There was no resisting the potent monosyllable as the sweet but firm voice delivered it.  At noon the two maidens rang at the doctor’s door.  The servant said he had been at the house after his morning visits, but found a hasty summons to Mr. Kirkwood, who had been taken suddenly ill and wished to see him at once.  Was the illness dangerous?  The servant-maid did n’t know, but thought it was pretty bad, for Mr. Paul came in as white as a sheet, and talked all sorts of languages which she couldn’t understand, and took on as if he thought Mr. Kirkwood was going to die right off.

And so the hazardous question about sending the letter was disposed of, at least for the present.

XVII

Dr. Butts’s patient.

The physician found Maurice just regaining his heat after a chill of a somewhat severe character.  He knew too well what this meant, and the probable series of symptoms of which it was the prelude.  His patient was not the only one in the neighborhood who was attacked in this way.  The autumnal fevers to which our country towns are subject, in the place of those “agues,” or intermittents, so largely prevalent in the South and West, were already beginning, and Maurice, who had exposed himself in the early and late hours of the dangerous season, must be expected to go through the regular stages of this always serious and not rarely fatal disease.

Paolo, his faithful servant, would fain have taken the sole charge of his master during his illness.  But the doctor insisted that he must have a nurse to help him in his task, which was likely to be long and exhausting.

At the mention of the word “nurse” Paolo turned white, and exclaimed in an agitated and thoroughly frightened way,

“No! no nuss! no woman!  She kill him!  I stay by him day and night, but don’ let no woman come near him,—­if you do, he die!”

The doctor explained that he intended to send a man who was used to taking care of sick people, and with no little effort at last succeeded in convincing Paolo that, as he could not be awake day and night for a fortnight or three weeks, it was absolutely necessary to call in some assistance from without.  And so Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was to play the leading part in that drama of nature’s composing called a typhoid fever, with its regular bedchamber scenery, its properties of phials and pill-boxes, its little company of stock actors, its gradual evolution of a very simple plot, its familiar incidents, its emotional alternations, and its denouement, sometimes tragic, oftener happy.

It is needless to say that the sympathies of all the good people of the village, residents and strangers, were actively awakened for the young man about whom they knew so little and conjectured so much.  Tokens of their kindness came to him daily:  flowers from the woods and from the gardens; choice fruit grown in the open air or under glass, for there were some fine houses surrounded by well-kept grounds, and greenhouses and graperies were not unknown in the small but favored settlement.