“What’s happened?” whispered Jacqueline.
“I went down to close the windows,” Aunt Martha went on, in that queer, deadened voice. “I’d left them open because of the heat. Grandma had got up to see to them. Somehow she must have lost her bearings, and slipped and fallen. The phone won’t work. Maybe the wires are down. Ralph’s going to get out the car and fetch the doctor right away.”
“Oh, Aunt Martha!” Jacqueline cried aloud.
“Grandma isn’t——”
“I’m afraid,” said Aunt Martha brokenly, “I’m afraid she’s hurt herself pretty bad.”
CHAPTER XXVI
THE SERPENT OF REMORSE
The day that followed on the party and the storm was unlike any day that Jacqueline had known in her short life, and the week that followed was unlike any week that she had ever expected to live.
Grandma Conway was very, very ill. She had not been struck by lightning, as the younger children believed, nor had she slipped and fallen, as Aunt Martha had thought at first. She had had a stroke of apoplexy, so the old doctor said, when he came plowing through the mud to the farm, on that ghastly night. She would get well, he hoped, but she would never be so active again. And she might be ill for a long time.
Grandma’s bed was set up in the parlor, across the hall from the dining room. It was a big room, almost square, with windows to the north and the east. In one corner was a little old square piano, with yellow keys, on which Freddie’s and Annie’s mother used to play, when she was a girl. There were horsehair armchairs, with white crocheted tidies on their backs, and a horsehair sofa, and a marble-topped table. All this furniture was pushed aside, to make place for Grandma’s bed and the old couch from the dining room on which Aunt Martha slept so that she could be near her.
Upstairs, in Aunt Martha’s room over the dining room, Annie’s crib now stood beside Freddie’s. Jacqueline and Nellie slept in Aunt Martha’s bed, and it was their job to care for the younger children. Above all they had to see that the children did not cry in the night and disturb Grandma’s fitful sleep.