"No, thank you, Aunt Bretta. I'm all right. Please don't fuss."
"Kindly put on a fresh shirt," said Mrs. Devering, "and give this one to Cassowary to wash and mend, and you, Girlie, come to your room with me."
"I—I'm just like an Indian in the woods," said Cassowary with a last burst of contrition.
Mrs. Devering turned an almost frightened face to me as I trotted along the veranda beside them. Then her eyes went through an open door to a picture that hung on the wall in Cassowary's room. It was that of a favourite cousin of Mrs. Devering's, and I had often heard her tell the girl that she hoped she would grow up to be as good as this cousin.
"My child," she said, "good Indians restrain their passions. Sit down there by the window and I will read to you."
After a time she left her daughter, and for the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon we could see the girl sitting sewing slowly, often breaking her thread and stopping to rub her sticky needle on her clothes.
Once when I was near I heard her muttering something she seemed to be learning from a book,
"Calm and serene my frame,
Calm and serene my frame."
Well! she needed considerably more calmness and serenity before she would make the woman her mother was. However she was young, poor girl—I must not be too hard on her, but before the day was over, I was wishing most earnestly that she had been sent to bed and kept there until her temper had really left her excitable young body.