If she had been friends with Colin she would have run to show him her presents at once, and they would have looked at the pictures and read some of the gardening books and perhaps tried playing the games, and he would have enjoyed himself so much he would never once have thought he was going to die or have put his hand on his spine to see if there was a lump coming.  He had a way of doing that which she could not bear.  It gave her an uncomfortable frightened feeling because he always looked so frightened himself.  He said that if he felt even quite a little lump some day he should know his hunch had begun to grow.  Something he had heard Mrs. Medlock whispering to the nurse had given him the idea and he had thought over it in secret until it was quite firmly fixed in his mind.  Mrs. Medlock had said his father’s back had begun to show its crookedness in that way when he was a child.  He had never told any one but Mary that most of his “tantrums” as they called them grew out of his hysterical hidden fear.  Mary had been sorry for him when he had told her.

“He always began to think about it when he was cross or tired,” she said to herself.  “And he has been cross to-day.  Perhaps—­perhaps he has been thinking about it all afternoon.”

She stood still, looking down at the carpet and thinking.

“I said I would never go back again—­” she hesitated, knitting her brows—­“but perhaps, just perhaps, I will go and see—­if he wants me—­in the morning.  Perhaps he’ll try to throw his pillow at me again, but—­I think—­I’ll go.”

CHAPTER XVII

A TANTRUM

She had got up very early in the morning and had worked hard in the garden and she was tired and sleepy, so as soon as Martha had brought her supper and she had eaten it, she was glad to go to bed.  As she laid her head on the pillow she murmured to herself: 

“I’ll go out before breakfast and work with Dickon and then afterward—­I believe—­I’ll go to see him.”

She thought it was the middle of the night when she was wakened by such dreadful sounds that she jumped out of bed in an instant.  What was it—­what was it?  The next minute she felt quite sure she knew.  Doors were opened and shut and there were hurrying feet in the corridors and some one was crying and screaming at the same time, screaming and crying in a horrible way.

“It’s Colin,” she said.  “He’s having one of those tantrums the nurse called hysterics.  How awful it sounds.”

As she listened to the sobbing screams she did not wonder that people were so frightened that they gave him his own way in everything rather than hear them.  She put her hands over her ears and felt sick and shivering.

“I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know what to do,” she kept saying.  “I can’t bear it.”