"Yes; she slammed the door. Mama fainted."
"Of course!"
"Oh, Chris," said his wife, half crying, "wasn't that enough to make any one faint?—let alone Mama. Anyway, she was dreadfully ill, and they rather shut me up about it, and told everyone that Annie had gone abroad. We had been living very quietly, you know, and nobody cared much what Annie did, then. And she really had gone abroad, she wrote Mama from Montreal, and she had been married to Emil Müller in Albany. They had taken a train there, and were married that same afternoon. They went to London, and they were in Germany, and then—then it all broke up, you know about that!"
"How much later was that?"
Alice considered.
"It was about Christmas time. Don't you remember that I went to your mother, and Acton and I got measles? Mama was abroad then."
"And this Kate went with her?"
"Yes. That was—that was one of the things I was—just thinking about! Annie wrote Mama that she was very ill, in Munich, and poor Mama just flew. Müller had left her; indeed there was a woman and two quite big girls that had a claim on him, and if Mama hadn't been so anxious to shut it all up, she might have proved that he was a bigamist—but I don't know that she was ever sure. Judge Lee put the divorce through for Annie, and Mama took her to the Riviera and petted her, and pulled her through. But all her hair came out, and for weeks they didn't think she would live. She had brain fever. You see, Annie had had some money waiting for her on her eighteenth birthday, and your own father, who was her guardian, Chris, had given her the check—interest, it was, about seven or eight thousand dollars. And he told her to open her own account, and manage her own income, from then on. And we thought—Mama and I—that in some way Müller must have heard of it. Anyway, she never deposited the check, and when her money gave out he just left her."
"But what makes you think that her illness didn't commence—or wasn't entirely—brain fever?"
"That she might have had a baby?" Alice asked, outright.