“My dear Maud, I want you to show a little more consideration for that girl, who has been so devoted to Mildred all through her illness, and who has one very strong claim upon a mother’s heart—she is motherless.”
“I should think more of that claim, perhaps, if I knew who her mother was, and what she was to you,” said Maud Fausset.
“She was once near and dear to me. That is all I can tell you, Maud; and it ought to be enough.”
“It is more than enough,” his wife answered, trembling from head to foot, as she rose from her low chair, and walked away from the tent.
John Fausset looked after her irresolutely, went a few steps as if he meant to follow her, and then turned back to the tent, just as Mildred reappeared with Fay from another direction.
“We three will have tea together,” he exclaimed, with demonstrative cheerfulness. “Mamma is not very well, Mildred; she has gone back to the house. You shall pour out my tea.”
He seated himself in his wife’s chair, and Mildred sat on his knee, and put her arms round his neck, and adored him with all her power of adoration. Her household divinity had ever been the father. Perhaps her baby mind had found out the weakness of one parent and the strength of the other.
“Fay shall pour out the tea,” she said, with a sense of self-sacrifice. “It will be a treat for Fay.”
So Fay poured out the tea, and they all three sat in the tent, and were happy and merry—or seemingly so, perhaps, as concerned John Fausset—for one whole sunshiny hour, and for the first time Fay felt that she was not an outsider. Yet there lurked in her mind the memory of Mrs. Fausset’s anger, and that memory was bitter.
“What am I, that almost everybody should be rude to me?” she asked herself, as she sat alone that night after Mildred had gone to bed.