"Ah, Elizabeth, I am glad you have arrived," she said. "I have just left your mother; she has been crying for you, and--and--she is very ill indeed." "Oh, I know that, Sister Mary; let me go upstairs now." Bet pushed past the girl almost rudely, and ascended the dark rickety stairs with a light step. Her head was held very far back, and in her eyes there was a curious mixture of defiance, softness and despair. Two little boys, with the same reddish-brown hair as hers, were playing noisily on the fourth landing. They made a rush at Bet when they saw her, climbed up her like little cats, and half strangled her with their thin half-naked arms. "Bet, Bet, I say, mother's awful bad. Bet, speak to Nat; he stole my marble, he did. Fie on you, Cap'n; you shouldn't have done it." "I like that!" shouted the ragged boy addressed as "Cap'n." "You took it from me first, you know you did, Gen'ral." "If mother's bad, you shouldn't make a noise," said Bet, flinging the two little boys away, with no particular gentleness. "There, of course I'll kiss you, Gen'ral--poor little lad. Go down now and play on the next landing, and keep quiet for the next ten minutes if it's in you." "Bet," whispered the youngest boy, who was known as "Cap'n," "shall I tell yer what mother did this morning?" "No, no; I don't want to hear--go downstairs and keep quiet, _do._" "Oh, yer'll be in such a steaming rage! She burnt yer book, yer _Jane Eyre_ as yer wor reading--lor, it were fine--the bit as you read to the Gen'ral and me, but she said as it wor a hell-fire book, and she burnt it--I seed her, and so did the Gen'ral--she pushed it between the bars with the poker. She got up in her night-things to do it, and then she got back to bed again, and she panted for nearly an hour after--didn't she, Gen'ral?" "Yes--yes--come along, come along. Look at Bet! she's going to strike some 'un--look at her; didn't we say as she'd be in a steaming rage. Come, Cap'n." The little boys scuttled downstairs, shouting and tumbling over one another in their flight. Bet stood perfectly still on the landing. The boys were right when they said she would be in a rage; her heart beat heavily, her face was white, and for an instant she pressed her forehead against the door of her mother's room and clenched her teeth. The book burnt! the poor book which had given her pleasure, and which she had saved up her pence to buy--the book which had drawn her out of herself, and made her forget her wretched surroundings, committed to the flames--ignominiously destroyed, and called bad names, too. How dared her mother do it? how dared she? The girls were right when they said she was tied to apron-strings--she was, she was! But she would bear it no longer. She would show her mother that she would submit to no leading--that she, Elizabeth Granger, the handsomest newspaper girl in Liverpool, was a woman, and her own mistress.