Not that she suffered very keenly yet. She was too much stunned to realize the extent of her wounds and bruises. She picked herself up, as it were, after the fall and the shock, and walked mechanically homeward. Her strength did not give way until she found herself in her room, shutting her door behind her, and felt what a different being had gone out of it only a little while before. An hour after, Mrs. Bergan found her lying on her bed, white and still, more like a corpse than a living, suffering girl. "Carice!" she cried, appalled, but not without an intuitive perception of the truth,--"Carice, my child! what is the matter?" "I don't know--don't ask me," replied Carice, turning her face to the wall. Mrs. Bergan burst into tears, and stole softly away. Here was a grief in which even she could only intermeddle as a stranger. She could simply commend her child to tenderer, wiser hands than hers. A day or two went by, and Carice was down-stairs again, white; still, patient; filling her old place, and doing her old tasks, with a sad composure that was more affecting than any abandonment of sorrow. Her woe seemed to take the form of torpor, rather than of anguish. It was that chill and heavy misery, that dismal realization of the actual presence and power of evil in the world, which never comes to us except through the sin of some cherished, trusted friend; standing hitherto as the representative of all that is good and true, the earthly type of the Divine perfection. Falling, he falls not alone, but drags down with him the supports of every earthly confidence, and even makes the foundation of our heavenly faith to tremble. Such grief is dumb and tearless; it coils itself round the heart in cold, serpent-like folds, chilling the blood, and oppressing the breath; but it makes no single, special wound, to call forth cries and sobs of pain. Meanwhile, the yellow fever, as foreseen long ago by Doctor Remy, made its silent entry into Berganton. One day a single case was reported in the outskirts of the town; another week, and there was scarcely a threshold which it had not crossed, either to strike or slay. The town put on sackcloth and ashes; business was suspended, except the business of nursing the sick and burying the dead; the streets were deserted, except by hearses and doctors. Or, it would be truer to say, a doctor; for Doctor Gerrish, being unacclimated, was one of the earliest patients; and Doctor Harris, being old and infirm, quickly sank exhausted; so Doctor Remy was soon left to face the pestilence alone, and multiply himself as best he could, to meet the demands of a whole people.