“I am quite sick of hearing that word excitement!” said Fred, impatiently.

“Almost as tired as of having your pulse felt,” said Aunt Geoffrey.  “But yet I must ask you to submit to that disagreeable necessity.”

Fred moved pettishly, but as he could not refuse, he only told Henrietta that he could not bear any one to look at him while his pulse was felt.

“Will you fetch me a candle, my dear?” said Aunt Geoffrey, amazed as well as terrified by the fearful rapidity of the throbs, and trying to acquire sufficient composure to count them calmly.  The light came, and still she held his wrist, beginning her reckoning again and again, in the hope that it was only some momentary agitation that had so quickened them.

“What! ’tis faster?” asked Fred, speaking in a hasty alarmed tone, when she released him at last.

“You are flushed, Fred,” she answered very quietly, though she felt full of consternation.  “Yes, faster than it ought to be; I think you had better not sit up any longer this evening, or you will sleep no better than last night.”

“Very well,” said Fred.

“Then I will ring for Stephens,” said she.

The first thing she did on leaving his room was to go to her own, and there write a note to young Mr. Carey, giving an account of the symptoms that had caused her so much alarm.  As she wrote them down without exaggeration, and trying to give each its just weight, going back to recollect the first unfavourable sign, she suddenly remembered that as she left her sister’s room, she had seen Mrs. Langford, whom she had left with Fred, at the door of the store-closet.  Could she have been giving him any of her favourite nourishing things?  Mrs. Geoffrey Langford could hardly believe that either party could have acted so foolishly, yet when she remembered a few words that had passed about the jelly that morning at breakfast, she could no longer doubt, and bitterly reproached herself for not having kept up a stricter surveillance.  Of her suspicion she however said nothing, but sealing her note, she went down to the drawing-room, told Mr. Langford that she did not think Fred quite so well that evening, and asked him if he did not think it might be better to let Philip Carey know.  He agreed instantly, and rang the bell to order a servant to ride to Allonfield; but Mrs. Langford, who could not bear any one but Geoffrey to act without consulting her, pitied man and horse for being out so late, and opined that Beatrice forgot that she was not in London, where the medical man could be called in so easily.

It was fortunate that it was the elder Beatrice instead of the younger, for provoked as she already had been before with the old lady, it was not easy even for her to make a cheerful answer.  “Well, it is very kind in you to attend to my London fancies,” said she; “I think if we can do anything to spare him such a night as the last, it should be tried.”