While Miss Eunice worried, and Philippa haunted the post-office, he was lying ill in his cheerless little bedroom, on the top floor of the cheap lodging-house. He had skated not only Thanksgiving afternoon, but again at night when the ice was illuminated by bonfires and lanterns. There was a danger-signal posted farther down where the ice was thin. He had avoided it all the afternoon, but intent on cutting some fancy figure one of the boys had taught him, he did not notice how near he was to the dangerous spot until he heard a cracking noise all round him, and it was too late to save himself from a plunge into the icy water. Although he was helped out immediately, and ran every step of the way to his room, he was shaking with a chill when he reached it. All the covering he could pile on the bed did not stop the chattering of his teeth as he lay shivering between the cold sheets. In the morning he was burning with fever. There was such a sharp pain in his lungs that he could not draw a full breath. He tried to get up and dress, but the attempt made him so weak and dizzy that he could only stagger back to bed and lie there in a sort of stupor. It was not quite clear to him who brought a doctor, but one came in the course of the morning and left two kinds of little pellets and a glass of water on the chair beside his bed. He was to take two pink pellets every hour and one white one every two hours, 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.