control he cried: "Lift
me up! Lift me up!"

Lilly hurried and lifted him up, and he sat panting with a sobbing
motion, his eyes gloomy and terrified, more than ever like a criminal
who is just being executed. He drank brandy, and was laid down on his
side.

"Don't let me lie on my back," he said, terrified. "No, I won't," said
Lilly. Aaron frowned curiously on his nurse. "Mind you don't let me," he
said, exacting and really terrified.

"No, I won't let you."

And now Lilly was continually crossing over and pulling Aaron on to his
side, whenever he found him slipped down on his back.

In the morning the doctor was puzzled. Probably it was the toxin in the
blood which poisoned the heart. There was no pneumonia. And yet Aaron
was clearly growing worse. The doctor agreed to send in a nurse for the
coming night.

"What's the matter with you, man!" he said sharply to his patient. "You
give way! You give way! Can't you pull yourself together?"

But Aaron only became more gloomily withheld, retracting from life.
And Lilly began to be really troubled. He got a friend to sit with the
patient in the afternoon, whilst he himself went out and arranged to
sleep in Aaron's room, at his lodging.

The next morning, when he came in, he found the patient lying as ever,
in a sort of heap in the bed. Nurse had had to lift him up and hold him
up again. And now Aaron lay in a sort of semi-stupor of fear, frustrated
anger, misery and self-repulsion: a sort of interlocked depression.

The doctor frowned when he came. He talked with the nurse, and wrote
another prescription. Then he drew Lilly away to the door.

"What's the matter with the fellow?" he said. "Can't you rouse his
spirit? He seems to be sulking himself out of life. He'll drop out quite
suddenly, you know, if he goes on like this. Can't you rouse him up?"

"I think it depresses him partly that his bowels won't work. It
frightens him. He's never been ill in his life before," said Lilly.

"His bowels won't work if he lets all his spirit go, like an animal
dying of the sulks," said the doctor impatiently. "He might go off quite
suddenly--dead before you can turn round--"

Lilly was properly troubled. Yet he did not quite know what to do. It
was early afternoon, and the sun was shining into the room. There were
daffodils and anemones in a jar, and freezias and violets. Down below in
the market were two stalls of golden and blue flowers, gay.

"The flowers are lovely i