“Like the King of Spain, you can’t move your chair away from the fire without the proper attendant.”
“I never do put on coals or wood there!”
“There may be several reasons for that,” said Armyn, recollecting how nearly Kate had once burnt the house down.
“Oh, I assure you it would not do for me,” said Kate. “If it were not so inconvenient in that little house, I should have my own man-servant to attend to my fire, and walk out behind me. Indeed, now Perkins always does walk behind me, and it is such a bore.”
And what was the consequence of all this wild chatter? When Mary had seen the hot-faced eager child into bed, she came down to her brother in the drawing-room with her eyes brimful of tears, saying, “Poor dear child! I am afraid she is very much spoilt!”
“Don’t make up your mind to-night,” said Armyn. “She is slightly insane as yet! Never mind, Mary; her heart is in the right place, if her head is turned a little.”
“It is very much turned indeed,” said Mary. “How wise it was of Papa not to let Sylvia sleep with her! What will he do with her? Oh dear!”
CHAPTER XIII.
The Sunday at Oldburgh was not spent as Kate would have had it. It dawned upon her in the midst of horrid dreams, ending by wakening to an overpowering sick headache, the consequence of the agitations and alarms of the previous day, and the long fast, appeased by the contents of the pastry-cook’s shop, with the journey and the excitement of the meeting—altogether quite sufficient to produce such a miserable feeling of indisposition, that if Kate could have thought at all of anything but present wretchedness, she would have feared that she was really carrying out the likeness to Cardinal Wolsey by laying her bones among them.
That it was not quite so bad as that, might be inferred from her having no doctor but Mary Wardour, who attended to her most assiduously from her first moans at four o’clock in the morning, till her dropping off to sleep about noon; when the valiant Mary, in the absence of everyone at church, took upon herself to pen a note, to catch the early Sunday post, on her own responsibility, to Lady Barbara Umfraville, to say that her little cousin was so unwell that it would be impossible to carry out the promise of bringing her home on Monday, which Mr. Wardour had written on Saturday night.