Page:Hollyhock house; a story for girls (IA hollyhockhousest00tagg).pdf/278

256 But Mary’s head moved, distressed, and she repeated her trilogy: “Rain, rain, rain!”

There had been a drought of some weeks, the garden was suffering under it, although Joel Bell attached the hose to the garden reservoir and watered it. Joel was in utter anguish of mind over the disaster through which his child had so nearly died and Mary, perhaps, was to die for her.

“’Tain’t in nature not to be glad Nina May Bell is saved, but, my soul an’ body, you’ve no sort of an idee how I feel about your girl bein’ so bad hurt for her,” he repeated.

Doctor Hall said that it might be that a rainfall would benefit Mary. In her delirium she plainly mingled the suffering of her burns with the remembrance of the drought that parched her beloved blossoms. She was so sensitive, he added, to atmospheric conditions that she might be harmed by the dryness in the air.

After this Jane and Florimel watched the sky for a cloud as the shipwrecked sailor in the desert island of fiction scans it for a sail. On the third day after Doctor Hall had said that rain might help Mary toward recovery, they saw the fleecy heads of clouds in the west, white at their base, golden in the summer sunshine on their tops,