Mrs. Douglas shook her head. "I wasn't always a bustling hurricane. I think I became that because I married such a placid man; just as I became a Radical because he was such a Tory; just as I had to become sternly practical because he was such a dreamer. If we had both been alike we would have wandered hand-in-hand into the workhouse. Not that Mark spent money on himself--bless him--but nobody ever asked him for help and was refused; and he did like to buy things for me. I found I just had to take control of the money. Not at first, of course; it came to it by degrees. And your father was only too glad; money was never anything but a nuisance to him. I don't think I'm inordinately fond of money either, but I had to _hain_ so that for years it had an undue prominence in my mind. Well, I sighed for the South Country, and one day, when I was miserably moping over the fire, your father said to me: 'Come on, Nell, I'm going to visit a sick girl about your own age. She's always asking me questions about you, and I said you would go and see her.' "I didn't want to go, for I was shy of sick people--the being ill in bed seemed to put them such a distance away--but I put on my best clothes to make a good impression, and went.... We were taken into a clean, bright room, with a dressing-table dressed crisply in white muslin over pink. A girl was lying high up on the pillows, and I thought at first she couldn't be ill, she had such shining blue eyes and rose-flushed cheeks; her yellow hair hung in two plaits over her shoulders. Then I saw that her hands were almost transparent, and that her breath came in quick gasps between her red, parted lips, and I knew that this pretty child was dying quickly of consumption. I couldn't speak as I took her hand, but I tried hard to keep the tears from my eyes as she looked at me--two girls about an age, the one beginning life at its fullest, the other about to leave the world and youth behind. I stood there in my wedding braws, hating myself almost for my health and happiness. Your father talked to her until I got hold of myself, and then she seemed to like to hear me tell about the little house and my attempts to cook. As we were leaving she held your father's hand, and said, in her weak, husky voice, 'Mr. Douglas, tell the folk on Sabbath that _Christ is a Rock_....' I think I realised then, for the first time, what religion meant. A sentence in that book we were reading, _Green Apple Harvest_, reminded me of that girl.... You know when Robert is dying and his brother Clem says to him: "'Oh, Bob, it seems unaccountable hard as you should die in the middle of May!' "And Robert replies: '.... I've a feeling as if I go to the Lord God I'll only be going into the middle of all that's alive.... If I'm with Him I can't never lose the month of May....' "I went home crying bitterly for the girl who was dying in the May morning of her days. I don't think I moped any more." CHAPTER V