VI.

Eighteen seventy-one.

One cold day Roddy walked into the Pool of Siloam to recover his sailing
boat which had drifted under the long arch of the bridge.

There was no Passion Week and no Good Friday and no Easter that spring,
only Roddy's rheumatic fever. Roddy in bed, lying on his back, his face
white and sharp, his hair darkened and glued with the sweat that poured
from his hair and soaked into the bed. Roddy crying out with pain when
they moved him. Mamma and Jenny always in Roddy's room, Mr. Spall's
sister in the kitchen. Mary going up and down, tiptoe, on messages,
trying not to touch Roddy's bed.

Dr. Draper calling, talking in a low voice to Mamma, and Mamma crying.
Dr. Draper looking at you through his spectacles and putting a thing like
a trumpet to your chest and listening through it.

"You're quite right, Mrs. Olivier. There's nothing wrong with the little
girl's heart. She's as sound as a bell."

A dreadful feeling that you had no business to be as sound as a bell. It
wasn't fair to Roddy.

Something she didn't notice at the time and remembered afterwards when
Roddy was well again. Jenny saying to Mamma, "If it had to be one of them
it had ought to have been Miss Mary."