Her new home--though "new" it no longer was to her, for it was now nearly four years since Farmer Mac, as we will call him, had brought her back with him from the desolate house where she had been so happy and cared for since her birth--this new home was a large rambling old farm-house. A busy beehive of a place, cheerful enough to its owners and their sons, who were strong and active and hard-working from morning to night, but to Merran a sort of incessant worry and bustle, of loud voices and hurrying steps and noisy laughter, or noisier scolding, not really as cross or angry as it sounded, but startling to her sensitive nerves and childish timidity. So she grew duller and slower and thinner and whiter, till at last those about her began to say she was in a "dwine," and "maybe all for the best if so it were, for--" and at this, voices were lowered--"it's plain to see the child's 'not all there.'" And her aunt, as she had been told to call the farmer's wife, a strong hearty woman, who had done and meant to do her best for the little maiden, grew tired of worrying about her, and trying to feed her up and turn her into the sort of girl a daughter of her own would have been. Merran did her no credit, and the mixture of shame and pity Dame Mac came to feel about her gradually grew into a kind of constant, half-repressed irritation. She made her work, which of course was right, the child would have pined and "dwined" still more had she been left alone to do nothing but creep about and dream in corners, but the worst of it was that what Merran did, or tried to do, seldom pleased her aunt. As often as not, after telling her to sweep or dust, the dame would snatch the cloths or brush out of her hand, crying that she'd rather do it all herself than see the girl's feckless ways of going about the work. This had happened the day that this story begins. Merran had had an even worse scolding than usual, and though she set her face hard and said not a word in self-defence, when she got upstairs to the hiding-place where first we see her, she let her tears burst out and sobbed and wept to her heart's content.