"Your stepmother has been ill again, and the doctor says she mustn't be left alone, and must have someone to help her. She's terrible nervous when your father's away to the fishing, so you've got to be fetched home." Mrs. Barnes spoke resentfully. Her daughter, Mona's mother, had died when Mona was a sturdy little maiden of ten, and for eighteen months Mona had run wild. Her father could not bear to part with her, nor would he have anyone to live with them. So Mona had been his housekeeper, or rather, the house had kept itself, for Mona had taken no care of it, nor of her father's comforts, nor of her own clothes, or his. She just let everything go, and had a gloriously lazy, happy time, with no one to restrain her, or make her do anything she did not want to do. She was too young, of course, to be put in such a position; but she did not even do what she might have done, and no one was surprised, and no one blamed her father--no one, at least, but Mrs. Barnes--when at the end of eighteen months he married pretty, gentle Lucy Garland, one of the housemaids at the Squire's. Mrs. Barnes, though, resented very strongly anyone being put in her dead daughter's place, with control over her daughter's child, and she had written angrily enough to Peter, demanding that Mona should be given up to her. And though he doubted the wisdom of it, to please and pacify her, Peter Carne had let her have the child. "Not for good," he said, "for I can't part with her altogether, but for a long visit." "If she puts Mona against Lucy, it'll be a bad job," he thought anxiously, "and mischief may be done that it'll take more than I know to undo." However, Mona felt none of the dislike of her stepmother that her grandmother felt. In fact, she was too happy-go-lucky and fond of change to feel very strongly about anything. She had got her father's home and all his affairs into such a muddle she was not sorry to go right away and leave it all. She was tired of even the little housework she did. She hated having to get up and light the fire, and, on the whole, she was very glad for someone else to step in and take it all off her shoulders. And as she had left her home before her stepmother came to it, she had not experienced what it was to have someone in authority over her. So Mona felt no real grievance against her stepmother, and, with all her faults, she was too healthy-minded to invent one. Her grandmother's not too kind remarks about her had fallen on indifferent ears, and, fortunately, had had no effect except to make Mona feel a sort of mild scorn for anyone so constantly ailing as Lucy Carne was.