"I know it," replied Mr. Hastings. "A few nights of that and the fever will be driven away." "We shan't get a few nights of it," said David. "And the fever has broken out again." "What!" exclaimed Mr. Hastings. "The fever broken out again?" "Yes," said David. The news fell upon the clergyman's heart as a knell. He had fully believed the danger to have passed away, though not yet the sickness. "Are you sure it has broken out again, David?" he asked, after a pause. "I ain't no surer than I was told, sir," returned phlegmatic David. "I met Cox just now, and he said, as he passed, that fever had shown itself in a fresh place." "Do you know where?" inquired Mr. Hastings. "He said, I b'lieve, but I didn't catch it. If I stopped to listen to the talk of fevers, and such-like, where would my work be?" Taking his hat, one of the very clerical shape, with a broad brim, the Rector left his house. He was scarcely without the gates when he saw Mr. Snow, who was the most popular doctor in Prior's Ash, coming along quickly in his gig. Mr. Hastings threw out his hand, and the groom pulled up. "Is it true?--this fresh rumour of the fever?" "Too true, I fear," replied Mr. Snow. "I am on my way thither now; just summoned." "Who is attacked?" "Sarah Anne Grame." The name appeared to startle the Rector. "Sarah Anne Grame!" he repeated. "She will never battle through it!" The doctor raised his eyebrows, as if he thought it doubtful himself, and signed to his groom to hasten on. "Tell Lady Sarah I will call upon her in the course of the day," called out Mr. Hastings, as the gig sped on its way. "I must ask Maria if she has heard news of this," he continued, in soliloquy, as he turned within the Rectory gate. Maria Hastings had found her way to the study. To dignify a room by the appellation of "study" in a clergyman's house, would at once imply that it must be the private sanctum of its master, consecrated to his sermons and his other clerical studies. Not so, however, in the Rectory of All Souls. The study there was chiefly consecrated to litter, and the master had less to do with it, personally, than with almost any other room in the house. There, the children, boys and girls, played, or learned lessons, or practised; there, Mrs. Hastings would sit to sew when she had any work in hand too plebeian for the eyes of polite visitors.