fight for it.'

In a few days the diphtheria epidemic reached terrible proportion's.
There had been one death, others were expected, and soon Robert in his
brief hours at home could find no relief in anything, so heavy was the
oppression of the day's memories. At first Catherine for the child's
sake kept away; but the little Mary was weaned, had a good Scotch nurse,
was in every way thriving, and after a day or two Catherine's craving to
help, to be with Robert in his trouble was too strong to be withstood.
But she dared not go backward and forward between her baby and the
diphtheritic children. So she bethought herself of Mrs. Elsmere's
servant, old Martha, who was still inhabiting Mrs. Elsmere's cottage
till a tenant could be found for it, and doing good service meanwhile
as an occasional parish nurse. The baby and its nurse went over to the
cottage. Catherine carried the child there, wrapped close in maternal
arms, and leaving her on old Martha's lap, went back to Robert.

Then she and he devoted themselves to a hand-to-hand fight with the
epidemic. At the climax of it, there were about twenty children down
with it in different stages, and seven cases of fever. They had two
hospital nurses; one of the better cottages, turned into a sanatorium,
accommodated the worst cases under the nurses, and Robert and Catherine,
directed by them and the doctors, took the responsibility of the rest,
he helping to nurse the boys and she the girls. Of the fever cases
Sharland's wife was the worst. A feeble creature at all times, it seemed
almost impossible she could weather through. But day after day passed,
and by dint of incessant nursing she still lived. A youth of twenty,
the main support of a mother and five or six younger children, was also
desperately ill. Robert hardly ever had him out of his thoughts, and
the boy's doglike affection for the Rector, struggling with his
deathly weakness, was like a perpetual exemplification of Ahriman and
Ormuzd--the power of life struggling with the power of death.

It was a fierce fight. Presently it seemed to the husband and wife as
though the few daily hours spent at the rectory were mere halts between
successive acts of battle with the plague-fiend--a more real and grim
Grendel of the Marshes--for the lives of children. Catherine could
always sleep in these intervals, quietly and dreamlessly; Robert very
soon could only sleep by the help of some prescription of old Meyrick's.
On all occ