"No!..." exclaimed Ishmael and Killigrew in a breath; and Killigrew went
on: "What illness? I can't imagine the Hilaria we used to know ill."

"She's not the Hilaria we used to know, I'm afraid. You would hardly
recognize her. She's got a disease--you wouldn't know it if I were to
tell you its name--that is one of the most obscure known to science, if
you can call a thing known when no cure can be discovered to it. Yes,
she's hopelessly paralysed, is poor Hilaria." A certain impersonal note
as he spoke of the illness had crept through all the genuine feeling in
Carminow's voice.

"But it's impossible!" cried Ishmael, profoundly shocked, not so much at
any personal feeling for Hilaria, as an instinctive protest that such
things could be. "Hilaria--why she was never still, and the things she
did--why, you remember her walks and her fencing and everything--"

"Old Dr. Harvey at St. Renny puts it down very largely to those
excessive walks she used to take," said Carminow.

Ishmael said nothing; he was struck by a greater horror that it should
have been those walks, which had so seemed to set Hilaria apart from her
sex, on which he had so often accompanied her, of which even now he
could recall the delight though he had not thought of them since....
Carminow went on:

"But of course I don't agree with him; he only says that because he
always disapproved of the way poor old Eliot brought her up. Personally
I think it was a very healthy way, and I believe it will be for the good
of the race when women are made to exercise more. But Hilaria had the