“Jim is sick,” she said, with a sob.  “He—­he doesn’t want anything to eat, and his head aches.  He—­said for me—­to go away and let him die!”

Dal dropped the hammer immediately, and Lollie Mercer sat petrified, with a bonbon halfway to her mouth.  For, of course, it was unexpected, finding sentiment of any kind in Bella, and none of them knew about the scene in the den in the small hours of the morning.

“Sick!” Aunt Selina said, from a hall chair.  “Sick!  Where?”

“All over,” Bella quavered.  “His poor head is hot, and he’s thirsty, but he doesn’t want anything but water.”

“Great Scott!” Dal said suddenly.  “Suppose he should—­Bella, are you telling us all his symptoms?”

Bella put down her handkerchief and got up.  From her position on the stairs she looked down on us with something of her old haughty manner.

“If he is ill, you may blame yourselves, all of you,” she said cruelly.  “You taunted him with being—­fat, and laughed at him, until he stopped eating the things he should eat.  And he has been exercising—­on the roof, until he has worn himself out.  And now—­he is ill.  He—­he has a rash.”

Everybody jumped at that, and we instinctively moved away from Bella.  She was quite cold and scornful by that time.

“A rash!” Max exclaimed.  “What sort of rash?”

“I did not see it,” Bella said with dignity, and turning, she went up the stairs.

There was a great deal of excitement, and nobody except Mr. Harbison was willing to go near Jim.  He went up at once with Bella, while Max and Dal sat cravenly downstairs and wondered if we would all take it, and Anne told about a man she knew who had it, and was deaf and dumb and blind when he recovered.

Mr. Harbison came down after a while, and said that the rash was there, right enough, and that Jim absolutely refused to be quarantined; that he insisted that he always got a rash from early strawberries and that if he did have anything, since they were so touchy he hoped they would all get it.  If they locked him in he would kick the door down.

We had a long conference in the hall, with Bella sitting red-eyed and objecting to every suggestion we made.  And finally we arranged to shut Jim up in one of the servants’ bedrooms with a sheet wrung out of disinfectant hung over the door.  Bella said she would sit outside in the hall and read to him through the closed door, so finally he gave a grudging consent.  But he was in an awful humor.  Max and Dal put on rubber gloves and helped him over, and they said afterward that the way he talked was fearful.  And there was a telephone in the maid’s room, and he kept asking for things every five minutes.

When the doctor came he said it was too early to tell positively, and he ordered him liquid diet and said he would be back that evening.