“Oh, Ethelwynne!” groaned Agnes, “you never deny yourself anything. It is the only trait I don’t like in you. Now you have caught a dreadful cold just because you could not refuse the candy. You must break it up with quinine.” She fetched a small box from the bureau in her bedroom. “Here, open your mouth.”
The other girl opened her mouth obediently. “I love pills. We’re homeopaths, you know. Once when I was a baby, I got hold of mother’s medicine chest and ate all the pellets. I thought they were candy. Sweet—oh, delicious! I used to enjoy being sick. And now this nice big chocolate-coated pill!” She sprang up suddenly, her face twisted into an expression of agony. “Oh, oh, oh!”
Agnes white as a sheet flew to her side. “What is it? Quick, quick, Wynnie! Is it your heart? Your head? A darting pain! Where, oh, where?”
“Crackie!” Ethelwynne ruefully rubbed her mouth. “I’ve been sucking that pill.”
After a moment’s struggle to retain her sympathetic gravity, Agnes gave way and dropping her head on her hands shook alarmingly for at least half a minute.
“I told you I was a homeopath,” expostulated Ethelwynne, “how was I to know that allopaths always swallow their pills whole?”
“Wh-wh-why did you suppose it was coated with chocolate?” gasped Agnes.
“So as to improve the taste of course and tempt me to eat it. I am fond of chocolate. If it is my duty to eat a pill, I want it to be inviting. I don’t want to do anything that I don’t want to do, specially when I am sick. Well, anyhow, I shall never touch another.”
However, by bedtime Ethelwynne was feeling so miserable that finally after long urging she consented to swallow another dose of quinine in the orthodox way. She allowed Agnes to put a hot water bottle at her feet and to tuck in the coverlets cozily; and then she tried to go to sleep. But that was another story. It was a story of fitful jerks and starts, of burning fever alternating with shivering spells, of terrifying dreams and wretched haunted hours of wakefulness. At last the longed-for morning stole in at the windows to find her eyes heavy, her limbs languid, her brain muddled and dull, her head roaring.
It was the quinine that had done it—she knew it was—unspeakably worse than the cold unattended. Worried Agnes acknowledged that the dose might effect some systems violently.