Before morning I was aching all over: I had rheumatic fever.
CHAPTER XIX. CHARLEY NURSES ME.
I saw no more of Clara. Mr Coningham came to bid me good-bye, and spoke very kindly. Mr Forest would have got a nurse for me, but Charley begged so earnestly to be allowed to return the service I had done for him that he yielded.
I was in great pain for more than a week. Charley’s attentions were unremitting. In fact he nursed me more like a woman than a boy; and made me think with some contrition how poor my ministrations had been. Even after the worst was over, if I but moved, he was at my bedside in a moment. Certainly no nurse could have surpassed him. I could bear no one to touch me but him: from any one else I dreaded torture; and my medicine was administered to the very moment by my own old watch, which had been brought to do its duty at least respectably.
One afternoon, finding me tolerably comfortable, he said, ‘Shall I read something to you, Wilfrid?’
He never called me Willie, as most of my friends did.
‘I should like it,’ I answered.
‘What shall I read?’ he asked.
‘Hadn’t you something in your head,’ I rejoined, ‘when you proposed it?’