She walked to the door and when she reached it she turned round and spoke again.
“I was going to tell you all sorts of nice things,” she said. “Dickon brought his fox and his rook and I was going to tell you all about them. Now I won’t tell you a single thing!”
She marched out of the door and closed it behind her, and there to her great astonishment she found the trained nurse standing as if she had been listening and, more amazing still—she was laughing. She was a big handsome young woman who ought not to have been a trained nurse at all, as she could not bear invalids and she was always making excuses to leave Colin to Martha or anyone else who would take her place. Mary had never liked her, and she simply stood and gazed up at her as she stood giggling into her handkerchief..
“What are you laughing at?” she asked her.
“At you two young ones,” said the nurse. “It’s the best thing that could happen to the sickly pampered thing to have someone to stand up to him that’s as spoiled as himself;” and she laughed into her handkerchief again. “If he’d had a young vixen of a sister to fight with it would have been the saving of him.”
“Is he going to die?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said the nurse. “Hysterics and temper are half what ails him.”
“What are hysterics?” asked Mary.
“You’ll find out if you work him into a tantrum after this—but at any rate you’ve given him something to have hysterics about, and I’m glad of it.”
Mary went back to her room not feeling at all as she had felt when she had come in from the garden. She was cross and disappointed but not at all sorry for Colin. She had looked forward to telling him a great many things and she had meant to try to make up her mind whether it would be safe to trust him with the great secret. She had been beginning to think it would be, but now she had changed her mind entirely. She would never tell him and he could stay in his room and never get any fresh air and die if he liked! It would serve him right! She felt so sour and unrelenting that for a few minutes she almost forgot about Dickon and the green veil creeping over the world and the soft wind blowing down from the moor.