Hunger roused everybody early the next morning, Friday. Leila Mercer had
discovered a box of bonbons that she had forgotten, and we divided them
around. Aunt Selina asked for the candied fruit and got it--quite a
third of the box. We gathered in the lower hall and on the stairs and
nibbled nauseating sweets while Mr. Harbison examined the telephone.
He did not glance in my direction. Betty and Dal were helping him, and
he seemed very cheerful. Max sat with me on the stairs. Mr. Harbison had
just unscrewed the telephone box from the wall and was squinting into
it, when Bella came downstairs. It was her first appearance, but as she
was always late, nobody noticed. When she stopped, just above us on
the stairs, however, we looked up, and she was holding to the rail and
trembling perceptibly.
"Mr. Harbison, will you--can you come upstairs?" she asked. Her voice
was strained, almost reedy, and her lips were white.
Mr. Harbison stared up at her, with the telephone box in his hands.
"Why--er--certainly," he said, "but, unless it's very important, I'd
like to fix this talking machine. We want to make a food record."
"I'd like to break a food record," Max put in, but Bella created a
diversion by sitting down suddenly on the stair just above us, and
burying her face in her handkerchief.
"Jim is sick," she said, with a sob. "He--he doesn't want anything to
eat, and his head aches. He--said for me--to go away and let him die!"
Dal dropped the hammer immediately, and Lollie Mercer sat petrified,
with a bonbon halfway to her mouth. For, of course, it was unexpected,
finding sentiment of any kind in Bella, and none of them knew about the
scene in the den in the small hours of the morning.
"Sick!" Aunt Selina said, from a hall chair. "Sick! Where?"
"All over," Bella quavered. "His poor head is hot, and he's thirsty, but
he doesn't want anything but water."
"Great Scott!" Dal said suddenly. "Suppose he should--Bella, are you
telling us ALL his symptoms?"
Bella put down her handkerchief and got up. From her position on the
stairs she looked down on us with something of her old haughty manner.
"If he is ill, you may blame yourselves, all of you," she said cruelly.
"You taunted him with being--fat, and laughed at him, until he stopped
eating the things he should eat. And he has been exercising--on the
roof, until he has worn himself out. And now--he is ill. He--he has a
rash."
Everybody jumped at that, and we instinctively moved away from Bella.
She was quite cold and scornful by that time.
"A rash!" Max exclaimed. "What sort of rash?"
"I did not see it," Bella said with dignity, and turning, she went up
the stairs.