“I want my mummy!” she shouted. “I want my own mummy!”
“Your mummy isn’t here—be quiet this moment.”
A defiant yell was Cara’s sole answer.
“Shut up—shut up at once, you little devil! Do you hear me?” and her father reached down, and shook her roughly by the arm.
Cara surveyed him with a pair of rebellious blue eyes, then drew in her breath and screamed with a deafening increase of shrill and reckless fury. Such were her efforts, that her little face was actually purple and congested, as she drummed on the marble pavement with the heels of her best shoes.
“Go ’way!” she panted. “Go ’way—ugly man—I want my mummy!”
“I know what you want, and what you’ll get!” cried her father, beside himself with anger, and snatching her up, he proceeded to administer to the astonished Cara, a first and ruthless chastisement: carrying out the punishment with the broad palm of a powerful hand in loud and resounding smacks.
The subject was so completely dazed by the experience she had almost ceased to cry, merely ejaculating:
“Bad man! Bad man! Bad man!”
Meanwhile Nurse Waggett stood by, the embodiment of complacent satisfaction, till, at a sign from the executioner, she took over her gasping, sobbing, bewildered charge, and carried her off to her own apartments. Subsequently the threat, “I’ll bring your father!” had a magical effect upon Miss Caroline Blagdon: he remained an ineffaceable impression of awe and terror, for many and many a day.