e there
before poor Hal was killed. I am Flossie Meredith, and live now with my
grandmother, at Port Rush, in Ireland."

Grey bowed low to the vivacious little lady, who went on rapidly,
gesticulating as she talked, and emphasizing what she said with most
expressive shrugs and elevations of her eyelids and nose:

"I heard what that horrid clerk at the bureau told you ailed the young
lady in No.----. A severe cold, indeed! I should think it was. It is the
typhoid fever of the very worst form, and if you are afraid of it you
had better change your room. There are awful big cracks over and under
the door. I have stopped them up with paper as well as I can, but the
air can get through, and you might take the fever. The gentleman who
occupied the room before you came, left it in a hurry when he heard of
the fever, but I don't know where he went to escape it, for it's all
over the hotel. There is an American girl on the same floor, whom they
think is dying this morning, and a young man down stairs, and two or
three more somewhere else; and yet the clerks will tell you there is not
a single case of fever in the hotel. What liars they are, to be sure!
Grandma is frightened almost to death, and burns sugar, and camphor, and
brimstone, as disinfectants, and keeps chloride of lime under her bed,
till her room smells worse, if possible, than the hotel itself. But I am
not afraid. My room adjoins Bessie's, and I am with her half the time."

"What did you say? What did you call the young lady?" Grey asked,
excitedly, and Flossie replied:

"Bessie--Bessie McPherson, from Wales. I remember now, you must know
her, for Sir Jack told me that he once spent a Christmas at Stoneleigh,
and you were there with him."

"Yes, I know her," Grey said, with a tremor in his voice, and a pallor
about his lips. "Tell me how long she has been sick, and who is with
her."

Then Flossie told him that immediately on her return home from America,
Daisy had taken Bessie with her to Switzerland, where they spent the
remainder of the summer and a part of the autumn, making their way to
Paris in October, and going on to Italy sometime in November; that she,
Flossie, had come abroad with her grandmother and had fallen in with the
McPhersons at the Italian lakes, and kept with them ever since; that
Bessie had not seemed well or happy for some weeks; and that almost
immediately after her arrival in Rome she had taken her bed and had been
rapidly growing wors