But it was terribly cold—­and what a draught!  Perhaps it was because I was lying so dreadfully straight, whereas I generally lay curled up.  I wanted to bring my knees towards my chest, but couldn’t move my legs.  How cold my chest was!  Why had the bedclothes fallen away and left it exposed to this horrible draught?  I would have liked to pull them right over my head that I might get warm again, but I was too tired to make the effort.  At last, however, the cold was more than I could bear.  So I put out both hands to pull up the blankets—­but could find none anywhere.  God!  I wasn’t in bed at all, but was standing!

The horror of that moment!  A wild heart beat lawlessly at my side.  One more touch of terror, and it would rebel in utter panic.  Why was the dormitory so dark?  Why had the little night-lamp gone out?  And the wooden floors were stone-cold like the window-sill in my dream.  I couldn’t see if my bed were close to me or far away because of the impenetrable darkness; but I was so very, very tired, and my eyes were so uncomfortably warm with interrupted sleep that I must try to feel my way.  I put out my hand and touched a padlock.  Like a flash, it came with all its terror upon me:  I was not in the dormitory nor anywhere near it, but right away in a cellar below the ground where there were some old lockers and play-boxes.  Flinging myself first to one side of the cellar and then to the other, I tore at the walls in an agonised endeavour to get out.  The last thing that I remember was shrieking loudly and feeling a moisture rise to my dry lips and pass down my chin.

Sec.3

I awoke with a dull sense of impending trouble to find myself abed in the Bramhall sick-room, into which long shafts of noonday sunlight were streaming from behind drawn blinds.  Looking down upon me was Dr. Chapman, with his usual white waistcoat and moist cigar.

“Ah ha!” he said.  “Now, Gem, what the dooce do you think is the matter with you?”

I replied that I didn’t know, and, just to see what he would say, asked him why he called me “Gem.”

“Gem?  Whoever called you ‘Gem’?  Did I?  Yes, of course I did—­it’s short for Jeremiah.”

“The gifted old liar!” I thought, while I demanded aloud his reason for calling me “Jeremiah.”

“Why, because you look so dam—­miserable, as though your eyes would gush out with water.”

And partly at this idea, partly at his skill in getting out of a difficulty, Chappy laughed so heartily that I laughed too, only with this difference—­that, whereas his laugh was like sounding brass, mine was like a tinkling cymbal.  Then he sat down by my bed and, taking my wrist in one hand, pushed up the sleeve of my pyjama jacket and felt my smooth, firm forearm.  “Good enough,” he said, and proceeded to open the jacket down the front, and feel my chest and waist, thumping me in both of them, and expecting me to gurgle thereat like a sixpenny toy.