d him helpless and delirious with fever.

Touched by his condition she had him taken at once to Bleak House and
put to bed, intending when morning came to send for a doctor.

But in the morning little Joe was missing. Though they searched high and
low he was not to be found, and they decided that in his delirium he had
taken to the road again. It was not till long after that Esther found
his leaving had been brought about by Harold Skimpole, who was then
visiting Bleak House, and who, in his selfishness, feared the boy might
be the bearer of some contagious disease.

This unfortunately proved to be the case. Joe's illness was smallpox,
and a few days later a maid of Esther's fell ill with it. Esther nursed
her day and night, and just as she was recovering was stricken with it
herself.

In her unselfishness and love for the rest, before unconsciousness came,
she made the maid promise faithfully to allow no one (particularly
neither Mr. Jarndyce nor her beloved Ada) to enter the room till all
danger was past.

For many days Esther hovered between life and death and all the time the
maid kept her word. Caddy came from the Turveydrop dancing school early
and late, and little Miss Flite walked the twenty miles from London in
thin shoes to inquire for her. And at length, slowly, she began to grow
well again.

But the disease had left its terrible mark. When she first looked in a
mirror she found that her beauty was gone and her face strangely
altered.

This was a great grief to her at first, but on the day when Mr.
Jarndyce came into her sick-room and held her in his arms and said, "My
dear, dear girl!" she thought, "He has seen me and is fonder of me than
before. So what have I to mourn for?" She thought of Allan Woodcourt,
too, the young surgeon somewhere on the sea, and she was glad that, if
he had loved her before he sailed away, he had not told her so. Now, she
told herself, when they met again and he saw her so sadly changed he
would have given her no promise he need regret.

When she was able to travel, Esther went for a short stay at the house
of Mr. Boythorn, and there, walking under the trees she grew stronger.

One day, as she sat in the park that surrounded the house, she saw Lady
Dedlock coming toward her, and seeing how pale and agitated she was,
Esther felt the same odd sensation she had felt in the church. Lady
Dedlock threw herself sobbing at her feet, and put her arms around her
and kissed her, as