y, and your own father, who was
her guardian, Chris, had given her the check--interest, it was, about
seven or eight thousand dollars. And he told her to open her own
account, and manage her own income, from then on. And we thought--Mama
and I--that in some way Mueller must have heard of it. Anyway, she never
deposited the check, and when her money gave out he just left her."

"But what makes you think that her illness didn't commence--or wasn't
entirely--brain fever?"

"That she might have had a baby?" Alice asked, outright.

Christopher nodded, the point almost insufferably distasteful to him.

"Oh, I know it!" Alice said.

"You _know_ it?" the man echoed, almost in displeasure.

"Yes, she told me herself! But of course that was years later. At the
time, all I knew was that Kate Sheridan came home, and came to see me at
school, and told me that Mama and Annie were very well, but that Annie
had been frightfully sick, and that Mama wouldn't come back until Annie
was much stronger. As a matter of fact, it was nearly two
years--Theodore took me over to them a year from that following summer,
and then Annie stayed with some friends in England; she was having a
wonderful time! But years afterward, when little Hendrick was coming, in
fact, she was here one day, and she seemed to feel blue, and finally I
happened to say that if motherhood seemed so hard to a person like
herself, whose husband and whose whole family were so mad with joy over
the prospect of a baby, what on earth must it be to the poor girls who
have every reason to hate it. And she looked at me rather oddly, and
said: 'Ah, I know what _that_ is!' Of course I guessed right away what
she meant, and I said: 'Annie--not really!' And she said: 'Oh, yes, that
was what started my illness. I had been so almost crazy--so blue and
lonesome, and so sick with horror at the whole thing, that it all
happened too soon, the day after Mama and Kate got there, in fact!' And
then she burst out crying and said: 'Thank God it was that way! I
couldn't have faced _that_.' And she said that she had been too
desperately ill to realize anything, but that afterward, at Como, when
she was much better, she asked Mama about it, and Mama said she must
only be glad that it was all over, and try to think of it as a terrible
dream!"

"Well, there you are," said Chris, "she herself says that no child was
born!"

"Yes, but, Chris, mightn't it be that she didn't know?" Alice submitted,