"Oh," said Jean, "it's like a knife that has cut to-day away from to-morrow, and all of you from that crowd I'm going to. Do you know,"

she said, as though it were quite an interesting thing for them to hear about, "I feel quite queer--and sick. Do you think that perhaps there is something wrong with me?" She even mentioned appendicitis as a possible ailment.

"You are getting home-sick," said Mabel, who knew the signs.

Jean was much annoyed.

"You don't understand," she said. "I'm not silly in that way. I don't feel as though I could shed a tear at going away. I'm just over-joyed at the prospect. But I'm so wobbly in other ways. I'm really terrified that I'm going to be ill."

Poor Jean ate no dinner. Jean didn't sleep. Jean perambulated the corridors, and thought of the night when Cuthbert got hurt. She wished that she were enough of a baby to go and knock at her mother's door, as they had done then, and get her to come and comfort her. She hoped her father wasn't vexed that she had asked to go, and hadn't minded leaving him. Then she remembered how she intended coming home--a full-blown prima donna sort of person--one of whom he should really be proud. This ought to have set her up for the night, but the thought of it failed in its usual exhilarating effect.

The sick feeling returned, with innumerable horrors of imaginary pain, and a real headache.

Jean saw the dawn come in and sincerely prayed that already she had not appendicitis.

CHAPTER XVII

A Reprieve

The first two letters from Jean were so long, that one imagined she must have sat up most of the night to get them off.

"I don't mind telling you that I felt very miserable when I got to my rooms," she said among other things. "I drove here all right, and the door was opened by a servant who didn't seem to know who I was. Then she produced a secretary who looked at me very closely as though to see whether I was respectable or not. She took me up to my room, and it's like a little state-room, without the fun of a bunk. There's one little slippy window which looks out on the gardens, and across the gardens there are high houses, with occasionally people at the windows. One girl with a pink bow in her hair sits at a window all day long.

Sometimes she leans out with her elbows on the sill, and looks down, and then she draws them in again and sits looking straight over at me.

She's quite pretty. But what a life! It must be dreadful only having one room and nothing to do in it. My piano hasn't come, and until it arrives, it's like being the girl with the pink bow. At home it's different, we can always pull flowers, or fix our blouses or do something of that sort. The girls here don't seem to mind whether one is alive or dead. I think they are cross at new arrivals. I sat last night at dinner at a little table all by myself, on a slippery linoleum floor, and thought it horrid. Then it would have been fun to go to the drawing-room ('to play to papa,' how nice that sounds), but the girls melted off by themselves. I looked into the drawing-room and thought it awful, so I ran up to my room and stayed there. The girl with the pink bow was at her window again, and I really could have slain her, I don't know why."

Then "I'm to have my first lesson to-morrow. I'm so glad. Because I can't practise, even although my piano has come. A girl who writes made the others stop playing last night in the drawing-room because it gave her a headache. It makes me think that no one will want to hear me sing. I suppose they think I'm very countrified.

"I think the real reason why I can't practise is because I'm not very well. London food doesn't seem so nice as ours, and I still have that funny feeling that I had when I started. I suppose you are all having jolly times. You would know that girls lived in this house. It's all wicker furniture, and little green curtains, and vases of flowers. I've only gone out to see about my lesson, except to the post and quite near here. I don't like going out much yet. Isobel's directions were a great help."

This letter stopped rather abruptly. So much so that Mr. Leighton was far from happy about Jean. He bothered unceasingly as to whether he should have allowed her to go. Mrs. Leighton enlarged his anxiety by her own fears. Jean's growing so much faster and taller than any one else had been a point in her favour with her mother a few years before, and Mrs. Leighton had never got over the certainty that Jean must be delicate in consequence.

"I hope she won't have appendicitis," said she mournfully.

"Oh, mummy," said Mabel, "Jean is only home-sick."

Jean wrote another desponding letter.

"Home-sick or not home-sick, if Jean is ill, she has got to be nursed,"

said Mrs. Leighton.

"Jean has never been ill in her life," Mabel pointed out. "She hasn't even felt very home-sick. It will pa.s.s off, mummy dear."

But it didn't.

Jean sat, in dismal solitude, in the room looking over to the girl with the pink bow, and she thought she should die. She did not like the words of encouragement which came from home. Every one was trying to "buck her up" as though she were a kid. No one seemed to understand that she was ill.

At the fifth day of taking no food to speak of and not sleeping properly, and with the most lamentable distaste of everything and every one around possessing her, she detected at last an acute little pain which she thought must be appendicitis.

She went out, wired home "I am in bed," and came back to get into it.

Once the girls in the house heard that she was ill, they crowded into her room with the kindest expressions of help and sympathy. They brought her flowers and fruit, and one provided her with books. Then they came in, as Lance had promised, and made tea for her. Jean took the tea and a good many slices of bread and b.u.t.ter, and felt some of the weight lifted. It might not be appendicitis after all.

And she never dreamed of the havoc which her telegram might create.

Towards the evening, she got one of her effusive visitors to send off another telegram. "Feeling better," this one declared.

She did not know that just before this point, Mr. Leighton had determined to fetch her home from London. The whole household was in despair. Mrs. Leighton wanted to start with him in the morning. Mr.

Leighton was not only anxious, he was in a pa.s.sion with himself for ever having let Jean go.

"Madness," he said, "madness. I cannot stand this any longer."

Isobel hated to see people display feeling, and this excitement about a girl with a headache annoyed her infinitely. She was invited out to dinner with Mabel, and Mabel would not go.

"Papa is in such a state," Mabel said, "I could not possibly go out and leave him like this. Let us telephone that we cannot come."

Isobel checked the protest that rose to her calm lips. She was ready in a filmy black chiffon gown, and her clear complexion looked startlingly radiant in that framing. She had quite determined to go to the dinner party.

"Let me telephone for you, Mabel," she said with rather a nice concern in her voice. "Then it won't take you away from your father."

Mabel abstractedly thanked her.

"Say Jean is ill please, and that papa is in fits about her. The Gardiners will understand."

Isobel telephoned.

She came back to Mabel with her skirts trailing in little flaunting waves of delicate black.

"They beg me to come. It's so disorganizing for a dinner party. What shall I do?" she asked in an interrogative manner.

Mrs. Leighton said, "Oh, do go, Isobel," politely. "Why should anybody stay at home just because we were so foolish as to let Jean go off to London alone?"

"Oh, well," said Isobel lightly, "when you put it like that, I must."

She went to telephone her decision.

It was nearly four weeks afterwards when, in quite an unexpected manner, Betty discovered that she never telephoned that second time at all.

Isobel had arranged her going from the start, adequately.

Mabel was left alone with the anxious parents when Jean's second telegram came in. It opened Mabel's eyes to the fact that perhaps for once Jean was really homesick. It was so much like the way she herself would have liked to have acted on some occasions and dared not. Jean had never been ill or been affected by nerves before, and had therefore no confidence in recoveries. No doubt her interest in the new experience had made her imagination run away with her. She disliked London and wanted to get out of it--that was clear enough. But after just six days of it--with everybody laughing at her giving in! The thing was not to be thought of.

It seemed to Mabel that her own difficult experiences lately, all the hard things she had had to bear, culminated in this sudden act of duty which lay before her. She must clear out--go to Jean and help her through.

"Oh, papa," she said, "please let me go."

Mr. Leighton jumped as though she had exploded a bomb.

"What, another," asked he; "isn't one enough! No, indeed! I've had quite enough of the independence of girls by this time. There's to be no more of it. Jean is coming home, and you will all stay at home--for ever."