They all looked at her.  She tried to smile up at them, but the unwilling tears came instead.  “I’ll be all right, if I can just lie down a while,” she said.

Then they rallied, in alarm.  Not one of them but loved Sally as the dearest thing in the world, however careless of her comfort one or another of them might now and then seem to be.

Max put a brotherly arm round her.  “Tired out, little girl?” he asked, gently, and led her toward the couch in the living-room.

“All for those ungrateful duffers!” As he followed to put a pillow under his sister’s head Alec looked as if he would like to knock at least one of the “duffers” down.

“She’s had all she could do to keep up, for twenty-four hours!” cried Bob, pulling a small knit rug over Sally’s feet.

She managed to smile at them, choking back quite unwonted tears—­Sally was no baby, to cry at a touch of fatigue.  She had known they would be very good to her, once they understood.

It was Uncle Timothy who at once became practical.  He drew up a chair beside the couch and took Sally’s wrist in his, counting carefully.  Then he laid his hand on her forehead, against her flushed cheeks.  He bade her put out her tongue, and surveying that tell-tale member through his spectacles, came to his conclusions.  These he did not inflict upon Sally, who had closed her eyes, and lay like a tired child.  Instead, he beckoned Max into another room, and said, “She’s sick, sure enough.  Pulse jumping, skin hot and dry—­and too tired to move.  Suppose you telephone Doctor Wood to look in this morning.”

Max lost no time.  He went down stairs to telephone, that Sally-might not hear, and in his suddenly roused anxiety made his message so urgent that the doctor arrived within the hour.  He was the family physician long employed by the Lanes, and he had known Sally from her babyhood.  It took him but the space of a brief, yet thorough, examination to form his opinion.  He communicated it, under his breath, to Sally’s “four men,” who had tiptoed anxiously out into the hall where he had beckoned them.

“It looks mighty like typhoid,” he said—­and they winced at the word.  “It’s too soon to be certain, but there’s more or less of it about.  You can’t take care of her here, and she’ll be far better off at the hospital.  I’ll send a carriage and a nurse by twelve o’clock.”

So do hours change outlooks.  The last thing any one of the Lanes had expected to be doing at noon on that peaceful spring Sunday was to be standing in the vestibule of the Winona flats, watching the little sister being conveyed away, in the care of a nurse.  But so it was.

“Don’t look so blue, dears,” Sally had murmured, as she left them.  “I’ll soon be back, you know.”

“Heaven grant it!” ejaculated Uncle Timothy, in his heart.  As for the others, they filed silently up stairs again, and into the empty room.  It was full of all the things that had seemed to make it home—­with Sally there.  But somehow it looked empty now.