“What a burning fever!” she murmured.  Then she added, in a tone of anxiety,

“How strangely she works her mouth!  I don’t like this constant rolling of her head.  What can it mean?  Ella!  Ella!”

And she shook the child again.

“Want some water, love?”

The mother’s voice did not appear to reach the locked sense of hearing.

Mrs. Wilkinson now lifted a glass of water from the bureau near by, and raising the head of Ella with one hand, applied, with the other, the water to her lips.  About a table-spoonful was poured into her mouth.  It was not swallowed, but ran out upon the pillow.

“Mercy! mercy! what can ail the child!” exclaimed Mrs. Wilkinson, a look of fear coming into her face.

A little while she stood over her, and then leaving her place beside the crib, she hurried out into the passage, and, pausing at the bottom of the stairs leading to the room above, called several times—­

“Anna!  Anna!  Anna!”

But no answer came.  The domestic thus summoned had fallen into her first sound sleep, and the voice did not penetrate her ears.

“Anna!” once more called Mrs. Wilkinson.

There was no response, but the reverberation of her own voice returned upon the oppressive silence.  She now hurried back to her sick child, whose low, troubled moaning had not been hushed for a moment.

There was no apparent change.  Ella lay with her half-opened eyes, showing, by the white line, that the balls were turned up unnaturally; with her crimsoned cheeks, and with the nervous motions of her lips and slight twitchings of her hands, at first noticed with anxiety and alarm.

Mrs. Wilkinson was but little familiar with sickness in children; and knew not the signs of real danger—­or, rather, what unusual signs such as those now apparent in Ella really indicated.  But she was sufficiently alarmed, and stood over the child, with her eyes fixed eagerly upon her.

Again she tried to arouse her from so strange and unnatural a state, but with as little effect as at first.

“Oh, my husband!” she at length exclaimed, clasping her hands together, and glancing upward, with tearful eyes, “why are you away from me now?  Oh, why did you break your promise to return hours and hours ago?”

Then covering her face with her hands, she sobbed and wept, until, startled by a sharp, unnatural cry from the lips of Ella, her attention was once more fixed upon her suffering child.

CHAPTER III.

“Now, what will you take?” said Henry Ellis, as he entered, with the weak and yielding Wilkinson, the bar-room of Parker’s tavern.

“Any thing you choose to call for,” replied Wilkinson, whose mind was turning homeward, and who wished to be there.  “In fact, I don’t really want any thing.  Call for two glasses of cold water.  These will leave our heads clear.”