It was his second little sister, sobbing as if her heart would break; she was face downwards, her arms spread out, her whole body convulsed.
So stunned and shaken with his grief had Alan been, he had utterly forgotten, when he left the poor child, that she was not at her proper place for the night; he had gone straight home to see if there had been a call for him, then off to a serious case of typhoid in Fivedock, for doctors cannot sit down and give themselves up to their grief, however great the cause.
Pip tried to raise the girl, but she stiffened herself and resisted him; when she had flung herself down she had prayed passionately that she might die, and here was some one come to disturb her.
But surely it could not be careless Pip who held her so tenderly, when at last he did manage to lift [256] ]her,—Pip who stroked her hair, and rubbed his cheek against hers, and let her finish her bitter weeping on his shoulder.
When he felt how cold and damp she was, he stirred.
“You must come home, old girl,” he said.
“Here,” she said—“I must stay here! I shall nurse her, but she’ll die—oh! I know she’ll die.”
Pip groaned: he knew it himself, he would not give himself the slightest hope; and the bitterness was as of death itself.
But he saw Nellie was totally unfit to go into an infected house that night.
“To-morrow,”, he said; “come down to the cottage now; there’s the nurse there, and the servants; you’ll be ill yourself next.”