“You mean you all love me best! You can’t tell about value. The Bell baby may do fine things before she is eighteen. I’m glad she is living,” Mary managed to say.
“You saved her life. I never expect to save a life in all my own life! A whole chime of Bell babies couldn’t ring the peal you do, Molly darling!” said Jane, who had come into the room.
Mary smiled at her, a better smile than she had heretofore achieved.
“Prejudice!” she whispered.
Slight as this encouragement was, Jane went away cheered. Surely taking interest in the Bell baby and discussing comparative value of lives must mean that Mary was better! Yet after this the fever which the doctor had feared set in and Mary grew worse. At times she knew no one, but begged unbearably to be taken home to her “dear old garden,” or implored for Jane, Florimel, or Anne, as the case might be. She never recalled her mother in her delirium, and, though Mrs. Moulton, moved to pity for the girlish mother for whom she had secretly felt a little contempt, carefully explained that Mary’s mind turned back to her not-distant childhood, in which her mother had no part, that it was not the Mary of that summer forgetting her, Mrs. Garden was not consoled. Finding herself excluded from Mary now by her voluntary absence from her as she grew up, showed Mrs. Garden, as nothing else could have shown her, that the loss of her little girls’ childhood was a heavy price to pay for the honour the world had heaped upon her.
“Rain, rain, rain!” Mary moaned. And again: “Rain, rain, rain!” repeated over and over, thrice each time, sometimes for a weary hour. Occasionally the lament was varied by the cry that Mary’s garden “was burning up.”
Jane knelt and said clearly, close to her ear, hoping that she might understand: “Mel and I take care of it, Mary dearest. It is watered and all right.”
But Mary’s head moved, distressed, and she repeated her trilogy: “Rain, rain, rain!”
There had been a drought of some weeks, the garden was suffering under it, although Joel Bell attached the hose to the garden reservoir and watered it. Joel was in utter anguish of mind over the disaster through which his child had so nearly died and Mary, perhaps, was to die for her.
“’Tain’t in nature not to be glad Nina May Bell is saved, but, my soul an’ body, you’ve no sort of an idea how I feel about your girl bein’ so bad hurt for her,” he repeated.