“If he is ill, you may blame yourselves, all of you,” she said cruelly. “You taunted him with being--fat, and laughed at him, until he stopped eating the things he should eat. And he has been exercising--on the roof, until he has worn himself out. And now--he is ill. He--he has a rash.” Everybody jumped at that, and we instinctively moved away from Bella. She was quite cold and scornful by that time. “A rash!” Max exclaimed. “What sort of rash?” “I did not see it,” Bella said with dignity, and turning, she went up the stairs. There was a great deal of excitement, and nobody except Mr. Harbison was willing to go near Jim. He went up at once with Bella, while Max and Dal sat cravenly downstairs and wondered if we would all take it, and Anne told about a man she knew who had it, and was deaf and dumb and blind when he recovered. Mr. Harbison came down after a while, and said that the rash was there, right enough, and that Jim absolutely refused to be quarantined; that he insisted that he always got a rash from early strawberries and that if he DID have anything, since they were so touchy he hoped they would all get it. If they locked him in he would kick the door down. We had a long conference in the hall, with Bella sitting red-eyed and objecting to every suggestion we made. And finally we arranged to shut Jim up in one of the servants’ bedrooms with a sheet wrung out of disinfectant hung over the door. Bella said she would sit outside in the hall and read to him through the closed door, so finally he gave a grudging consent. But he was in an awful humor. Max and Dal put on rubber gloves and helped him over, and they said afterward that the way he talked was fearful. And there was a telephone in the maid’s room, and he kept asking for things every five minutes. When the doctor came he said it was too early to tell positively, and he ordered him liquid diet and said he would be back that evening. Which--the diet--takes me back to the famine. After they had moved Jim, Mr. Harbison went back to the telephone, and found everything as it should be. So he followed the telephone wire, and the rest followed him. I did not; he had systematically ignored me all morning, after having dared to kiss me the night before. And any other man I know, after looking at me the way he had looked a dozen times, would have been at least reasonably glad to find me free and unmarried. But it was clear that he was not; I wondered if he was the kind of man who always makes love to the other man’s wife and runs like mad when she is left a widow, or gets a divorce. And just when I had decided that I hated him, and that there was one man I knew who would never make love to a woman whom he thought married and then be very dignified and aloof when he found she wasn’t, I heard what was wrong with the telephone wire.