Alex was relieved when the Christmas holidays began, and she had no longer to fear the notice of the sharp-eyed children, but in the reduction of work surrounding the festive season, it became impossible that her breakdown should continue to pass unnoticed. She did not herself know what was the matter, and could scarcely have given a cause for those incessant tears, except that she was unutterably weary and miserable, and that they had passed far beyond her own control.
The idea that that continuous weeping could have any connection with a physical nervous breakdown never occurred to her.
It was with surprise, and very little thought of cause and effect, that she one night noticed her own extraordinary loss of flesh. She had never been anything but thin and slightly built, but now she quite suddenly perceived that her arms and legs in the last two months had taken on an astounding and literal resemblance to long sticks of white wood. All the way up from wrist to armpit, her left hand, with thumb and middle finger joined, could span the circumference of her right arm.
It seemed incredible.
Her mind went back ten years, and she thought of Lady Isabel, and how much she had lamented her daughter's youthful angularity.
"If she could have seen this!" thought Alex. "But, of course, it only mattered for evening dress—she wouldn't have thought it mattered for a nun."
Instantly she began to cry again, although her head throbbed and her eyes burned and smarted. There was no need now to wonder if she looked tired. Accidentally one day, her hand to her face, she had felt the sort of deeply-hollowed pit that now lay underneath each eye, worn into a groove.
She had ceased to wonder whether life would ever offer anything but this mechanical round of blurred pain and misery, these incessant tears, when the Superior sent for her.
"What is the matter with you, Sister? They tell me you are always in tears. Are you ill?"
Alex shook her head dumbly.