"Yes'm, I might," sighed poor little Evangeline. "He's my darlin' dear." A terrible separation yawned before her like a bottomless pit of desolation. How was she to live Elly Preciousless?
"Can't I come over an'—an' hold him when he isn't—when he isn't sneezing?" she suddenly sobbed forth. Miss Theodosia was too engrossed to be sympathetic. There were many things to think of.
"Come over?—I should say not! You can't do anything but look through the window, and I shall ask the doctor if that's safe. Now listen—dear," again the "dear" slipped through her lips unconsciously. "Listen! When you see Stefana coming, you go out the back door! I wish I'd told her to bring him in the clothes basket instead of in her arms—"
"I'll tell her to! Through the window. I'll tell her to bring him by the handles," and Evangeline hurried away excitedly.
An hour later Miss Theodosia, in a voluminous white apron and a hastily invented white cap, had formally assumed her astonishing new rôle. Under the cap Miss Theodosia's cheeks were prettily pink. It was becoming to her to be Elly Precious' nurse. But the queer feeling of it! An hour ago Theodosia Baxter, in a big house, alone; now this becapped and pink-cheeked Theodosia in a house with a baby! It was an exciting change; what else might it become? She was a little afraid of Elly Precious.
"Not now, while he is asleep, but when he wakes—" she thought. What would she do with Elly Precious when he waked?
Of course, she had sent for the Reformed Doctor, and equally, of course, she would do precisely what he told her to do. But how would it feel? So far, it felt queer.
"I'll wait and see," she concluded with philosophy. At six the doctor came. It was significant how he had left his rôle of authorship at home and came physicianly, brisk and competent.
"Measles haven't changed, anyway, in ten years," he said as he removed his coat. Long ago, as a doctor, John Bradford had had his idiosyncrasies, and one of them had been to work in his shirt sleeves. The laying aside of his coat now had, if Miss Theodosia had but known, bridged over the ten years.
"Am I quarantined?" demanded the nurse.