there had long been a secret pang of mortified pride--how born I do not
know--at seeing Aunt Bridget take the place of my mother, and now,
choking with vexation but without saying a word, I swept off the heads
of all the flowers in the bed, and with my arms full of them--ten times
more than I wanted--I sailed back to my mother's room.

Inside two minutes there was a fearful tumult. I thought I was doomed to
punishment when I heard the big bunch of keys, which Aunt Bridget kept
suspended from her waist, come jingling up the stairs, but it was my
poor mother who paid the penalty.

"Isabel," cried Aunt Bridget, "I hope you are satisfied with your child
at last."

"What has Mary been doing now, dear?" said my mother.

"Don't ask me what she has been doing. You know quite well, or if you
don't you ought to."

My mother glanced at the flowers and she seemed to understand what had
happened, for her face fell and she said submissively,

"Mary has done wrong, but I am sure she is sorry and will never do it
again."

"Sorry, indeed!" cried my Aunt. "Not she sorry. And she'll do it again
at the very next opportunity. The vixen! The little wilful, underhand
vixen! But what wonder if children go wrong when their own mothers
neglect to correct them."

"I daresay you are quite right, dear Bridget--you are always right,"
said my mother in a low, grave voice. "But then I'm not very well, and
Mary is all I have, you know."

My mother was in tears by this time, but Aunt Bridget was not content
with her triumph. Sweeping downstairs she carried her complaint to my
father, who ordered that I was to be taken out of my mother's charge on
the ground that she was incapable of attending to my upbringing--a task
which, being assigned to my Aunt Bridget, provided that I should
henceforward live on the ground floor and eat oaten cake and barley
bonnag and sleep alone in the cold room over the hall while Betsy Beauty
ate wheaten bread and apple tart and slept with her mother in the room
over the kitchen in which they always kept a fire.

FIFTH CHAPTER

The altered arrangements were a cause of grief to my mother, but I am
bound to confess that for me they had certain compensations. One of them
was the greater ease with which I could slip out to Tommy the Mate, who
had been a sailor before he was a gardener, and was still a fine old
salt, with grizzled beard and shaggy eyebrows, and a merry twinkle in
what he called his "starboar