When I was taken up I was thought to be dead.  I was perfectly white, and the physician who first saw me said that no pulse was perceptible.  But after a time consciousness returned; the wounds, though painful, were none of them dangerous, and the most alarming effects of the accident passed away.  My old nurse cared for me tenderly day and night, and my father, who had been almost distracted in the first hours which followed the injury, hoped and believed that no permanent evil results would be found to result from it.  My cousin Laura was of course deeply distressed to feel that her thoughtlessness had been the cause of so grave an accident.  As soon as I had somewhat recovered she came to see me, very penitent, very anxious to make me forget the alarm she had caused me, with all its consequences.  I was in the nursery sitting up in my bed, bandaged, but not in any pain, as it seemed, for I was quiet and to all appearance in a perfectly natural state of feeling.  As Laura came near me I shrieked and instantly changed color.  I put my hand upon my heart as if I had been stabbed, and fell over, unconscious.  It was very much the same state as that in which I was found immediately after my fall.

The cause of this violent and appalling seizure was but too obvious.  The approach of the young girl and the dread that she was about to lay her hand upon me had called up the same train of effects which the moment of terror and pain had already occasioned.  The old nurse saw this in a moment.  “Go! go!” she cried to Laura, “go, or the child will die!” Her command did not have to be repeated.  After Laura had gone I lay senseless, white and cold as marble, for some time.  The doctor soon came, and by the use of smart rubbing and stimulants the color came back slowly to my cheeks and the arrested circulation was again set in motion.

It was hard to believe that this was anything more than a temporary effect of the accident.  There could be little doubt, it was thought by the doctor and by my father, that after a few days I should recover from this morbid sensibility and receive my cousin as other infants receive pleasant-looking young persons.  The old nurse shook her head.  “The girl will be the death of the child,” she said, “if she touches him or comes near him.  His heart stopped beating just as when the girl snatched him out of my arms, and he fell over the balcony railing.”  Once more the experiment was tried, cautiously, almost insidiously.  The same alarming consequences followed.  It was too evident that a chain of nervous disturbances had been set up in my system which repeated itself whenever the original impression gave the first impulse.  I never saw my cousin Laura after this last trial.  Its result had so distressed her that she never ventured again to show herself to me.

If the effect of the nervous shock had stopped there, it would have been a misfortune for my cousin and myself, but hardly a calamity.  The world is wide, and a cousin or two more or less can hardly be considered an essential of existence.  I often heard Laura’s name mentioned, but never by any one who was acquainted with all the circumstances, for it was noticed that I changed color and caught at my breast as if I wanted to grasp my heart in my hand whenever that fatal name was mentioned.