e decided upon erysipelas for the time being, but he meant
to let Westover know later that he had been in a row--and the doctor
would not let him go out yet. He promised to come in as soon as he
possibly could. If Westover thought Jackson ought to be got home at
once, and was not fit to travel alone, he asked him to send a hospital
nurse with him.

Westover replied by Jeff's messenger that it would worry and alarm
Jackson to be put in charge of a nurse; but that he would go home with
him, and they would start the next day. He urged Jeff to come and see
his brother if it was at all safe for him to do so. But if he could not,
Westover would give his mother a reassuring reason for his failure.

Mrs. Durgin did not waste any anxiety for the sickness which prevented
Jeff from coming home with his brother. She said ironically that it must
be very bad, and she gave all her thought and care to Jackson. The
sick man rallied, as he prophesied he should, in his native air, and
celebrated the sense and science of the last doctor he had seen in
Europe, who told him that he had made a great gain, but he had better
hurry home as fast as he could, for he had got all the advantage he
could expect to have from his stay abroad, and now home air was the best
thing for him.

It could not be known how much of this he believed; he had, at any rate,
the pathetic hopefulness of his malady; but his mother believed it all,
and she nursed him with a faith in his recovery which Whitwell confided
to Westover was about as much as he wanted to see, for one while. She
seemed to grow younger in the care of him, and to get back to herself,
more and more, from the facts of Jeff's behavior, which had aged and
broken her. She had to tell Jackson about it all, but he took it with
that indifference to the things of this world which the approach of
death sometimes brings, and in the light of his passivity it no longer
seemed to her so very bad. It was a relief to have Jackson say, Well,
perhaps it was for the best; and it was a comfort to see how he and
Cynthia took to each other; it was almost as if that dreadful trouble
had not been. She told Jackson what hard work she had had to make
Cynthia stay with her, and how the girl had consented to stay only until
Jeff came home; but she guessed, now that Jackson had got back, he could
make Cynthia see it all in another light, and perhaps it would all come
right again. She consulted him about Jeff's plan of going