injuries.

Jeff lay in his darkened room, and burned with them, and with the
thoughts, guesses, purposes which flamed through his mind. Had she, that
girl, known what her brother meant to do? Had she wished him to think of
her in the moment of his punishment, and had she spoken of her brother so
that he might recall her, or had she had some ineffective impulse to warn
him against her brother when she spoke of him?

He lay and raged in vain with his conjectures, and he did a thousand
imagined murders upon Lynde in revenge of his shame.

Toward the end of the week, while his hurts were still too evident to
allow him to go out-of-doors before dark, he had a note from Westover
asking him to come in at once to see him.

"Your brother Jackson," Westover wrote, "reached Boston by the New York
train this morning, and is with me here. I must tell you I think he is
not at all well, but he does not know how sick he is, and so I forewarn
you. He wants to get on home, but I do not feel easy about letting him
make the rest of the journey alone. Some one ought to go with him. I
write not knowing whether you are still in Cambridge or not; or whether,
if you are, you can get away at this time. But I think you ought, and I
wish, at any rate, that you would come in at once and see Jackson. Then
we can settle what had best be done."

Jeff wrote back that he had been suffering with a severe attack of
erysipelas--he decided upon erysipelas for the time being, but he meant
to let Westover know later that he had been in a row--and the doctor
would not let him go out yet. He promised to come in as soon as he
possibly could. If Westover thought Jackson ought to be got home at once,
and was not fit to travel alone, he asked him to send a hospital nurse
with him.

Westover replied by Jeff's messenger that it would worry and alarm
Jackson to be put in charge of a nurse; but that he would go home with
him, and they would start the next day. He urged Jeff to come and see his
brother if it was at all safe for him to do so. But if he could not,
Westover would give his mother a reassuring reason for his failure.

Mrs. Durgin did not waste any anxiety for the sickness which prevented
Jeff from coming home with his brother. She said ironically that it must
be very bad, and she gave all her thought and care to Jackson. The sick
man rallied, as he prophesied he should, in his native air, and
celebrated the sense and science of the last doctor he had