He actually had stopped screaming because she had startled him so.  The scream which had been coming almost choked him.  The tears were streaming down his face and he shook all over.

“I can’t stop!” he gasped and sobbed.  “I can’t—­I can’t!”

“You can!” shouted Mary.  “Half that ails you is hysterics and temper—­just hysterics—­hysterics—­hysterics!” and she stamped each time she said it.

“I felt the lump—­I felt it,” choked out Colin.  “I knew I should.  I shall have a hunch on my back and then I shall die,” and he began to writhe again and turned on his face and sobbed and wailed but he didn’t scream.

“You didn’t feel a lump!” contradicted Mary fiercely.  “If you did it was only a hysterical lump.  Hysterics makes lumps.  There’s nothing the matter with your horrid back—­nothing but hysterics!  Turn over and let me look at it!”

She liked the word “hysterics” and felt somehow as if it had an effect on him.  He was probably like herself and had never heard it before.

“Nurse,” she commanded, “come here and show me his back this minute!”

The nurse, Mrs. Medlock and Martha had been standing huddled together near the door staring at her, their mouths half open.  All three had gasped with fright more than once.  The nurse came forward as if she were half afraid.  Colin was heaving with great breathless sobs.

“Perhaps he—­he won’t let me,” she hesitated in a low voice.

Colin heard her, however, and he gasped out between two sobs: 

“Sh—­show her!  She—­she’ll see then!”

It was a poor thin back to look at when it was bared.  Every rib could be counted and every joint of the spine, though Mistress Mary did not count them as she bent over and examined them with a solemn savage little face.  She looked so sour and old-fashioned that the nurse turned her head aside to hide the twitching of her mouth.  There was just a minute’s silence, for even Colin tried to hold his breath while Mary looked up and down his spine, and down and up, as intently as if she had been the great doctor from London.

“There’s not a single lump there!” she said at last.  “There’s not a lump as big as a pin—­except backbone lumps, and you can only feel them because you’re thin.  I’ve got backbone lumps myself, and they used to stick out as much as yours do, until I began to get fatter, and I am not fat enough yet to hide them.  There’s not a lump as big as a pin!  If you ever say there is again, I shall laugh!”

No one but Colin himself knew what effect those crossly spoken childish words had on him.  If he had ever had any one to talk to about his secret terrors—­if he had ever dared to let himself ask questions—­if he had had childish companions and had not lain on his back in the huge closed house, breathing an atmosphere heavy with the fears of people who were most of them ignorant and tired of him, he would have found out that most of his fright and illness was created by himself.  But he had lain and thought of himself and his aches and weariness for hours and days and months and years.  And now that an angry unsympathetic little girl insisted obstinately that he was not as ill as he thought he was he actually felt as if she might be speaking the truth.