“Annie Ware has the fever.”  Then I said,—­

“Annie Ware cannot die; she is too young, too strong, and we love her so.”

Then I said again,—­

“Annie Ware has the fever,” and all the time I seemed not to be thinking about her at all, but about the chrysanthemums, whose tops I still idly studied.

For weeks a malignant typhus fever had been slowly creeping about in the lower part of our village, in all the streets which had been under water in the spring freshet.

These streets were occupied chiefly by laboring people, either mill-operatives, or shopkeepers of the poorer class.  It was part of the cruel “calamity” of their “poverty” that they could not afford to have homesteads on the high plateau, which lifted itself quite suddenly from the river meadow, and made our village a by-word of beauty all through New England.

Upon this plateau were laid out streets of great regularity, shaded by grand elms, many of which had been planted by hands that had handled the ropes of the Mayflower.  Under the shade of these elms stood large old-fashioned houses, in that sort of sleepy dignity peculiar to old New England.  We who lived in these houses were also sleepy and dignified.  We knew that “under the hill,” as it was called, lived many hundreds of men and women, who were stifled in summer for want of the breezes which swept across our heights, cold in winter because the wall of our plateau shut down upon them the icy airs from the frozen river, and cut off the afternoon sun.  We were sorry for them, and we sent them cold meat and flannels sometimes; but their life was as remote from our life as if they never crossed our paths; it is not necessary to go into large cities to find sharp lines drawn between the well-to-do and the poverty-stricken.  There are, in many small villages, “districts” separated from each other by as distinct a moral distance as divides Fifth Avenue from the Five Points.

And so it had come to pass that while for weeks this malignant fever had been creeping about on the river shore, we, in our clearer, purer air, had not felt even a dread of it.  There had not been a single case of it west of the high water mark made by the terrible freshet of the previous spring.  We sent brandy and wine and beef-tea into the poor, comfortless, grief-stricken houses; and we said at tea-time that it was strange, people would persist in living down under the bank:  what could they expect? and besides, they were “so careless about drainage and ventilation.”

Now, on the highest and loveliest spot, in the richest and most beautiful house, the sweetest and fairest girl of all our village lay ill of the deadly disease.

“Annie Ware has the fever.”  I wondered if some fiend were lurking by my side, who kept saying the words over and over in my ear.  With that indescribable mixture of dulled and preternaturally sharpened sense which often marks the first moments of such distress, I walked slowly to my room, and in a short time had made all the necessary preparation for leaving home.  I felt like a thief as I stole slowly down the stairs, with my travelling-bag in my hand.  At the door I met my father.