and that Gerald lay there in the broad bed before him lapsing into a fever, now and then into a light-headedness. That topped the list of the anxieties and sufferings of the past week. But he must just take things as they came.
"I never knew before now," he ended his letter to Mr. Marcy, "what it was to feel a hundred years older, simply because what has happened in a few days has been of a kind to make one feel so. It seems as if it has been as long as that since we were all at the hotel, as gay as larks, and I with no more to worry me than Gerald had. I don't see how there has been time for so much," And verily, the Philip Touchtone laughing, rowing races on the lake, playing tennis before the Ossokosee House piazza, and riding about in Mr. Marcy's light wagon seemed like an insignificant sort of creature who had known nothing of life.
"And to think that I would be—well—that other fellow, that old Philip Touchtone, this minute if Gerald had not happened to come up to the Ossokosee to spend the summer!" he reflected, as his eyes turned upon the sick boy's flushed face. "But I don't believe that there
