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He tried to sing a measure of praise beneath his breath but the tune and words evaded him. He glanced furtively at Bowman's complacent bulk, the flushed face turned fatuously to Bella. Under the other's left arm his coat was drawn smoothly on a cushion of fat. Later Lemuel stopped at Flavilla's bed, and though she was composed he was vaguely alarmed at what seemed to him an unreal rigidity.
Flavilla's probably as well as any of us. I wish you would fix yourself a little, Lem. I'm tired of having you about the house in your suspenders." He viewed her silently. Bella had on a dress he had never seen before, thin red-spotted yellow silk drawn tightly over a pronounced figure, a red girdle, and high-heeled patent-leather slippers.
There had been no customers to-day nor yesterday; still, it was the middle of the week and what trade there was generally concentrated on Saturday. Beyond he went upstairs to Flavilla's bed. She was awake, twisting about in a fragmentary nightgown, dark against the disordered sheet. "It's dreadful hot," she complained shortly; "my head's hot too. The window won't go up."
Wishing to possess both Flavilla's fortune and Dalinda's charms, he effects a reconciliation with the latter by promising to own their prior contract, but when he comes out into the open and proposes to entertain her as a mistress, she indignantly returns to her grandmother's house, where she summons her brother and her faithful lover, Leander, to force her perfidious husband to do her justice.
He turned directly into Flavilla's room. She was there he saw her at once. But Bella hadn't put a fresh nightgown on her, and the sheets were disordered and unchanged. Lemuel took a step forward; then he stopped. "The fever's gone," he vainly told the dread freezing about his heart at a stilled white face. "Yes," he repeated with numb lips; "it's gone."
"It will hurt no one if I do that." Above Flavilla's flushed face, a tentative finger on her wrist, Frazee's expression grew serious. "I'll tell you this," he asserted; "she's sick. You had better call Markley to-day. And until he comes don't give her any solids. You can see she's in a fever." "Can't you tend her? I'd put more on you than any fresh young hospital stiff."
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