urs,
he was told.

There was no clock in the room, and he had no watch, but the
engine-house bell in the next block clanged the alarm regularly.

The responsibility of giving himself his own medicine kept him from
dropping asleep as he longed to do. He would doze for a few minutes
and start up, fearing that he had let the time go by, or that he had
taken a double dose, or that he had confused directions. Was it two
pink ones or two white ones, or one hour or two hours? He said it
over and over with every variation possible. The confusion was
maddening.

The pain in his lungs grew worse. He was burning with thirst, but
there was no more water in the glass. He looked round the room with
feverish, aching eyes, that suddenly filled with hot tears. If he
could only be back in his own room at home, with Aunt Eunice to care
for him, and Flip to make him comfortable, how good it would seem! He
was tasting to the dregs the misery of being ill, all alone among
strangers.

Toward evening the woman who kept the lodging-house sent a little
coloured boy up to ask if he wanted anything. A pitcher of water was
all that Alec asked for. That being supplied, the boy shut the door
and clattered down the hall, whistling. The night seemed endless.
Hour after hour he started up shuddering, as the bell's loud clang
awakened him, not knowing what it was that startled him. In his
feverish hallucinations he thought he was continually breaking
through the ice into a sea of burning water. He kept clutching at the
pillows, thinking they were islands that he was for ever drifting
past and could never reach.

When morning came at last, and the doctor made his second visit, he
found Alec delirious and the medicine still on the chair beside the
bed. With one glance round the cheerless room, he shrugged his
shoulders and went out for help.

When Alec next noticed his surroundings with eyes that were once more
clear and rational, he saw that the dingy little grate had been
opened and a bright fire was burning in it. The clothing he had left
on the floor in a heap had been put away. The window shade no longer
hung askew. He looked round half-expecting to see his Aunt Eunice or
Flip, and wondered if he had been so ill that some one had sent for
them. Then his glance fell on a grizzled old man with a wooden leg,
dozing in a rocking-chair by the fire.

"Old Jimmy Scott!" Alec said to himself after a moment's puzzled
scrutiny, in which he racked his