“Eh? nothing. I didn’t call.”
“Yes you did. Do try and lie still and get some rest.”
Lie still! As soon tell the waves to lie still in the storm as expect me, with my fever-tossed body and mind, to rest!
So the night wore on, and when the morning light struggled through the window it found me in a raging fever and delirious.
I must pass over the weeks that followed. I was very ill—as ill, so they told me afterwards, as I well could be, and live.
Jack watched me incessantly. I don’t know what arrangement he came to at Hawk Street, but while I was at my worst he never left my bedside day or night.
No one else was allowed up, except occasionally Billy, to relieve guard. With these two nurses to tend me—and never a patient had two such guardian angels!—I battled with my fever, and came through it.
I came through it an altered being.
Surely—this was the thought with which I returned to health—we boys, sent up to rough it in London, are not, after all, mere slung stones. There is One who cares for us, some One who comes after us when we go astray, some One who saves us when we are at the point of falling, if we will but cry, in true penitence, to Him!