“She is going to Colonel Tiffton’s first, though they’ve all got the typhoid fever, I hear, and that’s no place for her. That fever is terrible on Northerners—terrible on anybody. I’m afraid of it myself, and I wish this horrid throbbing I’ve felt for a few days would leave my head. It has a fever feel that I don’t like,” and the young man pressed his hand against his temples, trying to beat back the pain which so much annoyed him. Just then Colonel Tiffton was announced, his face wearing an anxious look, and his voice trembling as he told how sick _his Nell_ was, how sick they all were, and then spoke of Alice Johnson. “She’s the same girl I told you about the day I bought Rocket; some little kin to me, and that makes it queer why her mother should leave her to you. I knew she would not be happy at Saratoga, and so we wrote for her to visit us. She is on the road now, will be here day after to-morrow, and something must be done. She can’t come to us, without great inconvenience to ourselves and serious danger to her. Hugh, my boy, there’s no other way—she must come to Spring Bank,” and the old colonel laid his hand on that of Hugh, who looked at him aghast, but made no immediate reply. He saw at a glance that Alice could not go to Moss Side with impunity, and if not there she must, of course come to Spring Bank. “What can I do with her? Oh, Colonel, it makes me sweat like rain just to think of it, and my head thumps like a mill-hopper, but, I suppose, there’s no help for it. You’ll meet her at the depot. You’ll give her an inkling of what I am. You’ll tell her what a savage she may expect to find, so she won’t go into fits at sight of me.” “Yes, yes, I’ll fix it; but, I thought, maybe, you’d have Aunt Eunice come over till your mother’s return. Women are gossipping things, and they’d’ talk if she was to live here alone with you. I tell you, she’s handsome; and if I’s you, I’d be a little good, that is, I wouldn’t walk the lots Sundays, but go to church instead.” “I always do, sir,” and Hugh spoke quickly, for slowly, surely, Adah Hastings was influencing him for good, and more changes than one were already apparent in him. “That’s right,” rejoined the colonel. “Going to church is well enough for them that like it, which I can’t say I do, but I’ll see her, I’ll meet her; I’ll tell her. Good-bye, my boy. Now, I think of it, you look mighty nigh sick. Your face is as red as a beetle, and eyes kind of blood shot. The very way my wife looked. Are you sick?” “No, not sick, but this hot weather affects my head which feels much as if there were a snare-drum inside.”