The little girl stood still for a full minute; during this time she was collecting her faculties, and that brain, which Polly was pleased to call so small, was revolving some practical schemes.
“Ef I could only lay my hand on a match, now,” she thought.
She suddenly remembered that in her mother’s cottage the match-box was generally placed behind a certain brick near the fireplace; it was a handy spot, both safe and dry, and Maggie, since her earliest days, had known that if there was such a luxury as a box of matches in the house, it would be found in this corner. She wondered if the wife of Micah Jones could also have adopted so excellent a practice. She stepped across the little hut, felt with her hands right and left, poked about all round the open fireplace, and at last, joy of joys, not only discovered a box with a few matches in it, but an end of candle besides.
In a moment she had struck a match, had applied it to the candle, and then, holding the flickering light high, looked around the little hut.
A girl, crouched up against the wall on some straw, was gazing at her with wide-open terrified eyes; the girl was perfectly still, not a muscle in her body moved, only her big frightened eyes gazed fixedly at Maggie. She wore no hat on her head; her long yellow hair lay in confusion over her shoulders; her feet were shoeless, and one arm was laid with a certain air of protection on a wee white bundle on the straw by her side.
“Who are you?” said Flower, at last. “Are you a ghost, or are you the daughter of the dreadful woman who lives in this hut? See! I had a long sleep. She put me to sleep, I know she did; and while I was asleep she stole my purse and rings, and my hat and shoes. But that’s nothing, that’s nothing at all. While I was asleep, baby here died. I know she’s quite dead, she has not stirred nor moved for hours, at least it seems like hours. What are you staring at me in that rude way for, girl? I’m quite sure the baby, Polly’s little sister, is dead.”
Nobody could speak in a more utterly apathetic way than Flower. Her voice neither rose nor fell. She poured out her dreary words in a wailing monotone.
“I know that it’s my fault,” she added; “Polly’s little sister has died because of me.”
She still held her hand over the white bundle.
“I’m terrified, but not of you,” she added; “you may be a ghost, stealing in here in the dark; or you may be the daughter of that dreadful woman. But whoever you are, it’s all alike to me. I got into one of my passions. I promised my mother when she died that I’d never get into another, but I did, I got into one to-day. I was angry with Polly Maybright; I stole her little sister away, and now she’s dead. I am so terrified at what I have done that I never can be afraid of anything else. You need not stare so at me, girl; whoever you are I’m not afraid of you.”