Miss Quincey relied tartly that no, she had not got a headache. The Mad Hatter appeared to be absorbed in tracing rude verses on her rough notebook with a paralytic pencil.
"I'm sorry; because then you must be unhappy. When people are cross," she continued, "it means one of two things. Either their heads ache or they are unhappy. You must be very unhappy. I know all about it." The paralytic pencil wavered and came to a full stop. "You like somebody, and so somebody has made you unhappy."
But for the shame of it, Miss Quincey could have put her head down on the desk and cried as she had seen the Mad Hatter cry over her sums, and for the same reason; because she could not put two and two together.
And what Mrs. Moon saw, what Martha saw, what the Mad Hatter divined with her feverish, precocious brain, Rhoda Vivian could not fail to see. It was Dr. Cautley's business to look after Miss Quincey in her illness, and it was Rhoda's to keep an eye on her in her recovery, and instantly report the slightest threatening of a break-down. Miss Quincey's somewhat eccentric behaviour filled her with misgivings; and in order to investigate her case at leisure, she chose the first afternoon when Miss Cursiter was not at home to ask the little arithmetic teacher to lunch.
After Rhoda's lunch, soothed with her sympathy and hidden, not to say extinguished, in an enormous chair, Miss Quincey was easily worked into the right mood for confidences; indeed she was in that state of mind when they rush out of their own accord in the utter exhaustion of the will.
"Are you sure you are perfectly well?" so Rhoda began her inquiry.
"Perfectly, perfectly—in myself," said Miss Quincey, "I think, perhaps—that is, sometimes I'm a little afraid that taking so much arsenic may have disagreed with me. You know it is a deadly poison. But I've left it off lately, so I ought to be better—unless perhaps I'm feeling the want of it."
"You are not worrying about St. Sidwell's—about your work?"
"It's not that—not that. But to tell you the truth, I am worried, Rhoda. For some reason or other, my own fault, no doubt, I have lost a friend. It's a hard thing," said Miss Quincey, "to lose a friend."
"Oh, I am sure—Do you mean Miss Cursiter?"