“I, too, will go with you.  Stay with me; don’t leave me!”

She stopped, put out her hand, as if to make sure of Olympia, then broke into low but convulsive sobs.  Her father, with the doctor, entered the room; but at the sight Kate turned her head to the wall, crying, piteously: 

“No, no—­not here, not here!  I can’t see him now!  Oh, spare me!  I—­I—­”

“Do your duty, doctor,” Boone said, in a quick, gasping tone, and with an uncertain step quit the chamber.  Olympia explained to the physician that Kate had heard painful news from an unexpected quarter, and that her illness was more nervous than physical.

“I don’t know about that,” the doctor said, decisively.  He felt her pulse, then with a quick start of surprise raised her head and examined the tongue and lining of the palate.  A still graver look settled on his face as he tested the breath and action of the heart.  When he had apparently satisfied himself he turned to Olympia with a perturbed air, and, beckoning her into the dressing-room, said: 

“Miss Sprague, this is no place for you.  Miss Boone has every symptom of typhoid fever.  She has evidently been exposed to a malarial air.  Her complaint may be even worse than typhoid—­I can’t quite make out certain whitish blotches on her skin.  I should suspect small-pox or varioloid, but that there has not been a case reported here for years.  Where has she been of late?”

Olympia turned ghastly white with horror.

“O doctor, she has been nursing Jack, who was for weeks in the small-pox ward at Point Lookout!”

“Good God!  Fly, fly the house at once!  I wondered if I could be deceived in the symptoms.  I must insist on your leaving at once.”

“But the poor girl must have some one of her own sex with her.  Whom can she get if not a friend?”

“She can get a professional nurse, and that is worth a dozen friends.  Indeed, friends will be only a drawback for the next ten days.”

He took her gently by the shoulders and pushed her out of the room.  He was an old friend of the family, and she was accustomed to his tyrannical ways.  He held her sternly under way until the front door closed and shut her out.  Then, turning into the library, he saw that the host was alone.  Closing the door, he said: 

“Mr. Boone, your daughter has been exposed to a great danger.  We may be able to save her, but it will require great patience.”

“Danger, doctor!  What do you mean?”

“Your daughter has caught the most hideous of all diseases—­small-pox!”

Elisha Boone started to his feet.  “Great God! where could she catch small-pox?”

“She caught it nursing young Sprague.  I thought you knew of that;” and the doctor regarded the incredulous, terror-stricken face of the father with bewildered fixity.  Well he might.  The first rod of the moral law had just struck him.  The vengeance he had so subtly planned had turned into retributive justice.  He had refused Kate’s prayer; he had driven her to this mad search and the contagion now periling her life, or, if it were spared, leaving her a hideous specter of herself.  This passed through his shattered mind as the doctor stood regarding him.