Poppy said nothing, but if having black murder in your heart makes you a Fenian, she knew that she was one.
Silently she assisted her aunt to put their pinafores upon the struggling twins, and to array Ina in her cape and bib—all starched to stand about them like boards, to their everlasting misery and discomfort. Mrs. Kennedy gloated upon the fact that all the neighbours said, "How beautifully kept Mrs. Kennedy's children are!"
At last Tommy was in the pram; Bobby pranced astride on Poppy's small bony hip, and Ina, who was just four, clung toddling to her skirt. Thus Poppy set forth, pushing the pram before her.
"And mind you bring them in before sun-down, and don't let them sit on the damp grass—" was Mrs. Kennedy's last word shouted up the street after the procession.
A little lane lined with syringa trees led from the house and was shady and sweet to loiter in, but Fountain Street glared and blazed under the afternoon sun. Poppy was pale and sadly-coloured as some strange cellar-plant when at last she brought her charges to a halt by the Kopje. She put Bobby down from her hip with a bump, tilted the pram and let Tommy scramble out the best way he could, then sat down on a rock and covered her face with her hands.
Bobby was a heavy-weight, and though she changed him from one hip to another all the way up the street, she never got to the Kopje without a pain in her stomach and a feeling of deathly sickness.
Nearly all the children of the town came to the Kopje in the afternoons. It was only a slight hill, but it had bushes and clumps of mimosa trees, and little quarried-out holes and masses of rocks, and other fascinating features dear to children. The Kaffir-girl nurses squatted under the trees jabbering amongst themselves, and the children congregated in small herds. Poppy was the only white-girl nurse to be seen. She had a little circle of trees and stones where she always took her brood, and if she found anyone else in possession, she threw stones at them until they retreated.
When she had spread a rug for them to sit on, the children were left to amuse themselves in whatsoever fashion seemed good unto them. Poppy sat dreaming to herself, wrapped in the veils of poetry and romance. Near the Kopje was St. Michael's, a high school for girls kept by an English sisterhood, and when Poppy and her brood reached their haunt before three o'clock, she would see all the girls coming out of the gates, passing by in their nice dresses and hats with bags of books in their hands. They would stare at Poppy, and sometimes laugh; then the pain in her stomach would come into her throat and almost choke her. No one ever spoke to her. They knew quite well who she was, but she did Kaffir's work, and her clothes were old and ugly, and she was altogether a person to be despised and laughed at.
But sometimes a little ray of human friendliness would break through the hedge of snobbery. On this summer day a girl called Edie Wyllie, who used to sit next to her in Sunday-school, called out in quite a jolly way as she passed:
"Hullo, Poppy Destin!"