The children all loved Amy for doing this, and wondered how it was they had not thought of little Lucy before; so now, many of them insisted on pouring some blackberries into Lucy’s basket, and giving part of Amy’s back to her. In this way Lucy and Amy’s stores were soon the largest of the whole, and the children separated in good humour with each other and everything.
As Amy and Kitty entered the garden, the first thing that caught Amy’s eye was her little baby sister sitting on her little chair under the window. On each side of the door grew a little rose tree, one of which belonged to Amy and one to Kitty. Amy’s was a red rose. The flowers were nearly all gone, but one had lingered behind the rest. Amy had watched it with especial care: she had plucked off all the dead flowers around it, and this morning she had been thinking it would just be in beautiful bloom by Sunday, that she might take it to school as a present for Mrs. Mordaunt. And now there sat the baby with that very bud in her lap quietly picking it to pieces, and holding up the scattered leaves in Amy’s face, she lisped, “Pretty, pretty!” Amy was too angry and too vexed to think, and it was of no use to scold the baby, so she snatched the rose from the baby’s hands, and said, “You good-for-nothing, naughty little thing;” and then she burst into tears. The baby began to cry too, and their mother came out to know what was the matter. “O mother, how could you?” sobbed Amy passionately. “Why did you let baby sit close to my rose-bush—my beautiful rose? I had been saving it all the week for Mrs. Mordaunt—and it was my last.”
Mrs. Harrison tried to comfort Amy; and Kitty offered her the best flower in her garden. They both felt very sorry for her. But Amy was not to be comforted, and so they gave up trying. Poor Amy’s evening was quite spoilt,—not so much, I think, by the loss of her rose as by the loss of her temper.
CHAPTER VI.
THE TRUTH SETTING FREE.
THE next day she awoke, out of spirits and out of temper. She did not see why she should always work, while Kitty was enjoying herself in bed. She forgot the joy of serving others, and thought it very hard others should not try to serve her. We are apt to be very strict about other people’s duties when we forget our own. So Amy lay in bed until the last moment, and then hurried on her clothes, and hurried over her work, and what was worse, hurried over her prayers, and thus went out to meet the day’s temptations unarmed.
It never improves the temper to be hurried; and Amy was still further tried this morning by her father, who was in haste to be off to his work, and wondered why she was so slow.
“It’s of no use,” grumbled Amy to herself, “to try to do right and please everybody. The more one does, the more people expect. Nobody thinks of scolding Kitty for being slow.”