?" interrupted Gypsy, demurely. "No, not at all; I ought
to have known better."

Mrs. Breynton did not offer to help Gypsy in the task which bade fair to
be no easy one, of putting her room in order; but, with a few encouraging
words, she went down stairs and left her. It would have been far easier
for her to have gone to work and done the thing herself, than to see
Gypsy's face so clouded and discouraged. But she knew it would be the ruin
of Gypsy. Her only chance of overcoming her natural thoughtlessness, and
acquiring the habits of a lady, lay in the persistent doing over and over
again, by her own unaided patience, these very things that came so hard to
her. Gypsy understood this perfectly, and had the good sense to think her
mother was just right about it. It was not want of training, that gave
Gypsy her careless fashion of looking after things. Mrs. Breynton was a
wise, as well as a loving mother, and had done everything in the way of
punishment, reproof, warning, persuasion, and argument, that mothers can
do for the faults of children. Nor was it for want of a good example, Mrs.
Breynton was the very pink of neatness. It was a natural _kink_ in Gypsy,
that was as hard to get out as a knot in an apple-tree, and which depended
entirely on the child's own will for its eradication. This disorder in her
room and about her toilet was only one development of it, and by no means
a fixed or continued one. Gypsy could be, and half the time she was, as
orderly and lady-like as anybody. She did everything by fits and starts.
As Tom said, she was "always on the jump." If her dress didn't happen to
be torn and her room dusty, why, she had a turn of forgetting everything.
If she didn't forget, she was always getting hurt. If it wasn't that, she
lost her temper every five minutes. Or else she was making terrible
blunders, and hurting people's feelings; something was always the matter;
and some one was always on the _qui vive_, wondering what Gypsy was going
to do next.

Yet, in spite of it all, the person who did not love Gypsy Breynton
(provided he knew her) was not to be found in Yorkbury. Whether there was
any reason for this, you can judge for yourself as the story goes on.

After her mother had gone down, Gypsy went to work in earnest. She picked
up the beads, and put them back into the drawer which she left upon the
floor. Then she attacked Tom's image. It took her fully fifteen minutes
merely to get the thing to pieces,