Morris Hewland—­young, honest-hearted, but full of a young man’s fire and impulse, of an artist’s susceptibility to outward beauty, of the ready delight of educated taste in fresh, natural, responsive cleverness—­was treading dangerous ground.

He, too, knew that he was bewildered; and that if he opened his eyes he should see no way out of it.  Therefore he shut his eyes and drifted on.

Aunt Blin, with her simplicity,—­her incapacity of believing, though there might be wrong and mischief in the world, that anybody she knew could ever do it, sat there between them, the most bewildered, the most inwardly and utterly befooled of the three.

CHAPTER XXII.

BOX FIFTY-TWO.

In the midst of it all, she went and caught a horrible cold.

Aunt Blin, I mean.

It was all by wearing her india-rubbers a week too long, a week after she had found the heels were split; and in that week there came a heavy rain-storm.

She had to stay at home now.  Bel went to the rooms and brought back button-holes for her to make.  She could not do much; she was feverish and languid, and her eyes suffered.  But she liked to see something in the basket; she was always going to be “well enough to-morrow.”  When the work had to be returned, Bel hurried, and did the button-holes of an evening.

Mr. Hewland brought grapes and oranges and flowers to Miss Bree.  Bel fetched home little presents of her own to her aunt, making a pet of her:  ice-cream in a paper cone, horehound candy, once, a tumbler of black currant jelly.  But that last was very dear.  If Aunt Blin had eaten much of other things, they could not have afforded it, for there were only half earnings now.

To-morrow kept coming, but Miss Bree kept on not getting any better.  “She didn’t see the reason,” she said; “she never had a cold hang on so.  She believed she’d better go out and shake it off.  If she could have rode down-town she would, but somehow she didn’t seem to have the strength to walk.”

The reason she “couldn’t have rode,” was because all the horses were sick.  It was the singular epidemic of 1872.  There were no cars, no teams; the queer sight was presented in a great city, of the driveways as clear as the sidewalks; of nobody needed to guard the crossings or unsnarl the “blocks;” of stillness like Sunday, day after day; of men harnessed into wagons,—­eight human beings drawing, slowly and heavily, what any poor old prickle-ribs of a horse, that had life left in him at all, would have trotted cheerfully off with.  A lady’s trunk was a cartload; and a lady’s trunk passing through the streets was a curiosity; you could scarcely get one carried for love or money.