“So it does,” said Raymond, in the same dreamy manner, as if trying to shake something off. “Some years, isn’t it? I wanted it done, somehow. I would sit down to it now, only I have fallen asleep a dozen times over it already.”
“Not very good for composition,” said Julius, alarmed by something indefinable in his brother’s look, and by his manner of insisting on what was by no means urgent. “Come, put it out of your head, and go to bed.”
“How did you find the boy Terry?” asked Raymond, again as if in his sleep.
“I scarcely saw him. He was asleep.”
“And Worth calls it—?”
“The same fever as in Water Lane.”
“I thought so. We are in for it,” said Raymond, now quite awake. “He did not choose to say so to my mother, but I gathered it from his orders.”
“But Frank only came down yesterday.”
“Frank was knocked down and predisposed by the treatment he met with, poor boy. They say he drank quarts of iced things at the dinner and ball, and ate nothing. This may be only the effect of the shock, but his head is burning, and there is a disposition to wander. However, he has had his coup de grâce, and that may account for it. It is Cecil.”
“Cecil!”