“Are you too sick to take interest?” she asked.

The child made no answer.  The woman rose to put her potatoes on the stove.

It was an hour later when, as Tillie still lay motionless on the settee, and Mrs. Getz was dishing up the supper and putting it on the table, which stood near the wall at one end of the kitchen, Mr. Getz came in, tired, dirty, and hungry, from the celery-beds.

The child opened her eyes at the familiar and often dreaded step, and looked up at him as he came and stood over her.

“What’s the matter?  What’s hurtin’ you, Tillie?” he asked, an unwonted kindness in his voice as he saw how ill the little girl looked.

“I don’—­know,” Tillie whispered, her heavy eyelids falling again.

“You don’ know!  You can’t be so worse if you don’ know what’s hurtin’ you!  Have you fever, or the headache, or whatever?”

He laid his rough hand on her forehead and passed it over her cheek.

“She’s some feverish,” he said, turning to his wife, who was busy at the stove.  “Full much so!”

“She had the cold a little, and I guess she’s took more to it,” Mrs. Getz returned, bearing the fried potatoes across the kitchen to the table.

“I heard the Doc talkin’ there’s smallpox handy to us, only a mile away at New Canaan,” said Getz, a note of anxiety in his voice that made the sick child wearily marvel.  Why was he anxious about her? she wondered.  It wasn’t because he liked her, as Miss Margaret did.  He was afraid of catching smallpox himself, perhaps.  Or he was afraid she would be unable to help him to-morrow, and maybe for many days, out in the celery-beds.  That was why he spoke anxiously—­not because he liked her and was sorry.

No bitterness was mingled with Tillie’s quite matter-of-fact acceptance of these conclusions.

“It would be a good much trouble to us if she was took down with the smallpox,” Mrs. Getz’s tired voice replied.

“I guess not as much as it would be to her,” the father said, a rough tenderness in his voice, and something else which Tillie vaguely felt to be a note of pain.

“Are you havin’ the Doc in fur her, then?” his wife asked.

“I guess I better, mebbe,” the man hesitated.  His thrifty mind shrank at the thought of the expense.

He turned again to Tillie and bent over her.

“Can’t you tell pop what’s hurtin’ you, Tillie?”

“No—­sir.”

Mr. Getz looked doubtfully and rather helplessly at his wife.  “It’s a bad sign, ain’t, when they can’t tell what’s hurtin’"em?”

“I don’t know what fur sign that is when they don’t feel nothin’,” she stoically answered, as she dished up her Frankfort sausages.

“If a person would just know oncet!” he exclaimed anxiously.  “Anyhow, she’s pretty much sick—­she looks it so!  I guess I better mebbe not take no risks.  I’ll send fur Doc over.  Sammy can go, then.”