“Yes! oh yes!” said Maggie; “and I will never do it again.”
Miss Johnson left her, and Maggie flew back to bend over her paper and continue her writing:
“Darling, you must not let him come here. He threatens to come, but you must keep him away. All will be up with me if he is seen at the school. I beseech of you have a little mercy on me. For the sake of my own father, keep him—do keep him—from Aylmer House.—Your distracted daughter,
“Maggie Howland.”
This letter was addressed to Mrs. Martin (spelt this time with an “i”), Laburnum Villa, Clapham. Maggie stamped it, and, flying downstairs, popped it into the box which held the letters.
CHAPTER XX.
THE VILLA.
Laburnum Villa, in the suburb of Clapham, was, in the new Mrs. Martin’s eyes, quite a delightful place. She had never appreciated her first husband, Professor Howland, but she thoroughly appreciated Bo-peep, and after her own fashion was fond of him. He gave her comforts. She had lived so long without comforts that she appreciated these good things of life to the full. She had never really been much attached to Maggie, who was too like her own father and too unlike herself to allow of the existence of any sympathy between them. Maggie, even before Mrs. Howland met Martin the Shepherd’s Bush grocer, had been more or less a thorn in the flesh to her mother.