It was a very high house, with several flights of stairs, and two of these inquisitors would take me between them, and tear me at a running pace down the whole length of stairs, my heels lifted from the ground, and only the tips of my toes bruised against each stair. At night I would go to bed aching with pain and terror, and sob myself to sleep, yearning for the faces and sights and sounds that had passed out of my life. Ah, what tears I shed in that strange home! To have cried in childhood as I cried then, incessantly and for months, sometimes for the greater part of the day under a bed, that none of these mocking young creatures might see me and laugh at me; to have stood so intolerably alone among so many, without a hand to dry my eyes, a kiss to comfort me, a soft breast against which I could rest my tired little head and sob out my tale of sorrow,--this is to start permanently maimed for the battle of life. What compensation can the years bring us for such injustice? Could any possible future paradise make up to us for infancy in hell? There are faces that stand out upon memory with some kindness in them for a pitiable little outcast. Chiefly, of course, my stepfather, who was as serviceably good to me as a man's unreasoning terror of a woman's temper permitted him to be. He saved me from many a cruel beating, and when I seemed more than usually miserable, he would, with an air of secrecy and guilt that charmed me, himself help to fasten on my hat and little coat, and carry me out upon his business calls. They used to represent me to him as a dangerous small devil, describing my outbursts of fury but suppressing the provocation; and I once heard him exclaim angrily--"I am sick of these complaints of Angela's temper. When she is with me she is better behaved and gentler than any of them. You can twist an angel into a devil if you worry and ill-use it." I know now that he suffered for his partisanship of me, and that he forsook my cause at last from sheer weariness of spirit and flesh. He thought it better for his own peace to leave me to the mercies of my mother, concluding probably that I should not be worse off.