"Oh, she is all right, I am sure," Mrs. Graham maintained, but she turned back towards the house, nevertheless, for it had also occurred to her that it was unlike Undine to neglect her duty.
There was not a sound to be heard when Mrs. Graham reached the house and although she called Undine several times, she received no answer.
"Where can the child be?" she said, beginning to feel a little frightened, and she hurried to Undine's room. The door was open, and her first impression was that the room was empty. She was turning away again, more and more puzzled by the girl's mysterious disappearance, when her eye was caught by a heap of something white lying on the floor by the window, and in another moment she had hurried forward, with an exclamation of dismay, and was bending over Undine, who lay, white and unconscious on the floor, with Marjorie's letter clasped convulsively in her hand.
When Undine opened her eyes she was lying on her bed, and Mrs. Graham was bathing her forehead, while the faithful Juanita plied a palm-leaf fan and held a bottle of smelling-salts to her nose. For a moment the girl gazed about her in a kind of dull bewilderment; then a look of recollection came into her eyes, and she started up, with a sharp cry.
"I'm not dead, I'm not dead! Oh, tell them it isn't true! I'm not; I'm not!"
"Lie down, dear," said Mrs. Graham in a tone of gentle authority. "Of course you are not dead; you fainted, that is all. You are better now, and if you lie still for a few minutes you will be all right."
"But the letter said I was dead," persisted Undine, wildly, and she fixed her big, terrified eyes on Mrs. Graham's astonished face. "It said Barbara Randolph was dead, and her mother put flowers on her grave."
Mrs. Graham was beginning to be seriously alarmed for the girl's reason, but she made an effort to appear calm.
"My dear child," she said, soothingly, "you don't know what you are saying. Barbara Randolph is the daughter of the lady with whom Marjorie has been staying; she died long ago; she had nothing to do with you."
"But she didn't die, I know she didn't!" cried Undine, sitting up, despite all Mrs. Graham's efforts to keep her quiet. "I knew it when I read the letter. For one minute I remembered something horrible. I don't remember it any more now, but I was so frightened, and—oh, Mrs. Graham, I was so terribly frightened!" And the poor child burst into a fit of wild, hysterical sobbing, and clung passionately to her kind friend's neck.