After that scene, Gabriella had associated Jane's attacks with a
freezing January night and a fireless grate (though the last but one had
occurred in mid-August), and she was relieved now to find a fire burning
in her mother's room and a kettle singing merrily on the fender. The
elder children, with their flannel petticoats pinned over their thin
little shoulders, were sitting straight and stiff on a box couch which
had been turned into a bed, and their strange little faces looked wan
and peaked in the firelight.

Jane was really ill, Gabriella decided, after a glance at her sister.
Nothing except acute suffering could have given her that ghastly pallor
or made her eyes sink so far back in her head. She lay quite motionless
on the far side of the big tester bed, staring straight up at the
ceiling with an expression which terrified Gabriella, though she had
seen it on her sister's face at least a dozen times before to-night.

"Has Arthur gone?" asked Mrs. Carr in a voice that sounded as if she
were running.

"Yes. Did you want him, mother?"

"I thought we might send him for the doctor and for Charley. Don't you
think Charley ought to be told of her condition? She has asked for the
children."

"Have you given her the digitalis?"

"I can't make her swallow it. There are the drops on the table by the
bed. My hands tremble so I had to measure them three times."