"Yes I do," she said, decidedly, adding to herself: "I think you are a fool!" To him she continued: "I'll tell you what to do. Grandma is afraid, like you, so I know all the preventives. Let me burn a match or two under your nose so that the fumes will saturate your face; that will counteract any bad effects from the kiss, and to prevent contagion hereafter, get a good sized leek. You can find one at any grocer's: put it in a bit of cloth, with a piece of camphor-gum, and wear it over the pit of your stomach. You may even brave the small-pox with that about your person."
"But won't it smell awfully?" Neil asked, with a shudder, as he thought of wearing about his person an obnoxious leek, whose odor he abominated.
"It will smell some, but what of that? You can endure a great deal in order to feel safe," Flossie replied.
Neil could endure a great deal where his personal safety was concerned, and wholly deceived by Flossie's manner, he submitted to the burnt matches, which nearly strangled him, and brought on so violent a fit of coughing as made him fear lest he should burst a blood-vessel.
"I guess you are all right as far as the kiss is concerned," Flossie said, nearly bursting with merriment. "And now for the leek and camphor. I'll fix it for you."
He found the leek and the camphor and Flossie tied them up for him in a bit of linen and bade him be quite easy in his mind, as with these disinfectants he was impervious to the plague itself.
"What a coward he is, to be sure!" she said, as she watched him hurrying down the hall to his room with his disinfectants. "Sir Jack told me he was a milksop and not half worthy of Bessie, and he was right. I think him an idiot. Leeks, indeed! Won't he smell, though, when the leek gets warmed through and begins to fume! Phew!" and the little nose went up higher than its wont as Flossie returned to the sick-room.
That night Neil wrote to his mother the exact condition of affairs, telling her how he had found his aunt and cousin, whom he could not leave without being stigmatized as a brute; telling her what Grey had done for them; telling her that they owed old Mrs. Meredith twenty pounds, and that unless she wished a subscription paper to be started for them in the hotel, among the English, many of whom were her acquaintances, she must send money to relieve their necessities, and pay their bills. Neil felt almost sure that this last would touch his mother, when nothing else could reach her, and he was right. Neither she nor her husband cared to have their friends contribute to the needs of any one who bore their name, and the letter which Lady Jane sent to her son contained sixty pounds, which she bade him use to the best possible advantage, adding that he was to leave Rome as soon as he could, with any show of decency. This, Neil would gladly have done if he could, but when his mother's letter arrived it found him plunged into a complication of difficulties from which he could not extricate himself. Daisy had suddenly been stricken down with the fever, which developed so rapidly and assumed so violent a form that Neil's strength, and courage, and patience were taxed to the utmost, and he might have succumbed entirely, if it had not been for Flossie, who was equal to any emergency, and who resisted all her grandmother's efforts to get her out of the fever-hole, as she designated the hotel.
Flossie would not go so long as Bessie needed her. She was not afraid, she said, and every morning her eyes were just as saucy and mirthful, and the roses on her cheek just as bright, as if she had not been up half the night, soothing the wildly delirious Daisy, and encouraging Neil, who, as the days went by, rose a little in her estimation. He threw the obnoxious leek from his window, when, as Flossie had predicted, its fumes became intolerable, and he gave up the large, sunny room which he had occupied at first, and took a smaller, less expensive one, and he learned to deny himself many things before that terrible fever had burned itself out. He gave up table d'hote and lunch, and took to the restaurants outside. He gave up driving on the Pincian Hill, or having carriages at all, and patronized the street-cars and omnibuses when he went out for an airing, as Flossie insisted that he should do each day.
"I do believe I could make something of him in time," the energetic little lady thought. "But, dear me! Bessie would humor all his fancies, and be a perfect slave to his caprices; even now she will not let him wait upon her much, for fear of tiring him."