ere home is!" said Basil, with seven-year-old
scorn. "It's England, of course. Our grandmama lives there and our
sister Mabel was sent to her last year. You are not going to your
grandmama. You have none. You are going to your uncle. His name is
Mr. Archibald Craven."

"I don't know anything about him," snapped Mary.

"I know you don't," Basil answered. "You don't know anything. Girls
never do. I heard father and mother talking about him. He lives in a
great, big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes near him.
He's so cross he won't let them, and they wouldn't come if he would let
them. He's a hunchback, and he's horrid." "I don't believe you," said
Mary; and she turned her back and stuck her fingers in her ears,
because she would not listen any more.

But she thought over it a great deal afterward; and when Mrs. Crawford
told her that night that she was going to sail away to England in a few
days and go to her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, who lived at
Misselthwaite Manor, she looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested
that they did not know what to think about her. They tried to be kind
to her, but she only turned her face away when Mrs. Crawford attempted
to kiss her, and held herself stiffly when Mr. Crawford patted her
shoulder.

"She is such a plain child," Mrs. Crawford said pityingly, afterward.
"And her mother was such a pretty creature. She had a very pretty
manner, too, and Mary has the most unattractive ways I ever saw in a
child. The children call her 'Mistress Mary Quite Contrary,' and
though it's naughty of them, one can't help understanding it."

"Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty
manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty
ways too. It is very sad, now the poor beautiful thing is gone, to
remember that many people never even knew that she had a child at all."

"I believe she scarcely ever looked at her," sighed Mrs. Crawford.
"When her Ayah was dead there was no one to give a thought to the
little thing. Think of the servants running away and leaving her all
alone in that deserted bungalow. Colonel McGrew said he nearly jumped
out of his skin when he opened the door and found her standing by
herself in the middle of the room."

Mary made the long voyage to England under the care of an officer's
wife, who was taking her children to leave them in a boarding-school.
She was very much absorbed in her own little boy