“Oh, yes. You can come and go as you please, so long as you keep away from Charley’s room. Every one is barred from Charley’s room until further instructions, except Mrs. Clyde; and she is confined within military bounds, consisting of the house and yard. And now for the most important thing—Rosie and Katie,”—the cook and the maid—“pay particular heed to this—nothing of any kind which comes from the sick-room is to be touched until it is disinfected, except under my supervision. When I’m not in the house, the nurse’s authority will be absolute. Now for the clinic; we’ll look over the throats of the whole crowd.”
Throat inspection appeared to be the Health Master’s favorite pursuit for the next few days.
“I don’t dare open my mouth,” protested Bobs, “for fear he’ll peek into it and find a spot.”
“Dr. Strong spends a lot more time watching us than he does watching Charley,” remarked Junkum. “Who’s the sick one, anyway—us or him?” she concluded, her resentment getting the better of her grammar.
“Ho!” jeered Bobs, and intoned the ancient couplet, made and provided for the correction of such slips:—
“Her ain’t a-callin’ we,
Us don’t belong to she.”
“Anyhow, I ain’t sick,” asseverated Bettina; “but he shut me up in my room for a day jus’ because my swallow worked kinda hard.”
“If I’m going to have scarlet fever I want to have scarlet fever and get done with it!” declared.
Bobs. “I’m getting tired of staying out of school. Charley’s having all the fun there is out of this, getting read to all the time by that nurse and Mother.”
Meantime nothing of interest was happening in the sick-room. Interesting phases seldom appear in scarlet fever, which is well, since, when they do appear, the patient usually dies. Not at any time did Charley evince the slightest tendency to forsake a world which he had found, on the whole, to be a highly satisfactory place of residence. In fact, he was going comfortably along through a typically light onset of the disease; and was rather less ill than he would have been with a sound case of measles. Already the furrows in Mrs. Clyde’s forehead had smoothed out, and Grandma Sharpless had ceased waking, in the dead of night, with a catch at her heart and the totally unfounded fear that she had “heard something,” when one morning Charley awoke, scratched a tiny flake of skin off his nose, yawned, and emitted a hollow groan.