a room to herself. Jeannie cast one glance at the little haggard, fevered face, and took out her thermometer.

“Put it under your tongue, dear,” she said, “and keep it there till I take it away. Don’t bite it. No, it’s not medicine; it doesn’t taste nasty.”

She glanced at it at the end of half a minute.

“That’s all right,” she said, reassuringly. “How do you feel?[253]”

“Headache,” piped the little feeble voice from the bed.

“We’ll soon make that all right then,” said Jeannie. “Now lie quite still and covered up, and your mother will come to you again.”

“And I sha’n’t go a walk to-day?” said Maria.

“No, you shall stay in bed and rest. You are a little tired.”

Jeannie closed the door when they came out.

“Yes, she has high fever,” she said to Mrs. Raymond. “Go and sit with her, and don’t let her raise herself in bed. I am afraid it is typhoid, but we can’t tell yet. I will see you again before I leave the house. I am just going to speak to your husband, unless you will take the responsibility of what you do.”

“You must speak to him, then,” said Mrs. Raymond. “But please remember, dear Miss Avesham, how careful he is about infection.”

“Yes, I will remember,” said Jeannie.

The dressing-room door was shut when[254] she went downstairs again, and she knocked at it. It flew open, and it seemed to Jeannie that the Colonel thought he was opening to his wife.

“I want to speak to you, Colonel Raymond,” she said. “Oh, please don’t apologize for the state of your room. I have only a minute, and you need not come downstairs.”

“You have seen Maria?” asked the Colonel.

“Yes; she is ill. She must be treated as if she had typhoid.”

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Why, I have seen men die of it like flies!”

“They are dying of it like flies here,” said Jeannie. “Now I don’t want to dissuade you from going away, though for a man of your age there is really no risk. Still there is no telling what fright will do. If you were frightened of whooping-cough you might still catch it. But I want to know this. Will you send your daughter to the hospital? She will be as well looked after there as here; it will take anxiety off your wife, and you[255] can take the other two children away with you. Might I trouble you to open the window? This mixture of camphor and cigar is overpowering.”

“She would go as a paying patient?” asked the Colonel.

“Of course,” said Jeannie.

“Then, upon my soul, Miss Avesham, I think we’ll keep her here. She’ll be better looked after in her own home. My wife is an excellent nurse, and any little delicacies she might require will be more easily supplied at home.”

“As you will,” said Jeannie. “If, as I am afraid, it is typhoid, you will of course have to have two trained nurses, by day and night. Mrs. Raymond told me the decision would be with you.”

Colonel Raymond looked undecided, and slipped on his coat.

“Very difficult to decide,” he said, “very difficult. Which do you recommend, Miss Avesham?”

“It is difficult to choose,” said Jeannie. “Ah, it lightened again; I hope we shall have rain. As you say, perhaps she would[256] be more comfortable here. Please tell me at once. I am going straight back to the hospital, and I will tell them to send an ambulance if you decide she should go.”

“Well, she shall go, she shall go,” said the Colonel. “Nothing like proper treatment.”

“I think you have decided right,” said Jeannie. “The other child who sleeps in the same room must, of course, be removed at once. You have a spare room? If not, no doubt you could make her a bed here in your dressing-room.”

“That would be possible,” said the Colonel.

“And since the case is removed,” said Jeannie, “it will no longer be necessary for you to go away. Please don’t trouble to come down, as I can let myself out.”

As Jeannie left the house she noticed that the south was black with cloud. The texture of it was different to what it had been during the last fortnight of congested weather. The sky was no longer leaden and dry, but moist and dark with imminent rain. A little wind was beginning to blow in fitful gusts from[257] the same quarter, and leaves nearly dead danced with clouds of whirling dust about the road. Already in the air was the hint of a change; her heart was lighter, for the two hours had been like a caress to her troubled spirit. She had been worn with fruitless effort; the collar of the suffering world chafed her, but one hand brought healing to her, and her heart was holpen.

She reported the case of probable typhoid to a doctor, and went back to her ward. Nurse James met her with a smiling face, and when Nurse James smiled it was not without reason.

