Making a movement, hurriedly, to go back across her own room, Miss Bree turned faint and giddy, and fell headlong.
They got her into bed again, and brought her to. But with circulation and consciousness, came the rush of fever. In half an hour she was in a burning heat, wandering and crying out deliriously.
"O what shall we do? We must have a doctor. She'll die!" cried Bel.
"If I dared to go up and call Mr. Sparrow?" said the spinster, timidly.
Her thought reverted as instantly to Mr. Sparrow, and yet with the same conscious shyness, as if she had been eighteen, and the poor old watchmaker twenty-one. Because, you see, she was a woman; and she had but been a woman the longer, and her woman's heart grown tenderer and shyer, in its unlived life, that she was four and fifty, and not eighteen. There are three times eighteen in four and fifty.
"O, Mr. Sparrow isn't any good!" cried Bel, impetuously. "If you wouldn't mind seeing whether Mr. Hewland is up-stairs?"
Miss Smalley did not mind that at all; and though numbly aggrieved at the reflection upon Mr. Sparrow, went up and knocked.
Bel heard Morris Hewland's spring upon the floor, and his voice, as he asked the matter. Heavy with fatigue, he had not roused till now.
As he came down, five minutes later, and Bel Bree met him at the door, the gas suddenly went out, and they stood, except for the flame outside, in darkness.
In house and street it was the same. Miss Smalley called out that it was so. "The stable light is gone," she said. "Yes,—and the lights down Tremont Street."