“Mary didn’t come, Aunt Beulah. I thought you was—were so tired, I’d let you have your sleep out. I heard Miss Prentis calling, and I made her some gruel, and I got my own breakfast.” 58
“Oh! how dreadful,” Beulah gasped in the face of this new calamity; “and I’m really so sick. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Eleanor regarded her gravely. Then she put a professional hand on her pulse and her forehead.
“You’ve got the grip,” she announced.
“I’m afraid I have, Eleanor, and Doctor Martin’s out of town, and won’t be back till to-morrow when he comes to Aunt Ann. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
“I’ll tend to things,” Eleanor said. “You lie still and close your eyes, and don’t put your arms out of bed and get chilled.”
“Well, you’ll have to manage somehow,” Beulah moaned; “how, I don’t know, I’m sure. Give Aunt Annie her medicine and hot water bags, and just let me be. I’m too sick to care what happens.”
After the door had closed on the child a dozen things occurred to Beulah that might have been done for her. She was vaguely faint for her breakfast. Her feet were cold. She thought of the soothing warmth of antiphlogistine when applied to the chest. She thought of the quinine on the shelf in the bathroom. Once more she tried lifting her head, but she could not accomplish a 59 sitting posture. She shivered as a draft from the open window struck her.
“If I could only be taken in hand this morning,” she thought, “I know it could be broken.”
The door opened softly. Eleanor, in the cook’s serviceable apron of gingham that would have easily contained another child the same size, swung the door open with one hand and held it to accommodate the passage of the big kitchen tray, deeply laden with a heterogeneous collection of objects. She pulled two chairs close to the bedside and deposited her burden upon them. Then she removed from the tray a goblet of some steaming fluid and offered it to Beulah.