mattered not at all to her. For she _was_ sick--doctor-three-times-a-
day-trained-nurse-bottles-by-the-bedside sick, her head, with its
bright hair rumpled and dry with the fever, tossing from side to side
on the lumpy hotel pillow, or lying terribly silent and inert against
the gray-white of the bed linen. She never quite knew how narrowly she
escaped that picture in the _Dry Goods Review_.

Then one day the fever began to recede, slowly, whence fevers come,
and the indefinable air of suspense and repression that lingers about
a sick-room at such a crisis began to lift imperceptibly. There came a
time when Emma McChesney asked in a weak but sane voice:

"Did Jock come? Did they cut off my hair?"

"Not yet, dear," the nurse had answered to the first, "but we'll hear
in a day or so, I'm sure." And, "Your lovely hair! Well, not if I know
it!" to the second.

The spirit of small-town kindliness took Emma McChesney in its arms.
The dingy little hotel room glowed with flowers. The story of the sick
woman fighting there alone in the terrors of delirium had gone up and
down about the town. Housewives with a fine contempt for hotel soups
sent broths of chicken and beef. The local members of the U. C. T.
sent roses enough to tax every vase and wash-pitcher that the hotel
could muster, and asked their wives to call at the hotel and see what
they could do. The wives came, obediently, but with suspicion and
distrust in their eyes, and remained to pat Emma McChesney's arm, ask
to read aloud to her, and to indulge generally in that process known
as "cheering her up." Every traveling man who stopped at the little
hotel on his way to Minneapolis added to the heaped-up offerings at