“Yes; and seen the lad who appears to be dying.”
“What will we do now,” asked Susan in an access of despair, “the children have come home?”
“Well, what of that?”
“What of that!” repeated the woman, scornfully, “like as not you’ll have brought the fever home in your clothes with you.”
Grace stopped. It was a serious loss to her as a woman that she had never been with illness, and knew little or nothing about it, and now unwittingly she had run the risk of doing a very terrible wrong,—bringing infection into another person’s house, amongst another person’s children.
“Oh! I am so sorry,” she exclaimed, unheeding the contemptuous inflection of Susan’s voice; “what can we do; what ought I to do?”
“You had better take off your outside things, and give them to me to hang up in the air,” was the reply uttered in a mollified tone. “I will bring down your wrapper; and then if you throw your other clothes into water, maybe no harm will come of it. But don’t go talking to the mistress till you’ve changed.”
“I will not,” promised Miss Moffat, and she tried to keep her word, for when Mrs. Brady called to her querulously, Grace answered,—
“Wait for a few minutes, I will be with you directly.”
“I want you now.”