because
Nellie Atterbury lived in the healthiest quarter of the town, that he
spent so much of his time at her house. There was no use denying or
qualifying it. An epidemic of typhoid fever had stolen upon Joppa as a
thief in the night, and there was no knowing what house it would not
enter next, to rob it of its dearest and best.

Through all this slowly increasing alarm, Phebe Lane had been living as
in a dream. It was as if she found herself back in that old life before
she knew Halloway, when people bored her, and when there seemed nothing
worth doing or worth looking forward to, though the days were so full of
duties. She had been at the rectory but once since Gerald left, and that
was to the Bible-class, and when Mrs. Whittridge had tried to detain her
afterward, she had pleaded some pressing business at home, though
chancing to look out of her window a little later, Soeur Angelique was
almost sure that through the closed shutters in Phebe's room, she saw a
dim shadow of the girl's head laid down listlessly on her folded arms on
the sill. But when the epidemic reached its height, Phebe seemed
suddenly to awaken from her languor and rouse herself to action. Here was
something worth doing at last. Once more her soft, sweet whistling
sounded bird-like through the house. The spring came back to her step,
the brightness to her eyes, and more than the old tenderness to her
voice, as she went from one shunned sick-room to another like a living
sunbeam, bringing the freshness of a May morning with her, and seeming
always to come solely for her own pure pleasure. And when poor motherless
Janet Mudge was struck down too with the dreaded disease, and had no one
but servants to care for her, her own aunt, who lived in Joppa, being
afraid to so much as go to the house to ask after her, it seemed
perfectly natural to everybody that Phebe Lane, who had no cares at home
and no one really dependent upon her, should quietly install herself as
Janet's nurse. It was a very proper and natural thing for Phebe to do,
everybody said, and thought no more about it. It was so manifestly a duty
sent direct from Heaven, labelled "For Phebe Lane."

"I met Dr. Dennis to-day," said Halloway one afternoon, coming into his
sister's room and throwing himself wearily down on the sofa. "He says
Janet Mudge is better,--is really going to get well."

Soeur Angelique put aside her work and came to sit by the sofa and stroke
her boy's head. If the doc