t was told to come in, revealed itself as an
obliging nurse whose upper front tooth was lifting her lip to look out
under it at the public. Her mission was to say that Miss Grahame had
heard the visitor's voice and she might speak to her through the door,
but on no account come into the room. A little more nonsense of this
sort, and Gwen was talking with her cousin at a respectful distance, to
comply with existing prejudices; but without the slightest belief that
her doing so would make any difference, one way or the other. The
dreadful flavour of fever was in everything, and lemons and hothouse
grapes were making believe they were cooling, and bottles that they
contained sedatives, and disinfectants that they were purifying the
atmosphere. It was all their gammon, and the fiend Typhus, invisible,
was chuckling over their preposterous claims, and looking forward to a
happy fortnight, with a favourable outcome from his point of view; or,
at least, the consolation of _sequelae_, and a retarded convalescence.

There is a stage of fever when lassitude and uncertainty of movement and
eyesight have prostrated the patient and compelled him to surrender at
discretion to his nurses and medical advisers, but before the Valkyrie
of Delirium are scouring the fields of his understanding, to pounce on
the corpses of ideas their Odin had slain. That time was not due for
many hours yet, when Gwen got speech of her cousin. She immediately
appreciated that the patient was anxious to impress bystanders that this
illness was all in the way of business. Also, that she was watching the
development of her own symptoms as from a height apart, in the interest
of Science.

"I knew I should catch it. But somebody had to, and I thought it might
as well be me. I caught it from a child. A mild case. That would not
make much difference. Being a woman is good. More men die than women.
It's only within the last few years that typhus has been distinguished
from typhoid...." After a few more useful particulars, she said:--"It
was very bad of you to come. I telegraphed to you not to come, last
week.... Wasn't it last week?... Well then--yesterday.... They ought
never to have let you in.... There!--I get muddled when I talk...." She
did, but it did not amount to wandering.

Gwen made very fair essays towards the correct thing to say; the usual
exhortations to the patient to rely upon everything; acquiesce in
periodical doses; absorb nourishment, however