I suppose she considered this amusing, but of course it was not, and I jerked myself free of my braces without answering.
“Won’t you tell me what it is?” she asked again.
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.”