"Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea!" Dal hummed
outside.
"Put up those window shades!" Aunt Selina's voice was strong enough.
"What's in that bottle?"
Betty was still mild. She swished to the window and raised the shade.
"I'm SO sorry you are ill," she said sympathetically. "This is for your
poor aching head. Now close your eyes and lie perfectly still, and I
will cool your forehead."
"There's nothing the matter with my head," Aunt Selina retorted. "And
I have not lost my faculties; I am not a child or a sick cow. If that's
perfumery, take it out."
We heard Betty coming to the door, but there was no time to get away.
She had dropped her mask for a minute and was biting her lip, but when
she saw us she forced a smile.
"She's ill, poor dear," she said. "If you people will go away, I can
bring her around all right. In two hours she will eat out of my hand."
"Eat a piece out of your hand," Max scoffed in a whisper.
We waited a little longer, but it was too painful. Aunt Selina demanded
a mustard foot bath and a hot lemonade and her back rubbed with liniment
and some strong black tea. And in the intervals she wanted to be read
to out of the prayer book. And when we had all gone away, there came the
most terrible noise from Aunt Selina's room, and every one ran. We found
Betty in the hall outside the door, crying, with her fingers in her ears
and her cap over her eye. She said she had been putting the hot water
bottle to Aunt Selina's back, and it had been too hot. Just then
something hit against the door with a soft thud, fell to the floor and
burst, for a trickle of hot water came over the sill.
"She won't let me hold her hand," Betty wailed, "or bathe her brow, or
smooth her pillow. She thinks of nothing but her stomach or her back!
And when I try to make her bed look decent, she spits at me like a cat.
Everything I do is wrong. She spilled the foot bath into her shoes, and
blamed me for it."
It took the united efforts of all of us--except Bella, who stood back
and smiled nastily--to get Betty back into the sick room again. I was
supremely thankful by that time that I had not drawn the nurse's slip.
With dinner ordered in from one of the clubs, and the omelet ten hours
behind me, my position did not seem so unbearable. But a new development
was coming.
While Betty was fussing with Aunt Selina, Max led a search of the house.
He said the necklace and the bracelet must be hidden somewhere, and that
no crevice was too small to neglect.