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"One hundred and two."
Downstairs, the doctor left three different medicines in different
coloured capsules with instructions for giving them. He seemed to know all
about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever
did not go above one hundred and four degrees. This was a light epidemic
of influenza and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.
Back in the room I wrote the boy's temperature down and made a note
of the time to give the various capsules.
"Do you want me to read to you?"
"All right. If you want to," said the boy. His face was very white and
there were dark areas under his eyes. He lay still in the bed and seemed
very detached from what was going on.
I read about pirates from Howard Pyle's "Book of Pirates", but I could
see he was not following what I was reading.
"How do you feel, Schatz?" I asked him.
"Just the same, so far," he said.
I sat at the foot of the bed and read to myself while I waited for it to be time
to give another capsule. It would have been natural for him to go to sleep, but
when I looked up he was looking at the foot of the bed.
"Why, don't you try to go to sleep? I'll wake you up for the medicine."
"I'd rather stay awake."
After a while he said to me. "You don't have to stay in here with me,
Papa, if it bothers you."
"It doesn't bother me."
"No, I mean you don't have to stay if it's going to bother you."
I thought perhaps he was a little light-headed and after giving him the
prescribed capsules at eleven o'clock I went out for a while...
At the house they said the boy had refused to let any one come into the
room.
"You can't come in," he said. "You mustn't get what I have." I went up
to him and found him in exactly the same position I had left him, white-
faced, but with the tops of his cheeks flushed by the fever, staring still, as he
had stared, at the foot of the bed.
I took his temperature.
"What is it?"
"Something like a hundred," I said. It was one hundred and two and four
tenths.
"It was a hundred and two," he said.
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