The kind-hearted girl dragged him into the hall. "Come out with me, dear, and get a glass of cold milk," she said. "You've walked too far." Seated on a chair in the kitchen, his eyes closed, he heard, as in a dream, his friend's voice raised in dispute with some distant person. "And I say he shall have it, then. Walking all this way! And him lame, too! Tell Emma to put it on the tray, and leave it in the hall. The child's well enough now, anyway. I'll go get it myself--I'm not afraid. The whole of us had the fever, and no such smelling sheets pinned up, and no fuss at all, at all. I'm as good as a paid nurse, any day, if you come to that. A book'll hurt no one." Later he found himself perched beside the coachman, who was going to meet a train, the beloved book tight in his arms. He fingered it lovingly; he smelled the leaves like a little dog. For the first time in his life he took it to his home, and clasped it in his arms as he lay in bed. For days he did not appear, and it was Thomas, the janitor, who went finally to look him up, troubled by the children's reports of his illness. He returned grave-faced. "It's the fever, Miss Watkins, and they say there's little chance for him, the poor little feller! He was worn out with the heat. They don't know how he got it. He's out of his mind. To think of Jimmy like that!" The librarian's heart sank, and her assistant put her head on her arms and cried. Thomas sat sadly on his little porch, his unlighted pipe in his mouth. The library seemed strangely empty. The little Meadows girl brought them the news the next morning. "Jimmy's dead," she said abruptly. "He got it from a book up at the Vanderhoof's. His aunt feels awful bad. It was a libr'y book. They say he held it all the time." The librarian put away the book in her hand, envying the younger woman her facile tears. She was not imaginative, but she realised dimly for a moment that this little boy had known more of books, had got more from them, than she, with all her catalogues. They sat together, she, Miss Mather, and Thomas, a strange trio, at the simple funeral service in the church nearby. So far as daily living went, they were as near to him as the aunt who cared for him. Coming back to the library, they lingered awhile in the reading-room, trying to realise that it was all over, and that that little, quick tapping would never be heard again among the books. At last Thomas spoke: "It don't seem right," he said thickly, "it don't seem right nor fair. Here he was, doting on that book so, tugging it round, just living on it, you might say, and it turned on him and killed him. Gave it up, and a sacrifice it was, too--I know--and as a reward, it killed him. Went back to get it, brought it home, took it to bed--and it killed him. It's like those things he'd tell me out of it--they all died; seemingly without any reason, the gods would go back on 'em, and they'd die. He's often read it out to me."