will you--can you come upstairs?" she asked. Her voice
was strained, almost reedy, and her lips were white.

Mr. Harbison stared up at her, with the telephone box in his hands.

"Why--er--certainly," he said, "but, unless it's very important, I'd
like to fix this talking machine. We want to make a food record."

"I'd like to break a food record," Max put in, but Bella created a
diversion by sitting down suddenly on the stair just above us, and
burying her face in her handkerchief.

"Jim is sick," she said, with a sob. "He--he doesn't want anything to
eat, and his head aches. He--said for me--to go away and let him die!"

Dal dropped the hammer immediately, and Lollie Mercer sat petrified,
with a bonbon halfway to her mouth. For, of course, it was unexpected,
finding sentiment of any kind in Bella, and none of them knew about the
scene in the den in the small hours of the morning.

"Sick!" Aunt Selina said, from a hall chair. "Sick! Where?"

"All over," Bella quavered. "His poor head is hot, and he's thirsty, but
he doesn't want anything but water."

"Great Scott!" Dal said suddenly. "Suppose he should--Bella, are you
telling us ALL his symptoms?"

Bella put down her handkerchief and got up. From her position on the
stairs she looked down on us with something of her old haughty manner.

"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