'Auntie!' he said, smiling a very little; 'how pretty you look!'
And so she did in her long white dressing-gown, with her lovely fair hair hanging about, for all the world like Miss Lally's.
I think myself the fever was on his brain a little already, else he would scarce have dared speak so to his aunt.
She took no notice, but drew me out of the room.
'What in the world's the matter with him?' she said, anxious and yet irritated at the same time. 'Has he been doing anything foolish that can have made him ill?'
I shook my head.
'It's seldom one can tell how illness comes, but I feel sure the doctor should see him,' I replied.
So he was sent for, and before the day was many hours older, there was little doubt left—though, as I said before, I tried for a bit to hope it was only a bad cold—that Master Francis was in for something very serious.
Almost from the first the doctor spoke of rheumatic fever. There was a sort of comfort in this, bad as it was—the comfort of knowing there was no infection to fear. It was a great comfort to Master Francis himself, whenever he felt the least bit easier, now and then to see his cousins for a minute or two at a time, without any risk to them. For one of his first questions to the doctor was whether his illness was anything the others could catch.