Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/323

 almost insurmountable; so I half sat, half lay, in a chair, with my eyes shut and my head leaning back. I was extremely thirsty, and at every breath I drew my side hurt me, the pain being increased by the fact that I had begun to cough a little. It had all come on so quickly that I wondered if I should die that night.

When my father came in he immediately saw I was worse, and sent me to bed, giving me something hot to drink; but all that night I hardly slept, and in the morning he went for Doctor O'Brian. By that time I had almost forgotten the cause of my illness; what had led me to seek it; whether I desired it to be fatal or not. I was examined, stethoscoped, asked questions, gazed at. "Acute pneumonia." I caught the words through a kind of lethargy into which I had fallen. They were talking together, my father and the doctor, but neither could understand how the disease had developed so rapidly