"Oh dear!" cried May, completely taken aback, "that is dreadful. Will he die, Annie? Will he die?" forgetting all her own high-strung woes, the product of an advanced stage of civilization, in heart-felt, human sympathy with the most primitive of all trials—bodily suffering and loss.
"Not if we can help it, please God," said Annie emphatically. Then an inspiration came to her as she gazed on the girl's white quivering face. "You have been working too hard, 'little May'; you shake your head like a tragedy queen. Then you've been worrying too much, which is a great deal worse. I shall take you in hand, but I can't stay to talk about it. Just you think how little my poor fellow would mind not passing an examination, in comparison with the loss of an arm—fortunately it is the left one. He is a printer who got his arm crushed under one of the great rollers, and he has a wife and five little children dependent on their bread-winner."
Annie was gone, leaving May suddenly transported out of herself, and plunged into the trials of her neighbours, the awfully near, common life-and-death trials, of which she had known so little. Her own seemed to sink into insignificance beside them. St. Ambrose's and its intellectual lists and wordy contests, even its lofty abstruse thoughts—excellent things in their way, without which the unlettered world would become rude, sordid and narrow—faded into the background. She forgot everything but the poor man passing through a mortal crisis, with Annie able to succour him in his need, and his wife and children waiting to hear whether the end were life or death.
May held her breath, and watched, prayed, and waited in her turn, with no thought left for the news she had brought to town, and was to carry to Redcross. What did it signify if only the poor man lived when May herself was well and strong, and all her dear friends were in health, and likely to be spared to her.
When Annie came in again with a cheerful face, and said, "He has stood it wonderfully; there is every prospect of his making a speedy recovery," May's face too cleared till for the moment it was almost radiant. She acquiesced, with responsive animation, in Annie's arrangement that since she, Annie, had got leave of absence for the rest of the day she would put on her walking-dress, and she and May too would go and pick up Rose at Mr. St. Foy's class-rooms; and what was to hinder all the three from having an expedition together in the fine summer weather to Hampton Court, or Kew, or the Crystal Palace, thus celebrating May's visit to town, and making the most of Annie's holiday? It would be like dear old times of primrose hunting, blue-bell gathering, maying, and nutting down at Redcross before the cares and troubles of the world had taken hold of the girls. Annie had already sent on May's luggage to Welby Square, to which May would return with Rose. Annie excluded herself carefully from this part of the programme, with a kind of unapproachable haughtiness which had three strains of stubbornness and one strain of fiery youthful anger in its composition, while it was a complete enigma to May. But all she cared to know was that she was going with her own two sisters for an entire afternoon's delightful excursion. In the morning she had felt that she could never have the heart to be happy again. Even yet she would not be quite happy; she would be very much affronted when she was telling Annie and Rose the particulars of her, May's, silliness and selfishness; how she had given herself up to moping, and then how she had played herself—first with the St. Ambrose gaieties, and later with the Greek play, instead of setting about her work methodically and diligently. Annie would, perhaps, tell her a few home-truths, and Rose would crumple up her nose, shake her head, and look superhumanly wise—Rose who in the old days had been more thoughtless than May.
Still she deserved it all a thousand times over, and it would be a relief to have disburdened herself of the sorry tale.
Her own sisters would defend her from every other assailant. They would feel for her, seek to reassure her, even make much of her, as they were doing by taking her away with them this afternoon. May was very sensible that a burden was lifted off her back.