He had never been ill a day in his life, had never had as much as a headache, a bad cold or a touch of fever, and he began to think that something must be wrong.

He said to himself that if such a thing happened to him again he would go to the chemist and ask for some medicine.

His strength was the chief of his few possessions, he thought, and it would be better to spend a franc at the chemist's than to let it be endangered.

It was a serious matter.

Suppose that the young lady, instead of speaking to him about a boat, had told him to pick up the box on which he was sitting--one of those big boxes these foreigners travel with--and to carry it upstairs, he would have cut a poor figure just at that moment, when his heart was thumping like a flat-fish in the bottom of a boat, and his hands were trembling with cold.