atched him.

"How queer and quiet it is," she said. "It sounds as if there were no
one in the bungalow but me and the snake."

Almost the next minute she heard footsteps in the compound, and then on
the veranda. They were men's footsteps, and the men entered the
bungalow and talked in low voices. No one went to meet or speak to
them and they seemed to open doors and look into rooms. "What
desolation!" she heard one voice say. "That pretty, pretty woman! I
suppose the child, too. I heard there was a child, though no one ever
saw her."

Mary was standing in the middle of the nursery when they opened the
door a few minutes later. She looked an ugly, cross little thing and
was frowning because she was beginning to be hungry and feel
disgracefully neglected. The first man who came in was a large officer
she had once seen talking to her father. He looked tired and troubled,
but when he saw her he was so startled that he almost jumped back.

"Barney!" he cried out. "There is a child here! A child alone! In a
place like this! Mercy on us, who is she!"

"I am Mary Lennox," the little girl said, drawing herself up stiffly.
She thought the man was very rude to call her father's bungalow "A
place like this!" "I fell asleep when everyone had the cholera and I
have only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?"

"It is the child no one ever saw!" exclaimed the man, turning to his
companions. "She has actually been forgotten!"

"Why was I forgotten?" Mary said, stamping her foot. "Why does nobody
come?"

The young man whose name was Barney looked at her very sadly. Mary
even thought she saw him wink his eyes as if to wink tears away.

"Poor little kid!" he said. "There is nobody left to come."

It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found out that she had
neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried
away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died
also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of
them even remembering that there was a Missie Sahib. That was why the
place was so quiet. It was true that there was no one in the bungalow
but herself and the little rustling snake.

CHAPTER II

MISTRESS MARY QUITE CONTRARY

Mary had liked to look at her mother from a distance and she had
thought her very pretty, but as she knew very little of her she could
scarcely have been expected to love her or to miss her very much when
sh