with a deadly nausea that
swathed her muscles and laid her rigid in its limp, devil-fish clutch.
The roof of her mouth was like leather; her head seemed to be pounded
with hammers; she was burning with fever, and malign twitchings and
itchings tormented her to rub her nose incessantly, when the least
motion was fearsome to her. She had much more cause than ordinary to
moan, and moan she did at every breath. Jinny had rushed away to a small
chum the moment the dishes for her own breakfast had been washed; but
Emmy couldn't run. She drank a cup of coffee; she had no heart to eat.
Jinny, however had eaten the dainty little meal that Emmy had
prepared--a forlorn hope to tempt the invalid.

"Oh, my nose! my _nose_!" wailed Mrs. Darter. "Emmy, you've got to leave
off staring out of that window at the Glenns', and come and scratch my
nose! Ah-uh! Ah-u-h!"

Emmy silently sat down by the bedside. If Albert passed the yard on his
wheel, as he did every morning at half-past seven, he would not find
her. Emmy had used no one knows how many devices to always be in the
yard when Albert passed, or, at least, in sight by a window. Bert used
to say that glimpse of Emmy "was a bracer for the whole day." Thursday
night was his night to visit her, but last night he hadn't come.

"Emmy, you ain't any account at all as a scratcher!" fretted her mother.
"You scratch where it ain't itching, and you don't scratch where it
itches, and you're so mincing! Rub it _hard_! Oh-h! _why_ must I suffer
so? It's hard enough to have a ungrateful child without having your nose
itch!"

Emmy adventured a sentence long lurking in her mind, but which she never
had the courage to push out into the air: "Mother, I think, I'm sure it
is the soothing drops which make your nose itch so. There's opium--"

"There isn't a grain of opium in them," sobbed Mrs. Darter. "You know I
always hated opium or morphine or anything of the sort; and doctor told
me she wouldn't give the wicked drug. That's what Lida Glenn much as
told me; much as told me, too, that I was putting on and wasn't real
sick; and I told her--oh-h-h!--I told her--if she considered--_me_--that
sort of woman she must feel awful bad to--oh-h-h!--to have her only
child marry my daughter; and--I-thought--Oh-h! wuh-h-h! how awful sick I
am!"

"You told Mrs. Glenn?" prompted Emmy, a flame in either cheek.

"I told her that--sss! sss!--I thought the sooner that engagement was
broke the better it would be