"Suppose I had gone!" thought Virginia, while an overwhelming thankfulness swept the anxiety out of her mind. Not until the servant reappeared, dragging the fat old doctor after her, did Virginia remember that she was still barefooted, and go into her bedroom to search for her slippers. "You don't think he is seriously sick, do you, doctor? Is there any need to be alarmed?" she asked, and her voice entreated him to allay her anxiety. The doctor, a benevolent soul in a body which had run to fat from lack of exercise, was engaged in holding Harry's tongue down with a silver spoon, while, in spite of the child's furious protests, he leisurely examined his throat. When the operation was over, and Harry, crying, choking, and kicking, rolled into Virginia's arms, she put the question again, vaguely rebelling against the gravity in the kind old face which was turned half away from her: "There's nothing really the matter, is there, doctor?" He turned to her, and laid a caressing, if heavy, hand on her shoulder, which shook suddenly under the thin folds of her dressing-gown. After forty years in which he had watched suffering and death, he preserved still his native repugnance to contact with any side of life that did not have a comfortable feeling to it. "Oh, we'll get him all right soon, with some good nursing," he said gently, "but I think we're going to have a bit of an illness on our hands." "But not serious, doctor? It isn't anything serious?" She felt suddenly so weak that she could hardly stand, and instinctively she reached out to grasp the large, protecting arm of the physician. Even then his bland professional smile, which had in it something of the serene detachment of the everlasting purpose of which it was a part, did not fade, hardly changed even, on his features. "Well, I think we'd better get the other children away. It might be serious if they all had it on our hands." "Had it? Had what? Oh, doctor--not--diphtheria?" She brought out the word with a face of such unutterable horror that he turned his eyes away, lest the memory of her look should interfere with his treatment of the next case he visited. There was something infernal in the sound of the thing which always knocked over the mothers of his generation. He had never seen one of them who could hear it without going to pieces on his hands; and for that reason he never mentioned the disease by name unless they drove him to it. They feared it as they might have feared the plague--and even more! If the medical profession would begin calling it something else, he wondered if the unmitigated terror of it wouldn't partially subside? "Well, it looks like that now, Jinny," he said soothingly; "but we'll come out all right, never fear. It isn't a bad case, you know, and the chief thing is to get the other children out of danger."