He was removed to the fever hospital on Friday, and by Sunday morning it looked as though things would go hardly with Tarrant. There were complications, and the boy seemed to have no power, either mental or physical, to resist the disease.
So ill was he that the Principal went to see him after morning chapel. Tarrant was quite conscious, and made whispered, suitable answers to Dr. Wentworth's kind and serious remarks.
"Keep your heart up," said the Principal just before he left; "remember that we are all thinking about you and praying that you may get well."
"Did they pray for me in chapel?" Tarrant asked.
On being assured that this was so, the boy turned his face to the wall, feeling that all was over for him. Like a good many older folk who ought to know better, Tarrant thought that to be prayed for in public proved that the case was indeed desperate.
He had been prayed for in chapel!
Only people who were very ill, who were going to die, were ever prayed for in chapel. Chaps had told him so.
There was a chap died in the Easter term, and he'd been prayed for in chapel for a fortnight.
Tarrant was too weak to be much upset. It was a footling thing to do, to die in one's first term, but it couldn't be helped. Rotten luck though! Old Bruiser would be awfully cut up. Fellows had told him how cut up old Nick was when that chap died in his house, and Bruiser was a jolly sight decenter than old Nick.
What ought a chap to think about when he was dying? Religion and that, he supposed. He tried to remember a hymn, but the only hymns that really appealed to Tarrant were those with "ff." against several of the verses, when the Coll. all sang at the tops of their voices and nearly lifted the roof off the chapel. And somehow he didn't feel very jubilant just then.