Free May: Daughters of the Sea #2 by Kathryn Lasky

that she was wearing with a soft blue wool skirt. She had sewn a flounce of lace around the collar, which gave it a festive appearance. It was cheap lace, as Zeeba had reminded her at the time. It had edged a tablecloth someone had given Zeeba as a wedding gift and had ripped off after a few washings. But May hoped she looked better than when she had last seen Rudd. It was so easy, she thought, for boys. They never looked poorly if they were basically handsome. They didn’t have to fool with their hair, and because they grewbeards, or even if they were smooth-shaven, their skin never looked blotchy if they had been upset, as she certainly had been when Rudd called.
    “And that locket—so pretty.”
    “My father gave it to me for my last birthday.” May touched it lightly. It was silver with a filigree of intertwining vines.
    “Well, I won’t ask you what you keep in it.”
    “Nothing, Miss Lowe.”
    “When you do find something to keep in it, that will be your secret. You always have to keep a little something just for yourself, May.”
    She thought of the sea chest, nearly empty yet silently shuddering, dark with its secrets. The emptiness of the locket seemed in some way to echo the aching hollowness within her.
    “Here you go.” Miss Lowe handed the book to May. “Why don’t you curl up in your favorite spot?” She nodded toward a back corner of the library where there was a little window seat. “Make yourself at home. I have to leave in an hour or so, but you can stay here until the dance starts if you’lljust turn the latch behind you when you leave. Of course, by that time it might be too dark to read. There’s a small oil lamp you can use if you promise to turn down the wick and make sure it’s all the way out before you go.”
    “Oh, I surely will, Miss Lowe. This is so kind of you!”
    “Not at all, May.” She smiled, and there was just a trace of worry that seemed to dim the blueness of her eyes for a moment. “I’m so happy to see you getting out. Now that the weather is nice, I hope I’ll see you more.”
    “You will!” May said brightly. The words Rudd had spoken to her came back. “I’m going to start doing a bit of living!”
    Miss Lowe cocked her head, then nodded vigorously. “Good for you, May, good for you!”
    May settled herself happily into the window seat, opened the book, and began reading the first chapter: “The Sea and the Atmosphere.”
    “The two oceans of air and water: Our planet is invested with two great oceans; one visible, the otherinvisible; one underfoot, the other overhead; one entirely envelops it, the other covers about two-thirds of its surface. All the water of one weighs about four hundred times as much as the air of the other.”
    Two oceans,
May thought.
What an extraordinary idea!
    Some of the book May didn’t understand and some she did. But she loved the adventure of figuring it out. This was personal to her, much more vital than learning how to diagram a sentence or memorizing a poem. She had liked learning in school. She was a good student, but she had never felt such urgency to understand as she did with Mr. Maury and his book. If she could understand Maury, the links between those disparate objects in the chest might become clear—clear as sunlit water.
    She began to grasp the interplay between the bottom of the lighter “ocean,” the one of air, and the surface of the second one, of water—the currents ofboth and how they each affected the other. Maury referred to two main wind currents — ones that flowed from both poles of the earth, each toward the equator. But within and between these two main currents of air was a patchwork quilt of smaller currents, “bands” he called them, of wind and water, sometimes calm and sometimes boisterous. And there were rules that governed it all — laws of physics and geography. These laws functioned somewhat like clockworks and ruled the pendulums of the wind and water of two great oceans—the