“Oh, I don’t know, Mr Canninge,” she replied; “we want to do all the good we can, and one can’t help loving Miss Thorne.”
“No,” said George Canninge quietly; and as he rode home he repeated little Miss Burge’s words to himself over and over again—“One can’t help loving Miss Thorne.”
But he made no further advances—he did not go to the schoolhouse to make inquiries, nor yet ask at the cottage where Hazel was a prisoner; he contented himself with visiting the Burges day by day, to start back almost in alarm one morning as he saw a look of trouble in little Miss Burge’s face, and before he could ask what was wrong the little woman burst out with—
“Oh, Mr Canninge, that poor, dear girl!”
“What?” he said excitedly. “She has not—”
“Yes, sir, and badly. My brother has been down there this morning, and she is delirious. And oh, poor girl! poor girl! I cannot let her lie there alone. I’m dreadfully afraid of the fever, Mr Canninge; but I shall have to go.”
“You? What! to nurse her?” said George Canninge, with a face now ghastly.
“Yes, sir; I must go. My brother has been down every day, and I’ve never been once!” she cried, bursting into a fit of sobbing. “It’s dreadful cowardly, I know; but I could not help it then.”
“And she may die!” said George Canninge as he rode slowly home; “and I have never told her I loved her. Dare I go to see her now?”
He asked himself that question many times, and again many times on the succeeding days; but he did not go near the place where Hazel Thorne lay now, in the shabby room, upon the bed roughly made up for her by Mrs Potts; while Feelier, the very shadow of herself, lay watching “teacher,” and the tears stole down her wasted cheeks as she listened to Hazel Thorne’s excited talking, for the most part incoherent; but here and there a word came to Feelier’s ears, and she wept again, because she was too weak to get up and wait upon “teacher,” whose attack was rapidly assuming a serious form.