She slapped it open with her hand and ran across the room to the four-posted bed.
"You stop!" she almost shouted.

"You stop! I hate you! Everybody hates you! I wish everybody would run out of the house and let you scream yourself to death! You _will_ scream yourself to death in a minute, and I wish you would!" A nice sympathetic child could neither have thought nor said such things, but it just happened that the shock of hearing them was the best possible thing for this hysterical boy whom no one had ever dared to restrain or contradict.
He had been lying on his face beating his pillow with his hands and he actually almost jumped around, he turned so quickly at the sound of the furious little voice.

His face looked dreadful, white and red and swollen, and he was gasping and choking; but savage little Mary did not care an atom.
"If you scream another scream," she said, "I'll scream too--and I can scream louder than you can and I'll frighten you, I'll frighten you!" He actually had stopped screaming because she had startled him so.

The scream which had been coming almost choked him.

The tears were streaming down his face and he shook all over.
"I can't stop!" he gasped and sobbed.