“To be called a fright to my face!” shrieked Rachel, “by my own nephew! This is too much. Timothy, I leave your house forever.”
The excited maiden seized her hood, which was hanging from a nail, and hardly knowing what she did, was about to leave the house with no other protection, when she was arrested in her progress towards the door by the cooper, who stifled his laughter sufficiently to say: “Before you go, Rachel, just look in the glass.”
Mechanically his sister did look, and her horrified eyes rested upon a face which streaked with inky spots and lines seaming it in every direction.
In her first confusion, Rachel did not understand the nature of her mishaps, but hastily jumped to the conclusion that she had been suddenly stricken by some terrible disease like the plague, whose ravages in London she had read of with the interest which one of her melancholy temperament might be expected to find in it.
Accordingly she began to wring her hands in an excess of terror, and exclaimed in tones of piercing anguish,—
“It is the fatal plague spot! I feel it; I know it! I am marked for the tomb. The sands of my life are fast running out!”
Jack broke into a fresh burst of merriment, so that an observer might, not without reason, have imagined him to be in imminent danger of suffocation.
“You'll kill me, Aunt Rachel; I know you will,” he gasped out.
“You may order my coffin, Timothy,” said Rachel, in a sepulchral tone. “I sha'n't live twenty-four hours. I've felt it coming on for a week past. I forgive you for all your ill-treatment. I should like to have some one go for the doctor, though I know I'm past help. I will go up to my chamber.”
“I think,” said the cooper, trying to look sober, “that you will find the cold-water treatment efficacious in removing the plague-spots, as you call them.”