"You are a little fool; I say you shall not go!" and seizing him with hands, which we have said were not small ones, she shook him violently, and tears sprang to his eyes. "Oh," he wailed, "that my own mamma would come out of the ground, and help her little boy!" "Ah, but your mamma can't," she said spitefully; "she is deep enough down, thank Heaven!" "Hush, Anne," said Greville, suddenly appearing; "for Heaven's sake don't speak to the child in that manner." "He aggravates me so!" she replied, colouring; but more with anger than shame. "Oh, I do beg your pardon," said Derval one day, approaching in great tribulation, with his little hands pressed tremblingly together. "For what?" she asked sharply. "Please, I have broken your little china vase." "The vase that dear Aunt Rookleigh gave me! Oh you clumsy, obnoxious brat!" she exclaimed, while her eyes gleamed with anger; and as no one was near she punished him severely. "Mother, mother! mamma, mamma!" he cried, panting in her grasp, "oh, come back to your little boy, and save him from this terrible woman!" "Woman, indeed, you fractious imp; I'll teach you what your mamma, as you call her, never did--manners!" and she continued to beat him till he, and herself, were quite breathless, and then she flung him in a heap into a corner, to sob himself into sullen composure. In the lust of her cruelty she, by the pursuance of a system all her own, succeeded in actually weaning much of the regard of his father from him, and had him excluded from the dining-room when dessert--to which he had always been admitted--was on the table. Banishment from dessert seemed to Derval the acme of ill-usage; and, apart from the loss of the good things thereat, he never forgot the day he found himself thus banished. He had come into the room when he knew "papa was there," and rushed, breathless and laughing, up to his side. "My chair is not put in for me, papa!" he exclaimed; "why is this?" Seizing one, he began to drag it across the room towards the table, and to his father's side. Mrs. Hampton looked at him darkly (she was rather an Epicurean and did not like to be worried at meals), and Greville did so silently and uneasily, for he was not unmoved just then by the tender and pleading expression he read in the child's eyes. "I thought you said, my dear, that we were not to be disturbed in this way by that _gauche_ boy?" said Mrs. Hampton; "and you know the nervous condition to which he reduces me--just now, at least." "Leave the room, Derval; mamma does not want you to-day." "Oh, papa, you are not angry with me?" "Yes--no--but go; you are a bad boy to insist on coming to table." And so Derval never sat at that table again till the day came when he was to leave the house for ever. As he was peremptorily forbidden to go near the sea-shore, he frequently went to the churchyard of Finglecombe and spent hours there, weaving chaplets of daisies and wild flowers.