"It's a lie," said the May Girl, "what people say about drowning, that as you go down you remember every little teeny weeny thing that has ever happened to you in your life! All your past, I mean! All the dreadful—wicked things that you've ever done! Oh, it's an awful lie!"
"Is it?" said Allan John.
"Yes, it certainly is;" attested the May Girl. "Why, I never even remembered the day I bit my grandmother."
"N—o," shivered Allan John.
"No, indeed!" insisted the May Girl. "The only things that I thought of were the things I had planned to do!—The—the— PLANS that were drowning with me! One of them," she flushed suddenly, "one of the plans I mean I didn't seem to care at all when I saw it go down and the plan about going to Europe some time. Oh, I don't think that suffered so terribly. But the farm. The farm I was planning to have. The cows. The horses. The dogs. The chickens. The rabbits. Why, Allan John, I counted seventeen rabbits!" Very softly to herself she began to cry again.
"S—s—h. S—s—h," cautioned Allan John. "Things that have never happened you know can't die."
"Of that," reflected the May Girl through her tears, "I am— not so perfectly sure. Is—is it going to clear up?" she asked quite irrelevantly.
"Oh, yes, surely!" rallied Allan John. He would have told her it was Christmas I think if he had really thought that that was what she wanted him to say. Very expeditiously instead he began to shine up the silver whistle with the corner of his handkerchief.
With an almost amusing solemnity the May Girl lay and watched the proceeding. Under the heavy fringe of her lashes her eyes looked very shy. Then so gently, so childishly, that even Allan John didn't wince till it was all over, she asked him the question that no other person in the world probably could have asked him at that moment, and lived.
"Allan John," she asked, "do you suppose that you will ever marry again?"