The little girl had been too young to understand what it was all about. When she cried for her she was forbidden even to think of her, and was told that her mother was unworthy of that name.
The child had declared with angry tears and stampings of her small foot, that it was not true, that her mother was good and dear and beautiful; but they had paid no heed to her. The father had sternly commanded silence and sent her away; and the mother had not returned.
So she had sobbed her heart out in the silence of her own room, where every object reminded her of the lost mother's touch and voice and presence, and had gone about the house in a sullen silence unnatural to childhood, thereby making herself more enemies than friends.
Of her father she was afraid. She shrank into terrified silence whenever he approached, scarcely answering his questions, and growing farther away from him every day, until he instinctively knew that she hated him for her mother's sake.
When a year had passed he procured a divorce without protest from the innocent but crushed wife, this by aid of a law that often places "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne." Not long after, he brought to his home as his wife a capable, arrogant, self-opinionated woman, who set herself to rule him and his household as it should be ruled.
The little girl was called to audience in the gloomy study where sat the new wife, her eyes filled with hostility toward the other woman's child, and was told that she must call the lady "Mother."
Then the black eyes that held in their dreamy depths some of the gunpowder flash of her father's steely ones took fire; the little face darkened with indignant fury; the small foot came down with fierce determination on the thick carpet, and the child declared:
"I will never call her mother! She is not my mother! She is a bad woman, and she has no right here. She cannot be your wife. It is wicked for a man to have two wives. I know, for I heard Mary Ann and Betsey say so this morning in the kitchen. My mother is alive yet. She is at Grandfather's. I heard Betsey say that too. You are a wicked, cruel man, and I hate you. I will not have you for a father any more. I will go away and stay with my mother. She is good. You are bad! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! And I hate her!"—pointing toward the new wife, who sat in horrified condemnation, with two fiery spots upon her outraged cheeks.
"Jemima!" thundered her father in his angriest tone.
But the little girl turned upon him furiously.