Jeff lay in his darkened room, and burned with them, and with the thoughts, guesses, purposes which flamed through his mind.  Had she, that girl, known what her brother meant to do?  Had she wished him to think of her in the moment of his punishment, and had she spoken of her brother so that he might recall her, or had she had some ineffective impulse to warn him against her brother when she spoke of him?

He lay and raged in vain with his conjectures, and he did a thousand imagined murders upon Lynde in revenge of his shame.

Toward the end of the week, while his hurts were still too evident to allow him to go out-of-doors before dark, he had a note from Westover asking him to come in at once to see him.

“Your brother Jackson,” Westover wrote, “reached Boston by the New York train this morning, and is with me here.  I must tell you I think he is not at all well, but he does not know how sick he is, and so I forewarn you.  He wants to get on home, but I do not feel easy about letting him make the rest of the journey alone.  Some one ought to go with him.  I write not knowing whether you are still in Cambridge or not; or whether, if you are, you can get away at this time.  But I think you ought, and I wish, at any rate, that you would come in at once and see Jackson.  Then we can settle what had best be done.”

Jeff wrote back that he had been suffering with a severe attack of erysipelas—­he decided upon erysipelas for the time being, but he meant to let Westover know later that he had been in a row—­and the doctor would not let him go out yet.  He promised to come in as soon as he possibly could.  If Westover thought Jackson ought to be got home at once, and was not fit to travel alone, he asked him to send a hospital nurse with him.

Westover replied by Jeff’s messenger that it would worry and alarm Jackson to be put in charge of a nurse; but that he would go home with him, and they would start the next day.  He urged Jeff to come and see his brother if it was at all safe for him to do so.  But if he could not, Westover would give his mother a reassuring reason for his failure.

Mrs. Durgin did not waste any anxiety for the sickness which prevented Jeff from coming home with his brother.  She said ironically that it must be very bad, and she gave all her thought and care to Jackson.  The sick man rallied, as he prophesied he should, in his native air, and celebrated the sense and science of the last doctor he had seen in Europe, who told him that he had made a great gain, but he had better hurry home as fast as he could, for he had got all the advantage he could expect to have from his stay abroad, and now home air was the best thing for him.