“Friend, indeed! What should make her take up with you—a plain girl like you, with no sort of attraction that any living being ever yet discovered? What should make her pet you, and fondle you, and dress you up if she hadn’t had in her mind the getting of a husband? There I now you know. That’s the long and short of it. She used you for her own purposes, and I say she is a low-down sort of hussy, and she won’t get me a-humouring of her!”
“Very well, Hannah. I don’t love her. I would have loved her had she not been father’s wife.”
“There’s no use talking about what you would do had certain things not happened; it’s what you will do now that certain things have happened. That’s what you’ve got to face, Dumps.”
“Am I to sit up in my room all day and never speak to father and—and his wife?”
“Oh, I know you!” said Hannah. “You’ll come down after a day or two and make yourself quite agreeable, and it’ll be ‘mother’ you’ll be calling her before the week’s out I know you—she’ll come round the likes of you pretty fine!”
But this last straw was too much. I left Hannah. I went unsteadily—yes, unsteadily—towards the door. I rushed upstairs, entered my own room, bolted myself in. I took my mother’s miniature in my hands. I opened the case and pressed the miniature to my heart, flung myself on the bed face downwards, and sobbed and sobbed. No broken-hearted child in all the world could have sobbed more for her own mother than I did then.