it comforted me, and how it put to flight the terrified curiosity which had taken possession of me. “Aha!” I thought in my little brain, “the teacher was lying like a dentist! They will not die--that is certain. They can’t die. To begin with, when people laugh, that means that they don’t die.” This evident conclusion set my heart at rest. So far as I was concerned there was no longer any question on the subject. They were in front and I behind them. And since there was no risk for them how could death touch me, passing them by? My question “Am I going to die?” was therefore simply designed to make myself interesting. In their presence I was safe. Mother and Aunt Deen watched me by turns, that I might see no strange face; mother took two nights out of three, and I liked her best. She glided into the room like a mist over the lake, without the slightest sound. I was never aware of any of her movements. Her cares and her caresses mingled; while Aunt Deen, the dear woman, at the cost of tremendous effort, disturbed and irritated me. The important part which I myself was playing was by no means irksome to me. I seemed to myself to have become smaller than my brother James and my sister Nicola, and that I might just as well be rocked to sleep with lullabies. I used to ask for Venice and The Pool, because of my own drenching, and they thought I was delirious. I distinctly see in memory those two faces bending over me, and still more clearly that of my father, who was continually coming to see me; the attentive, fixed, almost severe expression with which he noted the effects of my disease upon my body was quite strange to me. It was his professional expression; the examination once over, his features would relax, lightened up by fatherhood. One day father brought in another doctor, but I clearly saw that the little man stood in awe of him, and invariably repeated what he said to him. With implacable logic I observed to my faithful nurses, “What’s the use of troubling that gentleman? Father knows much more about it than he. Father doesn’t need any one.” I probably uttered these words or something like them in a low voice. Aunt Deen promptly approved. “The child is right. He speaks so sensibly that he is surely getting well.” She repeated my remark to father, who was still anxious, and who smiled, as he had not done of late. “Yes,” he said; “we shall save him.” I had no need of any such assurance. I felt it so strongly that that was enough. He never dreamed that this very illness, over which he was triumphing by skill and will-power, was later to be the origin of the home tragedy in which I wandered away from him.