“Pretty sick,” answered Uncle Charlie. “But there's nothing you can do. Jump back into bed.”
So Missy crept back, and listened to the gradual steadying down of the rain. She was almost sorry, now, that the whirlwind of frantic elements had subsided; that had been a sort of terrible complement to the whirlwind of anguish within herself.
She lay there tense, strangling a desperate impulse to sob. La Beale Isoud had died of love—and now Aunt Isabel was already sickening. She half-realized that people don't die of love nowadays—that happened only in the Middle Ages; yet, there in the black stormy night, strange, horrible fancies overruled the sane convictions of daytime. It was fearfully significant, Aunt Isabel's sickening so quickly, so mysteriously. And immediately after Mr. Saunders's departure. That was exactly what La Beale Isoud always did whenever Sir Tristram was obliged to leave her; Sir Tristram was continually having to flee away, a kind of knight of the road, too—to this battle or that tourney or what-not—“here to-day, gone to-morrow, never able to stay where his heart would wish.”
“Oh! oh!”
At last exhaustion had its way with the taut, quivering little body; the hot eyelids closed; the burning cheek relaxed on the pillow. Missy slept.
When she awoke, the sun, which is so blithely indifferent to sufferings of earth, was high up in a clear sky. The new-washed air was cool and sparkling as a tonic. Missy's physical being felt more refreshed than she cared to admit; for her turmoil of spirit had awakened with her, and she felt her body should be in keeping.
By the time she got dressed and downstairs, Uncle Charlie had breakfasted and was about to go down town. He said Aunt Isabel was still in bed, but much better.
“She had no business to drink all those sodas,” he said. “Her stomach was already upset from all that ice-cream and cake the night before—and the hot weather and all—”
Missy was scarcely listening to the last. One phrase had caught her ear: “Her stomach upset!”—How could Uncle Charlie?
But when she went up to Aunt Isabel's room later, the latter reiterated that unromantic diagnosis. But perhaps she was pretending. That would be only natural.