“Oh, I'll pay you now,” said Fan; and taking the sovereign from her purse, asked the woman to get change.
“Very well, miss; if you'll go downstairs, I'll put the room straight for you.”
“Oh, I must lie down now, my head is aching so,” said Fan, feeling that she could no longer stand.
“What ails you—are you going to be ill?”
“No, no; this morning I had a fall and struck my head and hurt it so—look,” and taking off her hat, she showed the plaster on her forehead.
That satisfied the woman, who had only been thinking of fever and her own little ones, who were more to her than any stranger, and her manner became kind at once. She imagined that her lodger was a young lady who for some reason had run away from her friends. Smoothing down the coverlet, she went away to get change, closing the door after her, and then, with a sigh of relief, Fan threw herself on to the poor bed.
The pain she was in, and state of exhaustion after the violent emotions and the rough handling she had experienced, prevented her from thinking much of her miserable forlorn condition. She only wished for rest Yet she could not rest, but turned her hot flushed face and throbbing head from side to side, moaning with pain. By-and-by the woman came back with the change and a very big cup of hot tea.
“This'll do your head good,” she said. “Better drink it hot, miss; I always say there's nothing like a cup of tea for the headache.”
Fan took it gratefully and drank the whole of it, though it was rougher tea than she had been accustomed to of late. And the woman proved a good physician; it had the effect of throwing her into a profuse perspiration, and before she had been alone for many minutes she fell asleep.
She did not wake until past nine o'clock, and found a lighted candle on her table; her poor landlady had been up perhaps more than once to visit her. She felt greatly refreshed; the danger, if there had been any, was over now, but she was still drowsy—so drowsy that she longed to be asleep again; and she only got up to undress and go to bed in a more regular way. The time to think had not come yet; sleep alone seemed sweet to her, and in its loving arms she would lie, for it seemed like one that loved her always, like her poor dead mother who had never turned against her and used her cruelly. Before she closed her heavy eyes the landlady came into her room again to see her, and Fan gave her a shilling to get some tea and bread-and-butter for her breakfast next day.