Another slight stroke, they said later, when they were all about the fire in the next room again. Norma was white, her eyes glittering, her bitten lips scarlet in her colourless face. Chris looked stunned.
But he found time for just one aside, as the endless night wore on. Annie had arrived, superbly horrified and stricken, and Acton was there. Mrs. Melrose was still breathing. The sickly light of a winter morning was tugging at the shutters.
"Norma," Chris said, "do you realize what a tremendous thing has happened to you? Do you realize who you are? You are a rich woman now, my dear!"
"But do you believe it?" she asked, in a low tone.
"I know it is true! It explains everything," he answered. "It will be a cruel blow to Leslie—poor child, and Annie, too. Alice, I think, need never know. But Norma—even though this doesn't seem the time or the place, let me be the first to congratulate you on your new position—my old friend Theodore's daughter, and the last of the Melroses!"
At seven o'clock in the morning Norma, exhausted with excitement and emotion, took a hot bath, and finding things unchanged in the sick-room, except that the lights had been extinguished, and the winter daylight was drearily mingling with firelight, went on downstairs for coffee and for one more conference with the blinking nurses and the tired old doctor. She found herself too shaken to eat, but the hot drink was wonderfully soothing and stimulating, and for the first time, as she stood looking out into the street from the dining-room window, a sense of power and pride began to thrill her. Old people must die, of course, and after this sad and dark scene was over—then what? Then what? Then she would be in Leslie's long-envied place, the heiress, the important figure among all the changes that followed.
"If you please, Mrs. Sheridan——!" It was Joseph, haggard and white, who had come softly behind her to interrupt her thoughts. She glanced with quick apprehension toward the hall stairway. There had been a change——?
"No, it was the telephone, Miss." Norma, puzzled by the old butler's stricken air, went to the instrument. It was Miss Slater.
"Norma," Miss Slater said, agitatedly, "is Mr. Liggett—there?"
"I think he's with Aunt Annie, upstairs, but he's going home about eight," Norma answered. "There is no change. Is Aunt Alice awake? Mr. Liggett wanted to be there when she woke!"