“Thank you. It was thoughtful of you to come and tell me.”
With the help of the captain and the chief steward (for the ship was rolling) she passed out. She was very pale, but there was just a hint of a smile upon her handsome face.
The sympathetic, thoughtful woman sank into a chair, and looked foolish.
When the ship’s doctor had bathed the old gentleman’s face and whipped over the rent in his scalp, he was able to talk to his daughter.
His sister, the girl’s aunt, was helplessly seasick, and if there is a time in a man’s life, or a woman’s life, when a man or a woman is utterly incapable of sympathy for any human being who is foolish enough to want to live, it is when a man or woman is helplessly seasick.
“Papa was wholly unconscious for ten minutes, auntie,” said Kate.
“Oh, how glorious! If I could only put this—umph! horrid—Oh! ship and this heaving, tossing sea, and every—umph! thing and everybody out of my mind, and then get out myself, for ten minutes, I’d strangle the doctor who brought me back to this miserable, howling, rolling, watery old world.”
In spite of her troubles (she was not feeling any too fit herself) Miss Landon laughed at this pessimistic tirade from her usually even-tempered aunt.
CHAPTER XXII
THE NEW PRESIDENT