You will try, won't you ?" she asked, in the childish pleading way which was peculiar to her.
The dentist was searching for something in the drawer of a table, and his back was turned on the anxious questioner.
"You may depend upon it, I'll do my best, Mrs.Halliday," he answered, still busy at the drawer.

Mr.Sheldon the younger had paid many visits to Fitzgeorge-street during Tom Halliday's illness.

George and Tom had been the Damon and Pythias of Barlingford; and George seemed really distressed when he found his friend changed for the worse.

The changes in the invalid were so puzzling, the alternations from better to worse and from worse to better so frequent, that fear could take no hold upon the minds of the patient's friends.

It seemed such a very slight affair this low fever, though sufficiently inconvenient to the patient himself, who suffered a good deal from thirst and sickness, and showed an extreme disinclination for food, all which symptoms Mr.Sheldon said were the commonest and simplest features of a very mild attack of bilious fever, which would leave Tom a better man than it had found him.
There had been several pleasant little card-parties during the earlier stages of Mr.Halliday's illness; but within the last week the patient had been too low and weak for cards--too weak to read the newspaper, or even to bear having it read to him.