"I don't really think I can go, though I will turn up if I can," I
said, and Fred made the most of my promise and talked so much that
before I had to say anything else I found that he had persuaded Mrs.
Faulkner and Nina to go down to the river and watch Oriel rowing in the
earlier division. I went with them as far as the college lodge and
then I disappeared, for the note which I had received upset all my
hopes of enjoying myself for the rest of the day.
The first part of it was from Owen, who said he was feeling dreadfully
ill, but the second part was written by his landlady, and she seemed to
be in a terrible temper. As far as I could make out Owen was very much
worse and still refused to have a doctor. "He says," his landlady
wrote, "that if I send for a physician he won't pay him and I was up
last night five times and who is going to stand it cough he coughs
something awful and what's going to happen I don't know I expect he's
got typhoid fever or something horrible." She did not use any stops,
but that might have been because she was in a hurry; clearly, however,
she was very angry, and there was only one thing for me to do.
I went round to Lomax Street as fast as I could, and I had no sooner
got inside the house then I heard Owen coughing. I found his landlady
in the state her letter had suggested I should find her, she was
infinitely more sorry for herself than she was for Owen, and since he
was too ill for her to get any satisfaction from visiting her grievance
upon him she started off upon me.
"You are his friend," she said as she met me in the passage, "and you
ought to have been here before. I was just doing myself up before
putting on my bonnet to go out and report this case."
"To whom were you going to report it?" I asked, for I felt very much as
if I should like to know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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