The very next morning Mrs. Salisbury awakened with a dull headache.  Hot sunlight was streaming into the bedroom, an odor of coffee, drifting upstairs, made her feel suddenly sick.  Her first thought was that she could not have Sandy’s two friends to luncheon, and she could not keep a shopping and tea engagement with a friend of her own!  She might creep through the day somehow, but no more.

She dressed slowly, fighting dizziness, and went slowly downstairs, sighing at the sight of disordered music and dust in the dining-room, the sticky chafing-dish and piled plates in the pantry.  In the kitchen was a litter of milk bottles, saucepans, bread and crumbs and bread knife encroaching upon a basket of spilled berries, egg shells and melting bacon.  The blue sides of the coffee-pot were stained where the liquid and grounds had bubbled over it.  Marthe was making toast, the long fork jammed into a plate hole of the range.  Mrs. Salisbury thought that she had never seen sunlight so mercilessly hot and bright before—­

“Rotten coffee!” said Mr. Salisbury cheerfully, when his wife took her place at the table.

“And she never uses the poacher!” Alexandra added reproachfully.  “And she says that the cream is sour because the man leaves it at half-past four, right there in the sunniest corner of the porch—­ can’t he have a box or something, Mother?”

“Gosh, I wouldn’t care what she did if she’d get a move on,” said Stanford frankly.  “She’s probably asleep out there, with her head in the frying pan!”

Mrs. Salisbury went into the kitchen again.  She had to pause in the pantry because the bright squares of the linoleum, and the brassy faucets, and the glare of the geraniums outside the window seemed to rush together for a second.

Marthe was on the porch, exchanging a few gay remarks with the garbage man before shutting the side door after him.  The big stove was roaring hot, a thick odor of boiling clothes showed that Marthe was ready for her cousin Nancy, the laundress, who came once a week.  A saucepan deeply gummed with cereal was soaking beside the hissing and smoking frying pan Mrs. Salisbury moved the frying pan, and the quick heat of the coal fire rushed up at her face—­

“Why,” she whispered, opening anxious eyes after what seemed a long time, “who fainted?”

A wheeling and rocking mass of light and shadow resolved itself into the dining-room walls, settled and was still.  She felt the soft substance of a sofa pillow under her head, the hard lump that was her husband’s arm supporting her shoulders.

“That’s it—­now she’s all right!” said Kane Salisbury, his kind, concerned face just above her own.  Mrs. Salisbury shifted heavy, languid eyes, and found Sandy.

“Darling, you fell!” the daughter whispered.  White-lipped, pitiful, with tears still on her round cheeks, Sandy was fanning her mother with a folded newspaper.