She said this word aloud. She had been angry; she had been excited; she had gone through what seemed to her every sort of emotion during the last few hours, and now things had come to this.
“If only Father were at home,” thought the Squire’s little girl, and then she sank down on an ottoman in the middle of the room and burst into tears.
Her heart was very sore. She had not been a good girl, but, oh! she had enjoyed herself.
“Why is it so nice to be naughty, and why is it that I can’t feel sorry?” she said to herself.
She nursed with all her might and main hot anger against her governess, and for a long time succeeded. But the days were short, and by-and-by the light faded away at the windows, and there was only the firelight in the room. The fire was a good one; it had a guard in front of it. Phyllis went and poked it up; it blazed, and soon cheerful flashes of light fell all over the room. There was no lamp nor any other way of making a light. Phyllis crouched down near the fire and tried hard to think.
“I wonder when I’ll begin to feel sorry,” she said to herself. “In all the story-books when the children are naughty they are desperately, madly sorry afterwards, but I’m not one bit sorry—at least not yet.”
She nestled down comfortably on the hearthrug. Presently she took a pillow from one of the sofas and put it under her head, and then blinking into the fire and shutting and opening her eyes, she dropped off to sleep. When she awoke she found that the fire was nearly out; she was stiff and cold, too, from lying on the rug. She started up, and could not make out where she was.
Presently, however, memory came back to her. How cruel of Miss Fleet to leave her like this! How wrong!—how more than wrong!
“If Father were at home I would tell him he was to send Miss Fleet away,” said the little girl to herself. “She is a horrid, horrid woman; she makes me downright miserable. Oh, how dark it is! and there is no more coal in the coal-hod, and the fire will soon be out.”
She stood up and shook herself, and then she took the poker and poked what fire was left into as good a blaze as she could manage; but it soon died away for want of new fuel, and the little girl, who was now very desolate and in very low spirits and very hungry, began thoroughly to feel her punishment.