"Rosy," said her mother, "you are talking so sillily that if Fixie even talked like that I should be quite surprised. I won't answer you. I will not say any more about Beata—you know what I wish, and what is right, and so I will leave it to you. And I will give you a kiss, my little girl, to show you that I want to trust you to try to do right about this."
She was stooping to kiss her, when Rosy stopped her.
"Thank you, mother," she said. "But I don't think I can take the kiss like that—I don't want to like the little girl."
"Rosy!" exclaimed her mother, almost in despair. Then another thought struck her. She bent down again and kissed the child. "I give you the kiss, Rosy," she said, "hoping it will at least make you wish to please me."
"Oh," said Rosy, "I do want to please you, mother, about everything except that."
But her mother thought it best to take no further notice, only in her own heart she said to herself, "Was there ever such a child?"
In spite of all she had said Rosy felt, what she would not have owned for the world, a good deal of curiosity about the little girl who was to come to live with them. And now and then, in her cross and unhappy moods, a sort of strange confused hope would creep over her that Beata's coming would bring her a kind of good luck.
"Everybody says she's so good, and everybody loves her," thought Rosy, "p'raps I'll find out how she does it."
And the days passed on, on the whole, after the storm I have told you about, rather more peaceably than before, till one evening when Rosy was saying good-night her mother said to her quietly,
"Rosy, I had a letter this morning from Beata's uncle; he is bringing her to-morrow. She will be here about four o'clock in the afternoon."