“No, she has sisters—or at least half sisters—and brothers.”
“They should be written to, then, immediately,” the doctor said, as he took up his hat.
“I have written to one of her sisters, and I have written to another lady, a friend, who will be of more use, I fancy, in this crisis.”
The doctor went away, promising to send some saline draughts to keep the fever under, and to call again in the evening.
Richard Thornton went into the little bed-chamber, where the butcher’s wife sat beside the curtained alcove, making up some accounts in a leather-covered book. She was a hearty, pleasant-mannered young woman, and had taken up her post by the invalid’s bed very willingly, although her presence was always much needed in the shop below.
“Chut,” she whispered, with her finger on her lip, “she sleeps, pauvrette!”
Richard sat down quietly by the open window. He took out Michel Levy’s edition of “Raoul,” a stump of lead pencil, and the back of an old letter, and set to work resolutely at his adaptation. He could not afford to lose time, even though his adopted sister lay ill under the shadow of the worsted curtains that shrouded the alcove on the other side of the little room.
He sat long and patiently, turning the Poison drama into English with wonderful ease and rapidity; and meekly bearing a deprivation that was no small one to him, in the loss of his clay pipe, which he was in the habit of smoking at all hours of the day.
Eleanor awoke at last, and began talking in a rambling, incoherent way about her father, and the money sent by Mrs. Bannister, and the parting upon the Boulevard.
The butcher’s wife drew back the curtain, and Richard Thornton went to the bedside and looked down tenderly at his childish friend.