. It was a story of fitful jerks and starts, of
burning fever alternating with shivering spells, of terrifying dreams and
wretched haunted hours of wakefulness. At last the longed-for morning
stole in at the windows to find her eyes heavy, her limbs languid, her
brain muddled and dull, her head roaring.

It was the quinine that had done it--she knew it was--unspeakably worse
than the cold unattended. Worried Agnes acknowledged that the dose might
effect some systems violently.

"But it has broken up your cold," she pleaded, "that's certainly gone."

"What?" said Ethelwynne fretfully, "don't mumble so and run your words
together. I can't hear the gong very well either. And the Latin test is
coming the first hour after breakfast. I haven't had a chance to review
an ode. I feel so wretched! Oh, me! oh, me!"

Ethelwynne never forgot that Latin test. The very first line written by
the instructor on the blackboard smote her with despair. She had never
been able to translate from hearing anyhow. This morning when Miss Sawyer
took her seat on the platform and opened her book, Ethelwynne bent
forward anxiously, every nerve alert and strained. What was the first
word? Oh, what was it? She had not caught it. It sounded blurred and mazy
with no ending at all. And the next--and the next! And the third! Now she
had lost it. The first was gone. She had forgotten the second. The voice
went reading on and on. She floundered after, falling farther and farther
behind. There wasn't any sense to it, and she couldn't hear the words
plainly, and everything was all mixed up. The other girls seemed to
understand. They were writing down the translation as fast as they could
scribble--at least some of them were. But she could not make out a
particle of meaning. It was Agnes's fault--it was all her fault. She had
coaxed her to take the quinine, and now she could not hear plainly or
think or remember or anything.

In wrathful discouragement she turned to the rest of the questions. One
or two were short and easy. She managed to do the translations already
familiar. But when she reached the last part and attempted to write down
an ode which she had memorized the week before, she found that many of
the words had slipped away from her. The opening line was vivid enough,
then came a blank ending in a phrase that kept dancing trickily from spot
to spot in her visual imagination of the page. Here she recalled two
words, there three, with a vanishing,