So I trusted to the blessed quiet of a sick-room--often so healing to misery--to Jael's nursing, and his brother's love.
After a few days we called in a physician--a stranger from Coltham--who pronounced it to be this Norton Bury fever, caught through living, as he still persisted in doing, in his old attic, in that unhealthy alley where was Sally Watkins's house.

It must have been coming on, the doctor said, for a long time; but it had no doubt now reached its crisis.

He would be better soon.
But he did not get better.

Days slid into weeks, and still he lay there, never complaining, scarcely appearing to suffer, except from the wasting of the fever; yet when I spoke of recovery he "turned his face unto the wall"-- weary of living.
Once, when he had lain thus a whole morning, hardly speaking a word, I began to feel growing palpable the truth which day by day I had thrust behind me as some intangible, impossible dread--that ere now people had died of mere soul-sickness, without any bodily disease.

I took up his poor hand that lay on the counterpane;--once, at Enderley, he had regretted its somewhat coarse strength: now Ursula's own was not thinner or whiter.