It is the question that Jim, in baffled anxiety, puts when he is admitted inside the dull salon, where no love-glorified, homely face to-night lights up the tender candles of its glad eyes, from over its stitching, at his entry.
Sybilla is lying less comfortably than usual on her sofa, her cushions not plumped up, and her bottle of smelling-salts rolled out of her reach. Mr. Wilson is walking uneasily up and down the room, instead of sitting placidly in his chair, with the soothing voice—which he had always thought as much to be counted on, and as little to be particularly thankful for, as the air that fills his lungs—lullingly reading him to sleep.
"Cecilia is with her just now," he says, in a voice of forlorn irritation. "I wish she would come down again; I have no great opinion of Cecilia as a sick-nurse, and she must know how anxious we are." A moment later, still pursuing his fidgety ramble from wall to wall, and exclaiming peevishly, as he stumbles over a footstool: "If it would only declare itself! There seems to be nothing to lay hold of, we are so completely in the dark—if it would only declare itself!"
A not very subdued sob from the sofa is the only answer he gets, an answer which evidently irritates still further his fretted nerves.
"I cannot think what Cecilia is doing!" he cries, hastening to the door, opening it noisily, and then listening.
"Let me run up and see," says Jim, his heart going out to the fractious old man in a sympathy of suffering. "Yes, I know where her room is—au troisième, is not it?" (a flash of recollection lighting up the fact that Amelia's is distinctly the worst room of the suite occupied by the Wilson family; the room with most stairs to climb to, and least accommodation when you reach it). "I will knock quite gently. Do not be afraid, I will not disturb her, and I will come down immediately to tell you."
Without waiting for permission, he springs up the stairs, and, standing on the landing, taps cautiously on the closed door, whose number (by one of those quirks of memory that furnish all our minds with insignificant facts) he has recollected. His first knock is so superfluously soft that it is evidently inaudible within, since no result follows upon it. His second, a shade louder, though still muffled by the fear of breaking into some little fitful yet salutary sleep, brings Cecilia out. His first glance at her face shows him that she has no good news, either to warm his own heart, or for him to carry down as a solace to the poor old man below.
"Oh, it is you, is it?" says she, shutting the door behind her with a clumsy carefulness that makes it creak. "No, I do not think she is any better; but it is so difficult to tell, I am no judge. She does not complain of anything particular; but she looks so odd."
It is the same adjective that Cecilia had applied earlier in the day to her sick sister, and it fills Jim with an impotent terror.
"If she is asleep, might not I just look in at her?" he asks. "I do not know what you mean when you say she looks odd."