“It is—it is—for joy I’m crying now.”
“My name is Maggie May. But I’m not a child.”
“Well, when I opened my eyes I took you for a fairy, and——”
What more he would have said may never be known, for just then the doctor entered the room. He smiled to find Sandie awake, re-dressed his wounds, then gave him a draught, and commanded silence.
The fairy went back to her white seam; Mrs. M‘Crae once more took up her knitting; Sandie’s eyelids began to droop; wave after wave of sleep appeared to roll up and over his brain, and soon he was once more in the land of forgetfulness.
CHAPTER IV
AN IDYLLIC LIFE
When Sandie awoke again, he felt so much fresher, lightsomer, and better, and was admitted by the doctor to be so far recovered that he was permitted to sit up a little and engage in conversation with his mother and gentle little nurse, Maggie May.
The latter interested Sandie very much indeed. He had never before seen a child-girl half so lovely. To him she was idyllic, a poem, a dream-child. It seemed to this romantic ploughboy-student as if Maggie May—what a sweet name, too!—had flown straight out from the pages of Anacreon.
Of course there may have been a good deal of super-sentimentality about all this, for the mind is always more sensitive when the body is feeble and weak; and weak Sandie still was, and would be for many a day. However, it may be confessed, before we go any farther, that Maggie May was an innocent, artless, and a very beautiful child.