"Nonsense, grown people don't get that."
"They sometimes do," he assured me, after which he prescribed some medicine and spent several hours with me, that day, while I anathematized my luck and felt properly ashamed of my infantile complaint. After this a bad cough came, followed by a pain in my chest, and the medicine put me asleep, I think, for I woke up to find Frieda on one side of me and a nurse on the other. It was Miss Follansbee, who had looked after Baby Paul, and Frieda had gone off and haled her back, bodily. It was only afterwards that I knew my measles were complicated with pneumonia.
There was a week that was a sort of nightmare, I think, because for days I didn't know very much, and tossed about, and felt that pain in my side most of the time, and struggled unavailingly for a decent long breath that wouldn't hurt. One day a strange doctor came in with Dr. Porter.
Later, arrived a morning when I felt ever so well and Miss Follansbee was dozing a little in her chair, looking very weary, and the breathing was no longer painful and Porter came in and capered about the room and Frieda smeared her cheeks with the rubbing in of tears of joy. I suppose I must have been rather badly off during some of those days.
Then came the evening and with it a queer notion that visions and strange dreams were coming back to me, for through the open door there sounded a footfall I had been hearing vaguely and longing for. Suddenly, Frances rushed in and was kneeling by my bed.
"Oh, Dave dearest!" she cried, "You wicked, wicked man! They tell me that you forbade them to let me know for fear I would bring Baby back before he was all well! I'll never forgive you!"
As a proof of her anger, I suppose, she had taken up my thin bony hand and was kissing it.
"Please, please don't," I whispered hoarsely. "You—you'll get it too, first thing you know, and it's bad when it gets on one's lungs. You might lose that beautiful dear voice of yours again."
But she rose, shaking her head at me like a mother who feels that her boy is incorrigible, and dragged a chair by the bed and put her finger to her lips when I would have spoken again, and laid her soft hand on mine, whereupon sleep came, dreamless and beautiful.
During the night a hand gave me water, once or twice, and milk, I think, and I slept again and, when I awoke in the morning, I turned my head.