Page:Hollyhock house; a story for girls (IA hollyhockhousest00tagg).pdf/277

Rh set in and Mary grew worse. At times she knew no one, but begged unbearably to be taken home to her “dear old garden,” or implored for Jane, Florimel, or Anne, as the case might be. She never recalled her mother in her delirium, and, though Mrs. Moulton, moved to pity for the girlish mother for whom she had secretly felt a little contempt, carefully explained that Mary’s mind turned back to her not-distant childhood, in which her mother had no part, that it was not the Mary of that summer forgetting her, Mrs. Garden was not consoled. Finding herself excluded from Mary now by her voluntary absence from her as she grew up, showed Mrs. Garden, as nothing else could have shown her, that the loss of her little girls’ childhood was a heavy price to pay for the honour the world had heaped upon her.

“Rain, rain, rain!” Mary moaned. And again: “Rain, rain, rain!” repeated over and over, thrice each time, sometimes for a weary hour. Occasionally the lament was varied by the cry that Mary’s garden “was burning up.”

Jane knelt and said clearly, close to her ear, hoping that she might understand: “Mel and I take care of it, Mary dearest. It is watered and all right.”