“Then a walk on the sands, all around the point, if the tide was low; or, if the tide were high and the cape covered with water, we took a walk on the waste behind the manor house.
“Sometimes I got a letter from my father, inclosed in one to the steward or to my governess.”
CHAPTER XXIV
A NEW MOTHER
“One day I received a terrible shock. Child as I was, I felt it severely. It came so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that it fell like a thunderbolt upon me.
“It was a morning in November when the carrier’s cart stopped at the manor house, and left a box directed to me, in the care of the steward.
“When it was opened, it revealed a beautiful cake wrapped in many folds of silver paper. I was delighted, for I had not tasted cake for months.
“But, oh! I did not taste it even then! The letter that lay on the top of the cake poisoned it.
“That letter told me that my father had married and was spending his honeymoon in Paris. I had a stepmother! A being whom, I knew not how, or why, unless perhaps from the idle talk of servants, I had learned to hate as an evil and to dread as an enemy—though it never occurred to me that my father would give me one. And yet he had married within five months after my mother’s death.
“I could not touch the poisoned cake! I know not what became of it.
“I cried all that day and many days after. The steward and his wife and the two old servants who had known and loved and served my mother, encouraged me with their sympathy and lamentations to yield to my grief and despair; but the governess frowned upon me and lectured me upon my duty to my parents, as it was her business to do—only it seemed to me cruel in her.