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 under the acacia-tree, and through the hot air came the sound of voices singing, in a minor key:

He thought wildly, "I've got to get free. I must run . . . I must run."

Emma, holding his hand, felt the fever slipping back. She heard him saying, "Go down to the water, little monkey," which clearly made no sense, and suddenly she sprang up and called Miss Bull, the nurse.

"It's odd," said Miss Bull, white and frightened, "when he was so much better. Did anything happen to upset him?"

"No," said Emma. "Nothing. We barely talked at all."

The nurse sent Essie for the doctor, reproaching herself all the while for having allowed Emma to stay so long a time by the bed. But it was almost impossible to refuse when a woman like Mrs. Downes said, "Surely seeing his mother won't upset him. Why, Miss Bull, we've always been wonderful companions—my boy and I. He never had a father, you see. I was both mother and father to him." Miss Bull knew what a gallant fight she'd made, for every one in the Town knew it. A widow, left alone, to bring up her boy. You couldn't be cruel enough to stop her from seeing her own son.

When the doctor came and left again, shaking his head, Emma was frightened, but her fright disappeared once more as the fever receded again toward morning, and when at last she fell asleep, she was thinking, "He doesn't belong to her, after all. He's never belonged