Joseph and Benjamin had seen enough for their own curiosity.  It was a more terrible sight than they had anticipated, and they felt a great longing to get out of this stricken den into the purer air without.  Joseph had laid a hand on his brother’s arm to draw him away, when he was alarmed by seeing his brother’s eyes fixed upon the far corner of the room with such an extraordinary expression of amaze and horror, that for a moment he feared he must have been suddenly stricken by the plague and was going off into the awful delirium he had heard described.

A poignant fear and remorse seized him, lest he had been the means of bringing his brother into this peril and having caused his attack, if indeed it were one, and he pulled him harder by the arm to get him away.  But with a strange choked cry Benjamin broke from him, and running across the room he flung himself upon his knees by the side of a bed, crying in a lamentable voice: 

“Reuben—­Reuben—­Reuben!”

It was Joseph’s turn now to gaze in horror and dismay.  Could that be Reuben—­that cadaverous, death-like creature, with the livid look of a plague patient, lying like one in a trance which can only end in the awakening of death?  Was Benjamin dreaming? or was it really their brother?  But how could he by any possibility be here, so far away from home, so utterly beyond the limits of his own district?

The doctor had approached Benjamin and had pulled him back from the bedside quickly, though not unkindly.

“What are you doing here, child?” he said.  “Have we not enough upon our hands without having sound persons mad enough to seek to add to the numbers of the sick?  Is he a relation of yours?

“Well, well, well, he will be looked after here better than you can do it.  Your brother?  Well, he has been four days here, and is one of those I have hope for.  The tumours have discharged.  He is suffering now from weakness and fever; but he might get well, especially if we could move him out of this pestilential air.  Go home, children, and tell your friends that if they have a place to take him to he will not infect them now, and will have a better chance.  But you must not linger here.  It may be death to you; though it is true enough that many come seeking their friends who go away and take no hurt.  No one can say who is safe and who is not.  But get you gone, get you gone.  Your brother shall be well looked to, I say.  We have none so many who recover that we can afford to let those slip back for whom there is a chance!”

He had pushed the boys by this time into the garden, and was speaking to them there.  He was a kind man, if blunt, and habit had not bred indifference in him to the sufferings of those about him.  He told the boys that one of the strangest features about the plague patients was the rapid recovery they often made when once the poison was discharged by the breaking of the swellings, and the rapidity with which the infection ceased when these broken tumours had healed.  Reuben’s case had seemed desperate enough when he was brought in, but now he was in a fair way of recovery.  If he could be taken to better air, he would probably be a sound man quickly.  Even as he was, he might well recover.