The laugh again. 'So one says till one tries, and then one finds that one hates it all! all! all! No, I tell you, Clement, I won't be bothered now! I can't stand it.'
And she locked her door.
Even Felix, who in spite of that one attack was evidently stronger, must have remarked her manner, for he asked Wilmet whether there were anything amiss with Angel. 'She is grieving over her share in the accident,' said Wilmet. 'I hope it may be a turning-point with her.'
No doubt he thought over this; for later in the day, when Angela was sponging his face and hands with warm water, and exclaimed at sight of a red mark on his arm, 'Did you hurt yourself there, Felix?' he answered, 'No, it is the old scald. Do you remember our talk then?'
'You can't go on as you did then,' she hurriedly said.
'Then don't look as you did then,' he said. 'Remember, visible results are often merciful aids to correction.'
She perpetrated a hard stiff smile; and from that time shunned being left alone with him, and sometimes when the exterior family thought her in the sick-room was really shut up in her own, for she avoided the presence of the others as much as possible, and when among them showed an irritability and unkindness to Stella that Cherry could hardly bear to see. She could hardly answer an inquiry after Felix from her with common courtesy, and roughly took things out of her hands to prevent her bringing them into the room, when a moment's sight of her sweet face would have been no harm but rather good to her patient.
By Thursday much of the pain, tenderness, and disability to move were gone; and Tom May was well satisfied, not only thinking the first danger over, and ascribing the chief remaining damage to a sprain, but wishing that Felix should be lifted to a couch, where he could be a good deal cooler than in his bed. It was lucky that Wilmet and Cherry had resisted Clement's desire to present all the old Squire's invalid machinery to the hospital, for there was great comfort in the easy-going wheeled couch with angles of every inclination on which he was brought to the window. Bernard longed to draw up the blind, instead of his 'seeing nothing but that black cross and the old trumpeting angel under it,' as he said.
'My trumpeting angel is a dear friend,' said Felix. 'He says a great deal.'
Felix was obedient to the order to be moved, and showed that he was less prostrate in strength than had been anticipated; but his passiveness struck those who knew him best as not so much the langour of weakness as of sorrow. What Clement had rightly deemed no ill news in what seemed his own last struggle, was a sore grief in his recovery. Little Theodore's loving dependence was greatly missed, and saddened the thought of returning to the family.