always began to think about it when he was cross or tired," she said
to herself. "And he has been cross to-day. Perhaps--perhaps he has been
thinking about it all afternoon."

She stood still, looking down at the carpet and thinking.

"I said I would never go back again--" she hesitated, knitting her
brows--"but perhaps, just perhaps, I will go and see--if he wants me--in
the morning. Perhaps he'll try to throw his pillow at me again, but--I
think--I'll go."

CHAPTER XVII

A TANTRUM

She had got up very early in the morning and had worked hard in the
garden and she was tired and sleepy, so as soon as Martha had brought
her supper and she had eaten it, she was glad to go to bed. As she laid
her head on the pillow she murmured to herself:

"I'll go out before breakfast and work with Dickon and then afterward--I
believe--I'll go to see him."

She thought it was the middle of the night when she was wakened by such
dreadful sounds that she jumped out of bed in an instant. What was
it--what was it? The next minute she felt quite sure she knew. Doors
were opened and shut and there were hurrying feet in the corridors and
some one was crying and screaming at the same time, screaming and crying
in a horrible way.

"It's Colin," she said. "He's having one of those tantrums the nurse
called hysterics. How awful it sounds."

As she listened to the sobbing screams she did not wonder that people
were so frightened that they gave him his own way in everything rather
than hear them. She put her hands over her ears and felt sick and
shivering.

"I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do," she kept saying. "I
can't bear it."

Once she wondered if he would stop if she dared go to him and then she
remembered how he had driven her out of the room and thought that
perhaps the sight of her might make him worse. Even when she pressed her
hands more tightly over her ears she could not keep the awful sounds
out. She hated them so and was so terrified by them that suddenly they
began to make her angry and she felt as if she should like to fly into a
tantrum herself and frighten him as he was frightening her. She was not
used to any one's tempers but her own. She took her hands from her ears
and sprang up and stamped her foot.

"He ought to be stopped! Somebody ought to make him stop! Somebody ought
to beat him!" she cried out.

Just then she heard feet almost running down the corridor and her door
opened and the n