"Doctor, is it the Spanish influenza? Has he fever? He's always subject to colds, Doctor. He's not as strong as he looks. I've sat up many a night with his quincy sore throats. Many is the time, before we got the auto, that I rode down for him in the street car with his rubbers, if a rain came up. Doctor, do you think it could be that Spanish influenza? O God! if he should take sick away from home! Our doctor at home understands his system. My boy—my son—"
With a frozen sense of her alienism, Lilly sat, as it were, outside the situation, proffering herself almost with a sense of intrusion.
The doctor would not pronounce, but left with instructions and the promise of a midnight return. Into that Mrs. Becker read darkly.
"He's a sick man or one of these busy New York doctors wouldn't be returning again to-night. My boy is a sick man."
Meanwhile Albert had fallen into a light sleep. They sat beside his bedside watching his lips puff out, sometimes in bubbles.
The silence of midnight descended over the transient formality of the hotel room.
Undoubtedly Albert had a fever which seemed to be rising. He moistened his lips now constantly and threw himself about beneath the coverings, and then Mrs. Becker, not to be restrained, would lean forward to brush backward from his brow, as if there were hair.
At midnight the doctor returned and at one o'clock Albert was removed to
Murray Hill Hospital.
He was ill three days, slipping off almost from the beginning into a state of coma from which he did not emerge.
With a celerity that was presently to race it through the country, this strange malady laid low its victim with what might have been pneumonia, except for certain complications that baffled and alarmed an already thoroughly aroused medical world.