He got up next morning, in spite of heavy head and aching limbs, and went down to the sitting-room, where he breakfasted in his solitary corner, shunning all companionship with his fellow-captives--an elderly parson, a scribbler of the Philter type, and a decayed tradesman--all equally hopeless and dismal. "We are kept here to swell Bambridge's profits," protested the parson. "Charges are being run up against us all for our commons in this wretched hole, and still worse extortions of a so-called legal nature; and I am told there is a fever of some kind in the house, and that we may all sicken of it before we are transferred to the Fleet." Fétis heard almost indifferently. He had entered that accursed house in a state of low fever, disturbed mentally and bodily. It seemed to him he could scarcely become worse than he was. He sat in his corner by the fireplace, sipping brandy all through the dreary winter day; would fain have attempted that letter to the newspaper, but there was again a difficulty about writing materials, and he had not strength to be persistent, and insist that he should be accommodated in that way. A lethargy was creeping over him; he sat staring at the dull fire, sometimes shivering, sometimes oppressed by heat. Next morning he awoke in a much worse condition, and could not lift his head from his pillow; next night he was delirious, and for more than a week he languished in a state betwixt apathy and raving madness; then came a lull in the fever, and one afternoon, in a lucid interval, he heard the word smallpox pronounced by an ancient beldame who had been the only attendant upon him and his neighbour; and then gradually--for there was a dulness in his mind which made him slow to apprehend anything--he began to understand what had happened to him. He had been put into a room with a smallpox patient, and he was smitten by that fell disease. The house was infected; he had been sent there to his doom. It was Topsparkle's scheme for getting rid of a dangerous tool. The arrest had been prompted by Topsparkle; the whole business planned by Topsparkle. He asked to see Mr. Marjory, and after much expostulation and heart-sickening delay the proprietor of the den appeared. Fétis accused him of murder, of having entrapped an unconscious victim into his poisonous den, with deliberate purpose to compass his death. "You have been bribed to get me out of the way," he said. "This house of yours is a _guetapens_;" and then he entreated that he might be removed to the Fleet prison till his debts were paid. "You'll have first to settle with me," answered Marjory, "and the tipstaff, and the warders;" and thereupon he produced a bill of nearly thirty pounds. Fétis had entered the house with less than thirty shillings on his person, and the greater part of those shillings had dribbled away in payment for drams. He had less than a crown left.