It was very early, but May was in the garden. The sun was just rising and the morning glories on the back porch turned their purple and rose and white cups to catch the welcome light. The sky was full of rosy clouds; dew glittered on the waving grass and dancing flowers, and the birds were singing as they only sing at dawn.
"What a lovely world this is!" cried May aloud. "If my uncle liked me I should be almost too happy this morning."
"He doesn't dislike you, dear," said Sarah, who had come up softly behind May and had thus overheard her words. May grasped her kind friend by the hand and said, earnestly,—
"I thought that I wouldn't apologize. I have changed my mind, or the dark changed it for me. I think it is perfectly wonderful, how the dark, so still and black, will make you willing to do things that you've said ever so many times in the daytime that you wouldn't do! I am going to apologize because I'm ashamed of myself. Not because he shut me up in my room—I hope he will understand that. I got up early to get braced up for it by the air, and the flowers and the morning."
Sarah understood the feeling that prompted May's early rising; the hours just after dawn have more of inspiration in them than a whole library of books about right living and thinking.
"The General is in the library; why don't you go now?" asked Sarah, brightly.
"I will; and I will be as full of good humor as father and as gentle as mother."
This was undertaking a good deal, but May was in earnest; and to be in earnest is to be armed against almost any enemy.
Much to her own surprise Sarah bent and kissed the mock boy. "Now scamper!" said she. "And come and tell me how well you have kept your word."
The General was reading. A hundred lines of Greek before breakfast was his daily appetizer and he had just completed fifty when May slid into the room.