Of this Dora was not much inclined to talk, and as she was tired and excited, the doctor left her at last, stopping on his way from the house to look at little Daisy, whom Jessie held in her lap, and who seemed feverish and sick. The doctor did not then say what he feared, but when later in the day he came again, the child’s symptoms had developed so rapidly, that he had no hesitancy in pronouncing it the scarlet fever, then prevailing to an alarming extent in an adjoining town. Squire Russell had thought his cup full to overflowing, but in his anxiety for Daisy, he forgot his recent disappointment, and, as a father and mother both, nursed his suffering child, assisted by Jessie, whose services there, as elsewhere, were invaluable. It was indeed a house of mourning, and for weeks a dark cloud brooded over it as one after another, Ben and Burt, Letitia and Jim, were prostrate with the disease which Daisy had been the first to take, and from which she slowly recovered. When Letitia was smitten down Jessie was filled with remorse, for she remembered what she had said of the quiet child, and with a sister’s tenderness she nursed the little girl, who would take her medicine from no one else. From the first Ben and Burt were not very ill, but for a time it seemed doubtful which would gain the mastery, life or death, in the cases of Letitia and Jim. With regard to Letitia that question was soon settled, and one October morning Jessie put gently back upon the pillow the child who had died in her lap, kissing her the last of all ere she went the dark road already trodden by the mother, who in life would have chosen anybody else than Jessie Verner to have soothed the last moments of her little girl. But Jessie’s work was not yet done, and while the sad procession went on its way to the village graveyard, where Margaret was lying, she sat by Jimmie’s side fanning his feverish cheeks, and carefully administering the medicines which were no longer of avail. Two days after Jimmie, too, died in Jessie’s lap, and as she gave him into his father’s arms the weeping man blessed her silently for all she had been to him and his, and felt how doubly desolate he should be without her. CHAPTER XXVI. GIVING IN MARRIAGE. There were two little graves now by Margaret’s, and in the house two vacant chairs, and two voices hushed, while Squire Russell counted four children where he had numbered six, and yet the unselfish man would hear of no delay to Dora’s marriage. “Let it go on the same,” he said. “It will make me feel better to know that there are around me some perfectly happy ones.”