"Where is she?" repeats Burgoyne hastily, both because he wants to know, and because he is anxious to strangle in its infancy one of those ignoble family bickerings, to assist at many of which has been the privilege or penalty of his state of intimacy. "She is not well," replies Cecilia shortly, her rosy face rosier than usual, either with the joy of imminent battle, or with the exertion of swaddling, under protest, the invalid's now elevated legs. "Not well! Amelia not well," echoes he, in a tone of incredulity. During all the years of their acquaintance not once has he heard his patient sweetheart complain of ache or pain. Manlike, he has therefore concluded that she can never have felt either. "It is very thoughtless of her," says Cecilia, with a not altogether amiable laugh, and giving a final irritated slap to Sybilla's coverlet--"considering how much illness we already have in the house; ha! ha! but it is true all the same: she is not well, not at all well; she is in bed." "_In bed!_" "She must have caught a chill yesterday on that disgusting excursion; driving home that long distance in wet shoes and stockings." "But I thought, I hoped that--I asked her to change them." "She had them dried in a sort of way; but I could see when she put them on again that they were really wringing wet still. I told her so, but she only answered that even if they were, what matter? she never caught cold. You know that Amelia never thinks that anything matters that concerns herself." This would be an even handsomer tribute to Amelia than it is, if it did not suggest a secondary intention of administering a back-hander to someone else. "In the case of my children," says Mr. Wilson, making his voice heard for the first time from the window, where he is discontentedly peering up and down the sheets of a journal through his spectacles, "there seems to be no mean possible between senseless rashness and preposterous self-indulgence." Mr. Wilson likes his eldest daughter. He is uneasy and upset, and rather angry at her indisposition, and this is his way of showing his paternal tenderness. "_In bed!_" The human animal is the most adaptive of created beings; but even it requires some little time to adjust itself to entirely new conditions of existence. "Amelia," continues Mr. Wilson, fanning the flame of his ire with the bellows of his own rhetoric, "is the one among you whom I did credit with the possession of a head upon her shoulders, and now here she is wantonly laying herself up!" "You talk as if she did it on purpose, father," says Cecilia, with an indignant laugh--"as if she enjoyed it. I do not think that anyone, even Sybilla"--with a resentful side-glance at the sofa--"could enjoy having her teeth chattering with cold, her head as heavy as lead, and her knees knocking together under her." "Good heavens!" cries Jim, his bewildered surprise swallowed up in genuine alarm; "you do not mean to say that she is as bad as that?"