All this glanced through her mind as she lay staring at the ceiling, or at the blue square of the window gradually growing more visible. There was no sleep for her that night. The first part of it she had found uncomfortable enough, but sleep had been strong upon her. Now she was comfortable, but had thoroughly shaken off sleep. She thought over all the turmoil of the family, and its agitations. He had never done anything so bad as this before. There had been storms in the house without number, but he had always let the mother smooth things down. He had never shut out any of “the boys,” which was what she called even her brothers who were married and had boys of their own. And Harry was the one most like his mother; most likely to make a fuss and take such an accident in the worst way. Where had Harry gone? What was he doing? Where could he go in the middle of the night?
When she had come back to this subject, Joan felt almost too restless to stay in bed. If she had but thought of it at the time she would have gone after him; she would have prevented him from going away. To think she should have been so overcome by sleep as not to know when Harry had disappeared, or to be aware that he was gone! She turned and twisted about in the self-annoyance caused by this, and could not rest. If she had not been so sleepy, she might have stopped Harry and averted the catastrophe, for she felt vaguely that a catastrophe it was. And what would become of his mother if anything had happened to him? “Tut,” said Joan, to herself, “I am getting as bad as mother herself. There is a bit of mother in me, though I did not think it. What should have happened to him? He’s sound asleep now while I’m moidering myself about him. To be sure he must have knocked somebody up and got a bed somewhere; but in the morning he’ll go over to Will’s, or Tom’s, or even Uncle Henry’s. Things are bad enough as they are. Father’s getting that bad that even me, _I_ can’t put up with him; and mother’s life’s a trouble to her:--and to other folks too,” she added involuntarily, with a quaint, comic twist of her upper lip. But notwithstanding this strong sense in her mind that her mother’s example was not one to follow, and that there was in its pathos a faint touch of the ridiculous, she yet could not succeed in divesting her own mind of uneasiness. As soon as there was light enough to see by she got up, and roused the maids, who were tolerably early risers, but yet were now and then subjected to the ignominy of being called by Miss Joan. “You would sleep if it was the day of judgment,” she cried, standing at the door of the room in which two of them were hastily jumping up, rubbing their eyes. “Why didn’t you get up and let me in last night?”