“You were safe without it, I think, and with it you may have no fears whatever.”

He looked at her curiously again as if asking what she knew or feared, and, observing the look, Daisy said to him: 

“Do you attend the lady at the hotel?”

He bowed affirmatively and glanced uneasily at Sarah, who was looking on in surprise.

“Is she very sick?” was the next inquiry.

“Yes, very sick.”

“And does no one care for her but her husband?”

“No one.”

“Has she suffered for care—­a woman’s care, I mean?”

“Well, not exactly, and yet she might be more comfortable with a woman about her.  Women are naturally better nurses than men, and Mr. Thornton is quite worn out, but it does not make much difference now; the lady—­”

Daisy did not hear the last part of the sentence, and, bidding him good-night, she went back to the hotel as swiftly as she had left it, while the doctor stood watching the flutter of her white dress, wondering how she found it out, and if she would “tell and raise thunder generally.”

“Of course not.  I know her better than that,” he said to himself.  “Poor woman [referring then to Julia], nothing, I fear, can help her now.”

Meanwhile Daisy reached the hotel, and without going to her own room, bade Sarah tell her the way to No. ——.

“What!  Oh, Miss McDonald!  You surely are not—­” Sarah gasped, clutching at the dress, which her mistress took from her grasp, saying: 

“Yes, I am going to see that lady.  I know her, or of her, and I’m not afraid.  Must we let her die alone?”

“But your face—­your beautiful face,” Sarah said, and then Daisy did hesitate a moment, and, glancing into a hall mirror, wondered how the face she saw there, and which she knew was beautiful, would look scarred and disfigured as she had seen faces in New York.

There was a momentary conflict, and then, with an inward prayer that Heaven would protect her, she passed on down the narrow hall and knocked softly at No. ——­, while Sarah stood wringing her hands in genuine distress, and feeling as if her young mistress had gone to certain ruin.

CHAPTER XII

IN THE SICK-ROOM

Julia had the smallpox, not varioloid, but the veritable thing itself, in its most aggravated form.  Where she took it, or when, she did not know, nor did it matter.  She had it, and for ten days she had seen no one but her husband and physician, and had no care but such as Guy could give her.  He had been unremitting in his attention.  Tender and gentle as a woman, he had nursed her night and day, with no thought for himself and the risk he ran.  It was a bad disease at the best, and now in its worst type it was horrible, but Julia bore up bravely, thinking always more of others than of herself, and feeling so glad that Providence had sent them to those out-of-the-way rooms, where