For all answer I crawled into my berth and pulled the coverings up to my ears and turned my face to the wall; for indeed I was at the end both of my patience and my strength. I had had two days’ running full of disagreeable incidents, and Menzies-Legh’s fatal drop of milk seemed at last to have fallen into the brightness of my original strong tea. I ached enough to make his prophesied rheumatism a very near peril, and was not at all sure as I lay there that it had not already begun its work upon me, beginning it with an alarming promise of system and thoroughness at the very beginning, _i. e._, my feet. “Poor Otto,” said Edelgard, getting up and laying her hand on my forehead; adding, after a moment, “It is nice and cool.” “Cool? I should think so,” said I shivering. “I am frozen.” She got a rug out of the yellow box and laid it over me, tucking in the side. “So tired?” she said presently, as she tidied up my clothes. “Ill,” I murmured. “What is it?” “Oh, leave me, leave me. You do not really care. Leave me.” At this she paused in her occupation to gaze, I fancy, at my back as I lay resolutely turned away. “It is very early to go to bed,” she said after a while. “Not when a man is ill.” “It isn’t seven yet.” “Oh, do not, I beg you, argue with me. If you cannot have sympathy you can at least leave me. It is all I ask.” This silenced her, and she moved about the van more careful not to sway it, so that presently I was able to fall into an exhausted sleep. How long this lasted I could not on suddenly waking tell, but everything had grown dark and Edelgard, as I could hear, was asleep above me. Something had wrenched me out of the depths of slumber in which I was sunk and had brought me up again with a jerk to that surface known to us as sentient life. You are aware, my friends, being also living beings with all the experiences connected with such a condition behind you, you are aware what such a jerking is. It seems to be a series of flashes. The first flash reminds you (with an immense shock) that you are not as you for one comfortable instant supposed in your own safe familiar bed at home; the second brings back the impression of the loneliness and weirdness of Frogs’ Hole Farm (or its, in your case, local equivalent) that you received while yet it was day; the third makes you realize with a clutching at your heart that _something_ happened before you woke up, and that _something_ is presently going to happen again. You lie awake waiting for it, and the entire surface of your body becomes as you wait uniformly damp. The sound of a person breathing regularly in the apartment does but emphasize your loneliness. I confess I was unable to reach out for matches and strike a light, unable to do anything under that strong impression that something had happened except remain motionless beneath the bed-coverings. This was no shame to me, my friends. Face me with cannon, and I have the courage of any man living,