“That girl you left so ill this morning is no worse,” she said. “If anything, she is a little stronger. Dr. Maitland thinks that the sudden drop in the temperature may be after all a sudden turn for the better. He says it occasionally happens. Certainly if there had been perforation we should have known by now. Watch her very carefully.”

All the afternoon remote lightning winked distantly in the sky, and the answering thunder got ever gradually louder and more continuous. The wind had veered into[258] the north-west, and was coming in sudden claps and buffets of hot air, and the storm, a distant rack of coppery, hard-edged cloud, distinct and different from the heavy, soft vapours overhead, was approaching slowly from the opposite quarter. The oppression of the air was as intolerable as ever, and strangely more acute, the remote heavens seemed to be pressing down on the earth like a hot lid over a stewing pot. But in the ward there was a general feeling of cheerfulness, easy to perceive, hard to define, a survival doubtless in man of the curious instinct in animals which makes them smell an approaching storm and warns the domestic sort that an earthquake is coming. The earth and the fever-stricken town were waiting for a change, which could not be for the worse. Of them all, only the girl who had been almost despaired of that morning lay quite still and apathetic, and again and again Jeannie went to her bedside betwixt hope and fear.

About five the storm burst in riotous elements. For an hour before that the strain had been almost unbearable. The forked flashes of lightning, the dry growl of the[259] thunder had approached nearer and nearer, and all the earth seemed to pause, finger on lip, for the catastrophe. Now and then a few rain-drops as big as pennies fell down upon the pavements, and vanished again like a breath on a frosty morning on the hot, thirsty stones. Then suddenly the heavens burst, a ribbon of blue fire leaped downward from the zenith, and the noise of the thunder was as if the sky had cracked. One woman half raised herself in bed and cried, “Lord, have mercy!” but at the end of the words came a sound as if a thousand snakes had hissed in the street outside, the blessed whisper of rain, and all was changed.

The girl who was so ill moved slightly and laid one hand outside the bed-clothes; the woman who had cried aloud lay back in bed smiling; Jeannie felt a pulse rise in her throat and subside again, and outside the hiss of the snakes changed to a drumming on the roof, which got gradually louder and more insistent. Perpendicularly it fell, like rods of steel, and as the seconds added themselves into minutes the roofs, drains, and gutter-pipes began to gurgle and chuckle to them[260]selves, and never was there a song so sweet. These guttural sounds grew ever fuller, and in a few minutes, with a great splash, they choked and overflowed in bubbling laughter. Again and yet again the lightning tore a path through the clouds, and at each reverberation in the baptism of fire the earth grew regenerate and young. The hot, stifling smell of the last six weeks turned to something infinitely fresh and vigorous, and down the pavements and over the roads began to flow the flushing streams.

Five was the hour of the afternoon milk and beef-tea, and Carmel hour, as it seemed to Jeannie, of the evening sacrifice. Food and the healing rain were poured out, a sign of His hand, abundant, health-giving. Exultantly she went her rounds, and found smiling faces. One only did not smile, for the girl lay in deep, natural sleep, as if the racket and tumult outside were a lullaby to her. Outside it had grown very dark; the wind had ceased; but as if to compensate for the darkness, from moment to moment an intolerable brilliance of lightning made a tenfold brightness. It was as if the town was be[261]leaguered by the artillery of the sky, and from right and left fired unceasingly the guns of heaven. In the intervals between the flashes colour was blotted out from the world, dark roofs and black trees huddled together to meet a sky scarcely more luminous. Then in a moment the colour would be restored. The geraniums in the boxes outside the window, black before, leaped into their scarlet liveries; the black elm-tops, a dark blob, became an outlined company of green leaves, and the tiled roofs of the houses were red once more. A noise as of a hundred sacks of marbles poured out on to a wooden floor endorsed the truths, and once again the world became shadow and the click of gutters.

By six the first violence of the storm was momentarily abated. Sullen, blessed rain-clouds hung ready to burst, but when Jeannie and Miss Fortescue came to leave the hospital they passed unwetted down to Bolton Street. In Jeannie’s head an easy melody of love and joy bubbled and repeated, and listening to it she was silent. But Aunt Em spoke.

“I wish I had brought goloshes,” she said.[262] “But I am glad this rain has come; it will flush the drains.”

It was Miss Fortescue’s habit, though those who knew he............