shouldn’t be scared away by a red flag, like a crow from a cornfield.  There had never been a case of typhoid known in Joppa, and places were like people, they never broke out with diseases that were not already in their constitutions.  It was all arrant nonsense.  However, she was perfectly willing that Maria should make that proposed visit to her aunt in Boston if she liked, and it was quite proper that Mr. Upjohn, in the character of gallant father, should escort her there; the girl couldn’t go alone.  So every day saw some new flight from the village.  The doctors began to look overworked and very grave, and Mr. Hardcastle appeared less and less outside his gates, and took to walking always in the middle of the streets, whence he could wave a salutation to his passing friends without stopping to speak to them.  Dick said he’d like to see the fever catch him, and pursued the rough tenor of his ways fearlessly as of old, though he assured his anxious father that it was wholly because Nellie Atterbury lived in the healthiest quarter of the town, that he spent so much of his time at her house.  There was no use denying or qualifying it.  An epidemic of typhoid fever had stolen upon Joppa as a thief in the night, and there was no knowing what house it would not enter next, to rob it of its dearest and best.

Through all this slowly increasing alarm, Phebe Lane had been living as in a dream.  It was as if she found herself back in that old life before she knew Halloway, when people bored her, and when there seemed nothing worth doing or worth looking forward to, though the days were so full of duties.  She had been at the rectory but once since Gerald left, and that was to the Bible-class, and when Mrs. Whittridge had tried to detain her afterward, she had pleaded some pressing business at home, though chancing to look out of her window a little later, Soeur Angelique was almost sure that through the closed shutters in Phebe’s room, she saw a dim shadow of the girl’s head laid down listlessly on her folded arms on the sill.  But when the epidemic reached its height, Phebe seemed suddenly to awaken from her languor and rouse herself to action.  Here was something worth doing at last.  Once more her soft, sweet whistling sounded bird-like through the house.  The spring came back to her step, the brightness to her eyes, and more than the old tenderness to her voice, as she went from one shunned sick-room to another like a living sunbeam, bringing the freshness of a May morning with her, and seeming always to come solely for her own pure pleasure.  And when poor motherless Janet Mudge was struck down too with the dreaded disease, and had no one but servants to care for her, her own aunt, who lived in Joppa, being afraid to so much as go to the house to ask after her, it seemed perfectly natural to everybody that Phebe Lane, who had no cares at home and no one really dependent upon her, should quietly install herself as Janet’s nurse.  It was a very proper and natural thing for Phebe to do, everybody said, and thought no more about it.  It was so manifestly a duty sent direct from Heaven, labelled “For Phebe Lane.”