"Ask the doctor, then;" and he sauntered out, smiling, and perhaps not
dreaming that she would.
But "for the child's sake" had alarmed Ideala, and she sent for the
doctor. It was hours before he could come to her, and, in the meantime,
not knowing that her state of mind would affect the child, she had
fidgeted and fretted herself into a fever, and when the doctor saw her,
he could only confirm her husband's verdict.
"I am afraid you must give up nursing," he said. "You are in such a
nervous state it will do the child harm. But he's such a fine fellow!
He'll thrive all right--you needn't be frightened."
Ideala said nothing, but she sat in her own room night after night for
a week, and heard the child crying for her, and could not go to him--
and even when he did not cry she fancied she heard him still. I think
as the milk slowly and painfully left her, her last spark of affection
for her husband dried up too.
The child died of diphtheria some time afterwards, and in a little
while, Ideala, who was then in her twenty-sixth year, returned to her
old pursuits, and no one ever knew what she felt about it:
For, it is with feelings as with waters--
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb!
CHAPTER XI.
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