“I sent Ned to his work and Lally into the house,” proceeded Arthur, “but it is of no use _my_ speaking. Five minutes afterwards she was on Alick’s shoulder, and he was carrying the salt for her in a bag tied round his neck.” “Poor Heather, she will find out her mistake some day,” sighed Mrs. Ormson. “But it is not Heather alone,” went on Mr. Dudley. “Everybody is the same; everybody makes a perfect idol of Lally, while Leonard mopes about alone. Where could you find a better child than he is? He will walk with me from here to the mill and never say a word, while Lally’s tongue never ceases from morning till night. Sometimes I think she is in fifty places at once, for wherever I go I hear her.” “It is very sad,” observed Mrs. Ormson, “the child will be perfectly ruined.” And there can be no doubt but that the lady believed she was speaking the literal truth. She did, indeed, consider Lally an utter mistake—her very existence an oversight on the part of Providence. “A nice, quiet, pretty little girl, who would sit still in the nursery, with her doll and her picturebook,” was Mrs. Ormson’s idea of the correct style of thing in the scheme of creation; but a child with red hair, with a face covered with freckles, exactly like a turkey’s egg, with reddish-brown eyes, with legs that, in the course of the longest summer-day, never grew weary of carrying her from parlour to kitchen, from garden to Hollow, from Hollow to meadow; a child who had no “pretty ways,” according to Mrs. Ormson’s reading of juvenile attractiveness; who would not learn anything, nor keep her frocks clean; clearly the Almighty had not consulted Mrs. Ormson before He sent Lally Dudley into the world, or such a mistake never would have been committed, not even to please Heather, to whom the little girl was sun, moon, stars, and planets. And because her heart was bound up in the child, Heather could not bear that another should come in her place, and attract Lally towards her as Bessie had done. With the “other children,” as Mrs. Dudley still continued to call her husband’s brothers and sisters, it did not matter; with the servants also it was of no consequence, for they were all of the one household, all after a fashion members of one family; but here was a stranger—daughter to a woman whom Heather did not much like—a girl whom in her inmost heart Heather distrusted—making friendly overtures to Lally, which Lally accepted with even more than her ordinary readiness, with an increase of her wonted gracious affability. Was what Bessie said true—was Lally everybody’s Joe? Did she not care for her mother so very, very much, after all? For the first time in her married life there came swelling up in Heather’s heart a spirit of antagonism—a desire to quarrel; but, before she reached the house, she conquered herself and said— “Your mamma declares I spoil Lally. I wonder what she will think about you.”