She sat up and said as she had determined, "My head aches so that
I shall go indoors." He was half-way through the next verse, but he
dropped the book instantly.
"Your head aches?" he repeated.
For a few moments they sat looking at one another in silence, holding
each other's hands. During this time his sense of dismay and catastrophe
were almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to hear the
shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth, left him sitting in
the open air. But at the end of two minutes, noticing that she was not
sharing his dismay, but was only rather more languid and heavy-eyed than
usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and asked her to tell him what they
had better do, for Rachel had a headache.
Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she should go to bed,
and added that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to all
hours and went out in the heat, but a few hours in bed would cure it
completely. Terence was unreasonably reassured by her words, as he had
been unreasonably depressed the moment before. Helen's sense seemed
to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature, which
avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature's good sense, might be
depended upon.
Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very
long time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she
saw the windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time
before she had gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it
would be gone when she woke.
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