It bothered her a great deal, that she could not return to the stranger the case with the dollar notes and the portrait. She felt like a thief, to be carrying so much money about which did not belong to her; yet, by some strange contrariness, it was at the same time a comfort to her, since all the while it was in her possession she could not be said to be utterly destitute.
Presently her thoughts wandered to Mrs. Gunnage, and she wondered drowsily whether the good woman’s nerves had as yet permitted her to climb the ladder, to inspect the property which she had been obliged to leave behind when she came away.
Suddenly something different in the room struck Nell, causing her to be instantly on the alert. The moaning and muttering of the sick woman had ceased, and, bending over the bed, she found that the sufferer was lying peacefully asleep.
CHAPTER VII
A New Vocation
DR. SHAW was not in exactly an amiable frame of mind that morning. To begin with, there was more sickness in the district than he could very well cope with single-handed, while the lack of good nursing for his numerous patients was telling on his temper to quite a serious extent.
He had just come from a house where a patient, recovering from a rather bad bout of the malarial fever, just then so prevalent in the district, had been treated by an over-indulgent mother to roast goose and apple-pie, with, of course, disastrous results.
The fever itself was a puzzle. Some had it very lightly, and soon recovered, being no worse for the attack. Others had it so heavily that it became a life-and-death struggle.
In some instances it seemed epidemic, for whole households would go down with it; but mostly the cases were isolated, and had no connection with each other. As the neighbourhood had always been so healthy, the fever outbreak was all the more puzzling, and the overworked doctor had irritably decided to put it down to the weather, which had been unusually damp and hot through the latter part of the summer.
His practice lay on both sides of the frontier, and having looked after his Canadian patients, he crossed the border, plunging into the wild forest land that stretched for so many miles along the American side of the boundary.