im up however much you try. We Plumsteads are all like that, and
sometimes it is very awkward," said Sylvia earnestly.

"I will risk it; only you must go to bed now," said the doctor, laughing
broadly at her description of the Plumstead weakness in the matter of
popping off to sleep at inconvenient times; and then he called to
Rumple and asked him to see his sister safely into the wagon, and to
keep an eye on it during the remainder of the night.

Poor Rumple! He honestly meant to do just what the doctor asked of him,
for he was just as grateful as a boy could be for what was being done
for Rupert and also for the way in which the doctor was treating the
girls, so he trotted backwards and forwards for another hour, bringing
in wood, stoking the stove, making kettles boil, fetching water from a
crazy old pump in the next garden, falling over the tangled vegetation
_en route_, and getting hopelessly muddled in the darkness. Then he
suddenly became so sleepy that it seemed to him he would snore as he
walked about; his feet became heavier and heavier, until the effort to
lift them grew beyond his power. He could not see out of his eyes, and,
collapsing on to the floor between the door and the stove, he lay there,
happily unconscious of everything.

The doctor found him on one of his journeys out to the stove for fresh
boiling water, and would certainly have thought him to be in a fit but
for Sylvia's explanation of the family peculiarity. So he only smiled to
himself, and, lifting Rumple, laid him more at ease in the farther
corner of the room, covering him over with a rug; and then he went back
to the bedroom, where Nealie was busy helping him with Rupert, and said,
in a laughing tone: "I have just picked that brother of yours up from
the floor, where he lay as fast asleep as if he were on the softest bed
that had ever been made."

"Poor Rumple! His intentions about keeping awake are always so good that
it is very hard on him to be bowled over in such a fashion," said
Nealie, with a wan little smile, and then for a few minutes she was very
busy helping the doctor put fresh fomentations on Rupert. But when this
was finished, and the sufferer lay quiet from the comfort of it all, and
there was leisure to think of other things, Nealie spoke again: "How
soon will it be safe for me to leave Rupert?"

The doctor looked at her in surprise; but thinking she was tired out,
and longing for sleep, he said kindly:

"You can go o