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When a family sets its daughter's rank so high that no suitor counts as noble enough, she is left unmarried. The gap is then filled by someone the household itself brings in, such as a tutor, whose daily closeness lets love grow across the very line the family was guarding.
A child with a high fever can convulse, go rigid or twitch, and fall so still that his parents check whether he is alive and pray aloud to save him. Then he wakes from a deep sleep, yawning and laughing. The fits fit what is now called a febrile seizure, which looks like death but leaves no harm. Local belief blamed them on a brush with death.