But meanwhile it befell that, in London, he was stricken with influenza and with subsequent sorrow.

The attack was short but sharp--had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his aid; most of a blight really in its secondary stage.

The good ladies his sitters--the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive--left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and love, so that with their assistance he pulled through; but his convalescence was slow and his weakness out of proportion to the muffled shock.

He came out, but he went about lame; it tired him to paint--he felt as if he had been ill three months.

He strolled in Kensington Gardens when he should have been at work; he sat long on penny chairs and helplessly mused and mooned.