They took him direct to the room where he now lay, for they had them--selves but one chamber, and if they took him there, what would become of the old bones to which the gardener was so fond of referring in his colloquies with himself?
Also, it might be some fever he had taken, and their own lives were so much the more precious that so much of them was gone! Like most of us, they were ready to do THEIR NEXT BEST for him.

They spared some of their own poor comforts to furnish the skeleton bed for him; and there he lay, like one adrift in a rotten boat on the ebbing ocean of life, while the old woman trudged away to the village to tell the doctor that there was a young Scotch gardener taken suddenly ill at their quarters in the castle.
The doctor sent his son, a man about thirty, who after travelling some years as medical attendant to a nobleman, had settled in his native village as his father's partner.

He prescribed for Cosmo, and gave hope that there was nothing infectious about the case.
Every day during the week he had come to see him, and the night before had been with him from dark to dawn.
The gardener's wife had informed Lady Joan that a young Scotchman who had come to her husband seeking employment, had been taken suddenly ill, and was lying in a room in the old wing; and Lady Joan had said she would speak to the housekeeper to let her have whatever she wanted for him.

The doctor saw Lady Joan most every time he came to see Cosmo, and she would enquire how his patient was going on; she would also hear the housekeeper's complaints of the difficulty she had in getting wine from the butler--of which there was no lack, only he grudged it, for he was doing his best to drink up the stock the old lord had left behind him, intending to take his departure with the last bottle--but she took no farther interest in the affair.

The castle was like a small deserted village, and there was no necessity for a person in one part of it knowing what was taking place in another.
But that same morning she had a letter from the laird, saying he was uneasy about his boy.