The doctor, when he came, listened with very small attention to Beenie’s long and confused story, chiefly made up from things she had read and heard of the causes of Lily’s illness. Whatever the causes were, the result was clear enough. She was in a high fever, her faculties all lost in that confusion of violent illness which takes away at once all consciousness of the present and all personal control. “Fever” was an impressive word in those days, more alarming in some senses, less so in others, than now. It was not mapped out and distinct, with its charts and its well-known rules. There was not, so far as I am aware, such a thing as a clinical thermometer known, at least not in ordinary practice; and the word “fever” meant something dangerously “catching,” something before which nurses fled and friends retired in dismay--which is not to say that those who suffered from it were less sedulously guarded and taken care of by their own people then than now. The first idea of both Beenie and Katrin, however, was that it must be “catching,” being fever, and Sir Robert, when he was informed, was not much wiser. “Fever--where could she have got it?” he said with a sudden imagination of some wretched beggar-woman with a sick child who might have given it to the young lady. “It is not a thing of that kind. You are thinking of scarlatina or maybe typhus. Nothing of that sort. It does not spring from infection. It is brain-fever,” the medical man said. “Brain-fever!” said Sir Robert, indignant. “There was never any thing of that kind in my family.” He took it as a reproach, as if the Ramsays had ever been a race subject to disturbance in the brain!