"Yes. That was--that was one of the things I was--just thinking about! Annie wrote Mama that she was very ill, in Munich, and poor Mama just flew. Müller had left her; indeed there was a woman and two quite big girls that had a claim on him, and if Mama hadn't been so anxious to shut it all up, she might have proved that he was a bigamist--but I don't know that she was ever sure. Judge Lee put the divorce through for Annie, and Mama took her to the Riviera and petted her, and pulled her through. But all her hair came out, and for weeks they didn't think she would live. She had brain fever. You see, Annie had had some money waiting for her on her eighteenth birthday, 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 Müller 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!"