"My name is not Jemima!" she screamed. "I will not let you call me so. My name is Dawn. My mother called me Dawn. I will not answer when you call me Jemima."
"Jemima, you may go to your room!" commanded the father, standing up, white to the lips, to face a will no whit less adamant than his own.
"I will not go until you call me Dawn," she answered, her face turning white and stern, with sudden singular likeness to her father on its soft round outlines.
She stood her ground until carried struggling upstairs and locked into her own room.
Gradually she had cried her fury out, and succumbed to the inevitable, creeping back as seldom as possible into the life of the house, and spending the time with her own brooding thoughts and sad plays, far in the depths of the box-boarded garden, or shut into the quiet of her own room.
To the new mother she never spoke unless she had to, and never called her Mother, though there were many struggles to compel her to do so. She never came when they called her Jemima, nor obeyed a command prefaced by that name, though she endured in consequence many a whipping and many a day in bed, fed on bread and water.
"What is the meaning of this strange whim?" demanded the new wife, with set lips. Her position was none too easy, nor her disposition markedly that of a saint.
"A bit of her mother's sentimentality," explained the chagrined father. "She objected to calling the child for my grandmother, Jemima. She wanted it named for her own mother, and said Jemima was harsh and ugly, until one day her old minister, who was fully as sentimental as she, if he was an old man, told her that Jemima meant 'Dawn of the Morning.' After that she made no further protest. But I had no idea she had carried her foolishness to this extent, nor taught the child such notions about her honest and honorable name."
"It won't take long to get them out of her head," prophesied the new-comer, with the sparkle of combat in her eye. Yet it was now nearly three years since the little girl had seen or heard from her mother, and she still refused to answer to the name of Jemima. The step-mother had fallen into the habit of saying "you" when she wanted anything done.
Of the events which preceded her father's summons this morning, Dawn knew nothing.