"The signore came here from Florence?" he asked.
"From Florence," Herminia assented, with a sudden sinking.
The doctor protruded his lower lip. "This is typhoid fever," he
said after a pause. "A very bad type. It has been assuming such a
form this winter at Florence."
He spoke the plain truth. Twenty-one days before in his bedroom at
the hotel in Florence, Alan had drunk a single glass of water from
the polluted springs that supply in part the Tuscan metropolis.
For twenty-one days those victorious microbes had brooded in
silence in his poisoned arteries. At the end of that time, they
swarmed and declared themselves. He was ill with an aggravated
form of the most deadly disease that still stalks unchecked through
unsanitated Europe.
Herminia's alarm was painful. Alan grew rapidly worse. In two
days he was so ill that she thought it her duty to telegraph at
once to Dr. Merrick, in London: "Alan's life in danger. Serious
attack of Florentine typhoid. Italian doctor despairs of his life.
May not last till to-morrow.--HERMINIA BARTON.
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