d persecuted and sad. But
there--if I do not turn my back on them and my books, I must go to St.
Ambrose's, there is no choice," ended May disconsolately.

"But why not go to St. Ambrose's?"

"Oh! you do not know, Mr. Robinson," protested May with fresh energy.
"In the first place you are a man and cannot understand. In the second,
I suppose it is because I am so silly and childish and cowardly," she
went on incoherently. "Annie always said it was cowardly; she and Rose
went away quite bravely and cheerfully, keeping up their own and
everybody's spirits to the last. But Dora and I could not do it, yet I
do not know that anybody ever thought of calling our Dora cowardly
exactly, or silly, and childish. She was not a bit cowardly with the
horrid big dog and dear little Tray, you remember?--she would not let me
interfere, but she would have stoned the dog herself."

"Which would have been very foolish of her," said Tom Robinson with
decision. "I should say she was timid, not cowardly--there is a broad
distinction between the two conditions."

"It is just that we cannot leave home for any length of time, Dora and
I," said May piteously.

"So you and your sister Dora cannot leave home--that is the objection,
is it?" he repeated, slowly pulling his red moustache. "What do you call
home? The Old Doctor's House or Redcross?"

"Both," cried May quickly; "where father and mother and the rest of us
are, of course."

"But the rest of you are gone, and what if your father and mother were
to go too?"

"They won't, they never will," insisted May--"not until they come to
die. You were not meaning that? Oh! you could not be so cruel, so
barbarous," cried May, passionately, "when death is such a long way off,
I trust. I know that God is good whether we live or die, and that we
shall meet again in a better world. But we are not parted yet, and it is
not wrong to pray that we may be a long time together here on this very
earth, which we know so well, where we have been so happy. Why, father
and mother are not more than middle-aged--mother is not, and if father
is older, he is as strong and hale as anybody. Think how he was able to
give up his carriage and attend his patients on foot last autumn without
feeling it," urged the girl defiantly, in her passion of love and roused
dread, which she would not admit.

"Certainly," he strove to reassure her, feeling himself a savage for
frightening her by his inadvertence, "I never saw any