'Ah! a fever like this is a very touch-and-go affair,' responded old Gallipot, in whom the telegrams from headquarters and from Edinburgh had given a peculiar interest for his patient.
'Am I dying, doctor—don't fear to tell me?' asked the latter suddenly in a low, husky voice.
'Why do you ask, my poor fellow?' replied the doctor, bending over him.
'I mean simply, is the end of this illness—death?'
'To tell you the truth, I greatly fear it is,' replied the doctor, shaking his head.
'God's will be done!' said Florian resignedly. 'Well, well, perhaps it is better so—I am so far gone—but Dulcie!' he added to himself in a husky whisper—'poor Dulcie, alone—all alone!'
His senses had quite returned now, but he was so weak that he could neither move hand nor foot, and his eyelids, unable to uphold their own weight, closed as soon as raised, and often while his parched tongue clove to the roof of his mouth as he lay thus he was supposed to be asleep.
'Poor fellow!' he heard Tom Tyrrell whisper to an hospital orderly in a broken voice; 'he's got his marching orders, and will soon be off—yet he doesn't seem to suffer much.'
How hard it was to die so young, with what should have been a long life before him, and now one with honours won to make it valuable.
Well, well, he thought, if it was God's will it would be no worse for him than for others. It seemed as natural to die as to be born—our place in the world is vacant before and after; but yet, again, it was hard, he thought, to die, and die so young in a distant and barbarous land, where the savage, the wild animal, and the Kaffir vulture would be the only loiterers near his lonely and unmarked grave.