The landlady seemed satisfied, and having paid his five shillings in advance, Frithiof went off to secure his portmanteau, and by five o’clock was installed in his new home. It was well that he had lost no time in leaving his hotel, for during the next two days he was unable to quit his bed, and could only console himself with the reflection that at any rate he had a cheap roof over his head and that his rent would not ruin him. Perhaps the cold night air from the river had given him a chill on the previous night, or perhaps the strain of the excitement and suffering had been too much for him. At any rate he lay in feverish wretchedness, tossing through the long days and weary nights, a misery to himself and an anxiety to the people of the house. He discovered that his first impression had been correct. Miss Turnour, the landlady, was well born; she and her two sisters—all of them now middle-aged women—were the daughters of a country gentleman, who had either wasted his substance in speculation or on the turf. He was long since dead, and had left behind him the fruits of his selfishness, three helpless women, with no particular aptitudes and brought up to no particular profession. They had sunk down and down in the social scale, till it seemed that there was nothing left them but a certain refinement of taste, which only enabled them to suffer more keenly, and the family pedigree, of which they were proud, clinging very much to the peculiar spelling of their name, and struggling on in their little London house, quarreling much among themselves, and yet firmly determined that nothing on earth should part them. Frithiof dubbed them the three Fates. He wondered sometimes whether, after long years of poverty, he and Sigrid and Swanhild should come to the same miserable condition, the same hopeless, cold, hard spirit, the same pinched, worn faces, the same dreary, monotonous lives. The three Fates did not take much notice of their lodger. Miss Turnour often wished she had had the sense to see that he was ill before admitting him. Miss Caroline, the youngest, flatly declined waiting on him, as it was quite against her feelings of propriety. Miss Charlotte, the middle one of the three, who had more heart than the rest, tried to persuade him to see a doctor. “No,” he replied, “I shall be all right in a day or two. It is nothing but a feverish attack. I can’t afford doctor’s bills.” She looked at him a little compassionately; his poverty touched a chord in her own life. “Perhaps the illness has come in order that you may have time to think,” she said timidly. She was a very small little woman, like a white mouse, but Frithiof had speedily found that she was the only one of the three from whom he could expect any help. She was the snubbed one of the family, partly because she was timid and gentle, partly because she had lately adopted certain religious views upon which the other two looked down with the most supreme contempt.