“The Christmas box was a large and well-filled one, packed with flannels and blankets, and tea and sugar for the old women in the huts on the waste, and containing another smaller box with cakes, sweetmeats and sugar plums for me and my small household.
“I heard the steward remark to his wife that the new countess must be well off, or the earl must have come into money some way, for this was the very first Christmas that he had ever sent anything to the poor on the estate. As the guardian of his daughter, the heiress, he forgave many of them their rent, but he never helped them in any other way. And so at Christmas the old people on the waste were made happy. And now let me add here that as long as I remained at the old manor house this Christmas dole came every year.
“After this I heard less of the cruelty of my father in afflicting me with a stepmother. I heard even less of the wickedness of stepmothers in general and the probable enormity of my stepmother in particular.
“The old people from the waste came down in crowds to the manor house on Christmas Day to thank me for the dole that had been sent to them on Christmas Eve. This was the only pleasure we had. There was no merrymaking, and the state of the roads prevented us even from going to church.
“Oh, the dreary winter that followed! No one came to the house except the vicar and the doctor, who made weekly calls to report to my father. And we went nowhere at all. That was my first winter at Weirdwaste. And here let me add that all succeeding winters were like that.
“I had no companions, no amusements, no occupations except my schoolbooks and my piano. I had not even a pet bird, or cat, or dog.
“The steward and his wife were good to me, but they were engaged in their affairs. Miss Murray was faithful, but when she was not hearing my lessons, or guiding my fingers over the keys of the piano, she was busied in reading. I never knew anybody to read so much as she did. She had no other recreation.
“When the spring returned we began to take walks on the sand again when the tide was out; and we drove to church on Sundays when the state of the roads permitted us.
“On the first of August we received news from my father. He was at Enderby Castle, to which he had taken my stepmother for a temporary sojourn. He wrote to the steward to tell him that an heir had been born to Enderby; and he wrote to me to say that my new mother had given me a dear little brother, and that he hoped I would love them both very much.
“I was not quite four years old when my own dear mother died. I was but a few weeks past five now when I was told that I had a little brother by my father’s new wife, and that I must love both.