Though Jane’s attacks were familiar occurrences, they never failed to produce an immediate panic in the household.  As a child of nine, Gabriella remembered being aroused in the middle of a bitter night, hastily wrapped in her mother’s shawl and a blanket, and hurried up the staircase to Jane, who had broken her engagement to Charley the evening before.  Jane, pale, angelic, palpitating, appeared to draw her last breath as they entered, while the old doctor supported her in his arms, and Marthy, in a frenzy of service, rattled the dead embers in the grate.  It had all been horribly vivid, and when Jane had murmured Charley’s name in a dying voice, they had stood, trembling and blue with cold, around her bed, waiting for the end.  But the end had not come, and three months later Jane was married to Charley Gracey.

After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane’s attacks with a freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but one had occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a fire burning in her mother’s room and a kettle singing merrily on the fender.  The elder children, with their flannel petticoats pinned over their thin little shoulders, were sitting straight and stiff on a box couch which had been turned into a bed, and their strange little faces looked wan and peaked in the firelight.

Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her sister.  Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that ghastly pallor or made her eyes sink so far back in her head.  She lay quite motionless on the far side of the big tester bed, staring straight up at the ceiling with an expression which terrified Gabriella, though she had seen it on her sister’s face at least a dozen times before to-night.

“Has Arthur gone?” asked Mrs. Carr in a voice that sounded as if she were running.

“Yes.  Did you want him, mother?”

“I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley.  Don’t you think Charley ought to be told of her condition?  She has asked for the children.”

“Have you given her the digitalis?”

“I can’t make her swallow it.  There are the drops on the table by the bed.  My hands tremble so I had to measure them three times.”

Taking the glass from the table, Gabriella bent over her sister and implored her to swallow the drops, but, without appearing to hear her voice, Jane still stared blankly upward, with the rigid, convulsed look of a woman who has been stricken with dumbness.  Her flaxen hair, damp with camphor, which Mrs. Carr had wildly splashed on her forehead, clung flat and close to her head, while the only pulse in her body seemed to beat in irregular, spasmodic throbs in her throat.