Ardelia nodded. She felt very tired, and the glare of the sun seemed reflected from everything into her dazed eyes. When Mrs. Slater appeared with the foaming yellow glasses she wound her nervous little hands about the stem of the goblet and began a deep draught. She did not like it, it was hard to swallow, and instinct warned her not to go on with it; but all the thirst of a long morning—Ardelia was used to drinking frequently—urged her on, and its icy coldness enabled her to finish the glass. She handed it back with a deep sigh. The young lady clapped her hands.
“There!” she cried. “Now, how do you like real milk, Ardelia? I declare, you look like another child already! You can have all you want every day—why, what’s the matter?”
For Ardelia was growing ghastly pale before them; her eyes turned inward, her lips tightened. A blinding horror surged from her toes upward, and the memory of the liquid ice-cream and the frying onions faded before the awful reality of her present agony.
“A blinding horror surged from her toes upward.”
Later, as she lay limp and white on the slippery hair-cloth sofa in Mrs. Slater’s musty parlor, she heard them discussing her situation.
“There was a lot of Fresh Air children over at Mis’ Simms’s,” her hostess explained, “and they ’most all of ’em said the milk was too strong—did you ever! Two or three of ’em was sick, like this one, but they got to love it in a little while. She will, too.”
Ardelia shook her head feebly. She had learned her lesson. If success, as we are told, consists not in omitting to make mistakes, but in omitting to make the same one twice, Ardelia’s treatment of the milk question was eminently successful.
After a while Miss Forsythe went away, and at her urgent suggestion Ardelia came out and sat on the porch under the shade of a black umbrella. She sat motionless, staring into the grass, lost in the rapture of content that follows such a crisis as her recent misery, forgetful of all her earthly woes in the blessed certainty of her present calm. In a few minutes she was asleep.
When she awoke she was in a strange place. Outside the umbrella all was dusk and shadow. Only a square white mist filled the place of the barn, the tall trees loomed vaguely toward the dark sky, the stars were few. As she gazed in half-terror about her, a strange jangling came nearer and nearer, and a great animal with swinging sides, panting terribly, ran clumsily by, followed by a bare-legged boy, whose thudding feet sounded loud on the beaten path. Ardelia shrank against the wall with a cry that brought Mrs. Slater to her side.