“No, I bean’t,” replied Maggie, shortly.
“Eh, I suppose you got your fill of good things out with the young ladies and gentlemen. It ain’t your poor mother’s way to have a bit of luck like that, and you never thought, I suppose, of putting a slice or two of plum cake, or maybe the half of a chicken, in your pocket, as a bit of a relish for your mother’s supper. No, no, that ain’t your way, Mag; you’re all for self, and that I will say.”
“No, I ain’t mother. You has no call to talk so. How could I hide away chicken and plum cake, under Miss Polly’s nose, so to speak. I was setting nigh to Miss Polly, mother, jest about the very middle of the feast. I had a place of honor close up to Miss Polly, mother.”
“Eh, to be sure!” exclaimed Mrs. Ricketts.
She stopped dishing up the potatoes, wiped her brow, and turned to look at her daughter, with a slow expression of admiration in her gaze.
“Eh,” she continued, “you has a way about you, Mag, with all your contrariness. Miss Polly Maybright thinks a sight on you, Mag; seems to me as if maybe she’d adopt you, and turn you into a real lady. My word, I have read of such things in story-books.”
“You had better go on dishing up your supper, mother and not be talking nonsense like that. Miss Polly is a very good young lady, but she hasn’t no thought of folly of that sort. Eh, dear me,” continued Maggie, yawning prodigiously “I’m a bit tired, and no mistake.”
“That’s always the way,” responded Mrs. Ricketts. “Tired and not a word to say after your pleasuring; no talking about what happened, and what Miss Helen wore, and if Miss Firefly has got on her winter worsted stockings yet, and not a mention of them foreigners as we’re all dying to hear of, and not a word of what victuals you ate, nor nothing. You’re a selfish girl, Maggie Ricketts, and that I will say, though I am your mother.”
“I’m sleepy,” responded Maggie, who seemed by no means put out by this tirade on the part of her mother. “I’ll go up to bed if you don’t mind, mother. No, I said afore as I wasn’t hungry.”
She left the room, crept up the step-ladder to the loft, where the family slept, and opening the tiny dormer window, put her elbows on the sill and gazed out on the gathering gloom which was settling on the moor.