and shivering by the fire. Mr Wrench was again sent for, but was gone on his rounds, and Mrs Vincy seeing her darling’s changed looks and general misery, began to cry and said she would send for Dr Sprague.
“Oh, nonsense, mother! It's nothing,” said Fred, putting out his hot dry hand to her, "I shall soon be all right. I must have taken cold in that nasty damp ride.”
“Mamma!” said Rosamond, who was seated near the window (the dining-room windows looked on that highly respectable street called Lowick Gate), “there is Mr Lydgate, stopping to speak to some one. If I were you I would call him in. He has cured Ellen Bulstrode. They say he cures every one.”
Mrs Vincy sprang to the window and opened it in an instant, thinking only of Fred and not of medical etiquette. Lydgate was only two yards off on the other side of some iron palisading, and turned round at the sudden sound of the sash, before she called to him. In two minutes he was in the room, and Rosamond went out, after waiting just long enough to show a pretty anxiety conflicting with her sense of what was becoming.
Lydgate had to hear a narrative in which Mrs Vincy’s mind insisted with remarkable instinct on every point of minor importance, especially on what Mr Wrench had said and had not said about coming again. That there might be an awkward affair with Wrench, Lydgate saw at once; but the case was serious enough to make him dismiss that consideration: he was convinced that Fred was in the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever, and that he had taken just the wrong medicines. He must go to bed immediately, must have a regular nurse, and various appliances and precautions must be used, about which Lydgate was particular. Poor Mrs Vincy’s terror at these indications of danger found vent in such words as came most easily. She thought it “very ill usage on the part of Mr Wrench, who had attended their house so many years in preference to Mr Peacock, though Mr Peacock was equally a friend. Why Mr Wrench should neglect her children more than others, she could not for the life of her understand. He had not neglected Mrs Larcher’s when they had the measles, nor indeed would Mrs Vincy have wished that he should. And if anything should happen…”
Here poor Mrs Vincy’s spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe-throat and good-humoured face were sadly convulsed. This was in the hall out of Fred’s hearing, but Rosamond had opened the drawing-room door, and now came forward anxiously. Lydgate apologised for Mr Wrench, said that the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising, and that this form of fever was very equivocal in its beginnings: he would go immediately to the druggist's and have a prescription made up in order to lose no time, but he would write to Mr Wrench and tell him what had been done.
“But you must come again—you must go on attending Fred. I can’t have my boy left to anybody who may come or not. I bear no-
