“But why should you sit up, Miss Galindo?  It will tire you sadly.”

“Not it.  You see, there is Gregson’s mother to keep quiet for she sits by her lad, fretting and sobbing, so that I’m afraid of her disturbing Mr. Gray; and there’s Mr. Gray to keep quiet, for Doctor Trevor says his life depends on it; and there is medicine to be given to the one, and bandages to be attended to for the other; and the wild horde of gipsy brothers and sisters to be turned out, and the father to be held in from showing too much gratitude to Mr. Gray, who can’t hear it,—­and who is to do it all but me?  The only servant is old lame Betty, who once lived with me, and would leave me because she said I was always bothering—­(there was a good deal of truth in what she said, I grant, but she need not have said it; a good deal of truth is best let alone at the bottom of the well), and what can she do,—­deaf as ever she can be, too?”

So Miss Galindo went her ways; but not the less was she at her post in the morning; a little crosser and more silent than usual; but the first was not to be wondered at, and the last was rather a blessing.

Lady Ludlow had been extremely anxious both about Mr. Gray and Harry Gregson.  Kind and thoughtful in any case of illness and accident, she always was; but somehow, in this, the feeling that she was not quite—­what shall I call it?—­“friends” seems hardly the right word to use, as to the possible feeling between the Countess Ludlow and the little vagabond messenger, who had only once been in her presence,—­that she had hardly parted from either as she could have wished to do, had death been near, made her more than usually anxious.  Doctor Trevor was not to spare obtaining the best medical advice the county could afford:  whatever he ordered in the way of diet, was to be prepared under Mrs. Medlicott’s own eye, and sent down from the Hall to the Parsonage.  As Mr. Horner had given somewhat similar directions, in the case of Harry Gregson at least, there was rather a multiplicity of counsellors and dainties, than any lack of them.  And, the second night, Mr. Horner insisted on taking the superintendence of the nursing himself, and sat and snored by Harry’s bedside, while the poor, exhausted mother lay by her child,—­thinking that she watched him, but in reality fast asleep, as Miss Galindo told us; for, distrusting any one’s powers of watching and nursing but her own, she had stolen across the quiet village street in cloak and dressing-gown, and found Mr. Gray in vain trying to reach the cup of barley-water which Mr. Horner had placed just beyond his reach.