Her great hold upon life was the desire of dancing. This she had fostered on many a level stretch of sward, with daisy chains hung all about her. She had danced with damson-stained mouth like a young Bacchante. She had danced while her companions made arches and hoops of slender willow-stems. She had danced the moon up and the sun down; and once, when the summer dusk was like wine cooled by woodland airs, when a nightingale throbbed in every roadside tree and glow-worms spangled the grass, she had taken a spray of eglantine and led an inspired band of childish revelers down into the twinkling lamplight of Galton. Yet this wonderful year became a date in her chronicle chiefly because age or sunlight or wind tarnished her silver curls to that uncertain tint which is, unjustly to mice, always called mouse-colored; so that her arrival at Number Seventeen was greeted by a chorus of disapproval. "Good gracious!" cried Mrs. Raeburn, when she saw her. "Will you only look at her hair?" "What's gone with it?" asked Jenny. "Why, what a terrible color. No color at all, you might say. I feel quite disgusted." "Perhaps she won't be quite such a Miss Vain now," Ruby put in. Jenny was discouraged. The London spring was trying after Galton, and one day, a month or two after she came back, she felt horribly ill, and her face was flushed. "The child's ill," said Mrs. Raeburn. "Ill? Nonsense!" argued Charlie. "Why, look at her color. Ill? Whoever heard? Never saw no one look better in my life. Look how bright her eyes is." "You ignorant man!" said his wife, and sent for the doctor. The doctor said it was scarlet fever, and Jenny was taken away in blankets to the hospital. She felt afraid at first in the long, quiet ward with all the rows of nurses and palms and thin beds from which heads suddenly popped up. "Do you think you'll go to heaven when you die?" the charge-nurse whispered to Jenny as she tucked her in. "I don't care where I go," said Jenny; "as long as there isn't no castor-oil." As she lay waiting to get better and watched the lilac buds breaking into flower outside the big windows, she could not help wishing she were in Galton again, although in a way she liked the peace and regularity of hospital life. It amused her to have breakfast at half-past five and lunch at nine. The latter she laughed at all the time she was in the hospital. Her convalescence was an exceptionally long one, but she had two jolly weeks before she left, when she could run about and help to carry the meals to the other patients. She danced once or twice then for the benefit of the ward and was glad that everybody clapped her so loudly. She cried when she left in August to go home to her family. Chapter VII: _Ambition Wakes_