The doctors began to look overworked and very grave, and Mr.Hardcastle appeared less and less outside his gates, and took to walking always in the middle of the streets, whence he could wave a salutation to his passing friends without stopping to speak to them.

Dick said he'd like to see the fever catch _him_, and pursued the rough tenor of his ways fearlessly as of old, though he assured his anxious father that it was wholly because Nellie Atterbury lived in the healthiest quarter of the town, that he spent so much of his time at her house.

There was no use denying or qualifying it.

An epidemic of typhoid fever had stolen upon Joppa as a thief in the night, and there was no knowing what house it would not enter next, to rob it of its dearest and best.
Through all this slowly increasing alarm, Phebe Lane had been living as in a dream.

It was as if she found herself back in that old life before she knew Halloway, when people bored her, and when there seemed nothing worth doing or worth looking forward to, though the days were so full of duties.