"Ah, but if you stay here, how long are you likely to keep husband and children? not to speak of the danger to your own life and health."
"Sickness and death find entrance everywhere in this sad world," she said; her voice trembling slightly, "and in all places we are under the same loving care. It seems our duty to stay here, and the path of duty is the safest. It is thought that in a few years this will become a healthy country."
"I hope so, indeed, for your sake, but it is a hard one for you in other ways. I am not so unobservant as not to have discovered that you do a great deal of your own work. And I don't like that it should be so, Marcia."
"You are very kind," she answered, smiling up brightly into his face as he stood looking down upon her with a vexed and anxious expression, "It is very nice to have you care so much for me, Horace."
"There's nobody in the world I care more for, Marcia," he said, "and going over some of our late talk, in my mind, I have thought there is nobody to whom I should so much like to commit the care and training of my child. I mean, of course, if your hands were not already full and more than full with your own."
"They are not so full that I would not gladly do a mother's part by her," she answered with emotion, "were it not for the danger of bringing her to this climate."
"Yes, that is the difficulty. It would never do, so miasmatic and so cold and bleak during a great part of the year; especially for one born so far south. But I thank you, cousin, all the same."
"We have not much sickness here except ague," she remarked presently, "but there are several varieties of that—chills and fever occurring at regular intervals—generally every other day at about the same hour; dumb ague, shaking ague, and sinking or congestive chills; which last are the only very alarming kind, sometimes proving fatal in a few hours."
"Indeed! you almost frighten me away," he said half seriously, half in jest. "That is not a very common form, I hope?"