For answer Mrs. Ward felt about under the bolster and produced a much thumbed telegram which she handed to Mrs. Burnham who read the brief message it bore:
Mother worse. Come.
Annie.
“Who is Annie?” she inquired, handing back the telegram.
“My niece.” Mrs. Ward wiped her eyes with a corner of the sheet and thereby concealed from view a red and green string which had slipped from under the bolster in her exertions of searching for the telegram. “My sister died just after I got there.” Mrs. Ward was talking volubly as she pushed the string safely beneath the bedclothes. “Her death was a great grief; and on top of it, I found a dead man here—it clean bowled me over, for I’m not as young as I was, Mrs. Burnham.”
Mrs. Burnham considered her housekeeper in silence; she was certainly thinner than she had seen her in some time, and there were heavy lines in her face which had not been in evidence a week before. Another look at the empty breakfast dishes convinced Mrs. Burnham that the two spots of color in Mrs. Ward’s cheeks came from temper and not from temperature, unless so much food had made her ill. Had she really eaten it all herself? From where she sat Mrs. Burnham had a good view under the four-post bed occupied by the housekeeper; certainly no one was concealed there. Bending a little forward, she managed to see inside of the closet, the door of which stood partly open; no one was there. Mrs. Burnham sighed. She did not like mysteries, her forte did not lie in solving them. The bedroom and the sitting room and bath opening from it, all of which were given over to Mrs. Ward, were just above her boudoir, and the room’s shape, like the boudoir, was octagonal.
A discreet knock on the door broke the silence, and in response to Mrs. Burnham’s “Come in,” the pretty chambermaid entered.
“Mr. Burnham wishes to see you, ma’am,” she said.
Mrs. Burnham rose instantly. “Don’t go, Cora; I want you to help Mrs. Ward dress.” Meeting the housekeeper’s irate glare, she continued unruffled: “It is too weakening for you to remain in bed, Matilda, Cora will bring your meals to your sitting room to-day. To-morrow—we’ll see how you are to-morrow,” and with a friendly wave of her hand she left the housekeeper glaring indignantly at the smiling Cora.
Mrs. Burnham went at once to her husband’s bedroom; not finding him there, she went to her own room, and from there to her boudoir. Her husband dropped the newspaper he was reading and looked up impatiently as she appeared.