Posey laid down the ball of carpet rags she had been winding and faced Mrs. Hagood, her slim figure very erect and a spot of red burning on each cheek. “You are a wicked woman, and a liar,” she cried shrilly, all the gathered disappointment and bitterness of months breaking out in a sudden burst of fiery passion. “You promised Mr. Mott, at the Refuge, that I should go to school; I heard you, and I shall write and tell him just what you have done.” “You will, will you?” scoffed Mrs. Hagood. “And who do you suppose will believe what you say, a deceiving medium’s child?” “I wasn’t her child, as you know well enough,” retorted Posey. “And whatever she was, she was better than you. She sent me to school, and didn’t make me work every enduring minute of the time. And my own mother was the most beautiful lady that ever lived; you are no more like her than you are like an angel. You are a bad, cruel woman, that’s what you are.” Posey had been so repressed with Mrs. Hagood that when her long smoldering resentment leaped into wrathful words the latter stood for a moment in bewildered astonishment. It was only for a moment, however, a color so deep it was fairly purple mottled her face; glancing around her eye rested on a small wooden rod she had taken from a curtain, and seizing this she turned on Posey, “You vile little beggar. I’ll teach you to talk that way to me!” With the first blow that fell Posey sprang forward and fastened her sharp white teeth in Mrs. Hagood’s hand. But the latter’s greater strength shook her off before anything more than a deep mark had been made, the pain of which, as well as the insult of it only adding to the storm of blows the hand rained. “There,” she exclaimed, as breathless with anger, excitement, and exertion, she gave Posey a final violent shake, and whirled her into her little bedroom with such force that she fell in a heap on the floor, “you’ll stay in here till to-morrow morning, and we’ll see then if you will talk in any such way, and fly at me like a wildcat. If you do you’ll get something that you’ll remember as long as you live, I can tell you.” And with this parting threat she shut the door with a bang. Left alone, throbbing with a rage of resentful passion, into which the physical pain entered as a part, Posey threw herself on the bed and buried her head in the clothes with the old cry, “Mamma, my mamma,” and then as a gust of stormy sobs shook her frame. “Why can’t I die, too, oh, why can’t I?”