Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/289

Rh the suddenly fear-ridden house, head up and unflinching. She was stubbornly optimistic. She was persistently cheerful. She met Emma's and Syringa's gloomy forebodings with a brusque unsentimentality that defied defeat.

"Oh, she'll get well all right," she'd fling out in scorn to David's furtive inquiries, and Eunice's tears. "She ain't the first who's picked up a typhoid germ in their lives, and got well of it, too!"

But the typhoid germ that Reba had picked up, probably at one of the attractive summer restaurants in or about Boston, was not mild-natured. For weeks and weeks she lay its passive victim, unconscious of the big fight that others waged for her night and day, indifferent to their tireless administrations, long night-watches, and combined efforts to spin out unbroken her frailing thread of life across the long chasm of the fever.

These efforts were successful. Reba emerged at last from the dark valley and shadow—a white thin little creature, all eyes it seemed at first to her faithful nurses—all spirit, held in a vessel so fragile that they feared it could not bear even the weight of returning strength. For after the long fever had burned itself out in Reba's body she seemed as ephemeral as the ashes of tissue paper after fire has spent its heat upon it.

As merciless as the fever was, however, with rounded chin and glowing cheek, it was not without its compensations. The transfer of Reba's torment from her mind to her body was a relief. The fever, too, proved a miraculous short-cut back into the affections of women whose hearts hadn't many avenues of