“Don’t you wish robbers would come some night,” suggested Jennie.
“What would you do if they did?” said Agatha.
“I know what she’d do,” put in Patrick quickly; “she’d hide her head under the bed-clothes and keep on screaming for Rice.”
“If I had a pistol I should shoot them,” said Jackie, “only mine won’t go off.”
“And perhaps,” said Agatha, “they’d have pistols that would go off.”
“Oh! I say,” exclaimed Jackie suddenly, “if here isn’t Mary actually crying away like anything. What’s the matter with her?”
It was quite true. Overwrought and frightened, these dreadful pictures of robbers and pistols had a reality for her which was too much to bear. Mary the courageous, the high-spirited, who scorned tears and laughed at weakness, was now crying and sobbing helplessly, like the greatest coward of them all.
Fraülein put her arm round her compassionately. “She is quaite too tired,” she said; “it is an attack of nerfs. Nefer mind, dear shild. When you will sleep to-night you shall feel quaite better to-morrow.”
She drew her closely to her side; and Mary, who generally despised Fraülein and laughed at her broken English, was thankful now to feel the comfort of her kind protecting arm.