The fever which had so
soon smitten her down was not properly a contagious one. I went on with
my school again, missing the sweet face of the dead child more and more
each succeeding day.
Not one of the children with whom she had played was taken sick, but it
was scarcely two weeks after her death that I was taken sick as she had
been. In the interval George Olver had come to me and I had written to
Rebecca, but Rebecca had not come back to Wallencamp nor answered my
letter. I was more anxious and troubled about her than I dared confess to
any one. Then suddenly I ceased to care for any of those things. Of my
last afternoon in school I could recall very little afterwards, except
that the clock on the shelf back of me seemed to be ticking in my brain,
and the voices in the room sounded indistinct. My own voice sounded to me
like that of some one else speaking from a long way off.
And at evening, in the Ark, I put my little room in perfect order, my
head growing heavy with pain. I felt that I must finish this task before
I lay down, and there was another intention to which I clung with a
painful pertinacity of mind.
I sat down at my table and wrote half a dozen or more brief letters
home.
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