“On fine Sundays O’Nally took me in the jaunting car, with himself and his wife, to church, and we heard Mr. Clement preach, and after the service I sometimes got a pat on the head, and a smile and kind word from the vicar. He was a widower without children, so I never was asked to his house. “Once a week the county practitioner rode out to the manor house to see after my health, that he might report to my father. Also, if no one from Weirdwaste happened to go to church on a Sunday, the vicar would ride out to the manor in the course of the week to inquire the cause of absence, and report to my father. “These occasional drives to church on Sundays, and semi-occasional visits from the vicar and the doctor, were the only variations in the monotony of my days, which were ordinarily passed in this way. “At seven o’clock in the morning, Nurse Burns would wake me up, give me a bath, and dress me in such a plain black frock! I had not even the pleasure of pretty clothes! And then she would give me my breakfast—such a plain breakfast of oatmeal and milk! I had never the indulgence of cakes or sugar plums, which was all very well for me, no doubt, but which was also very dull. Then came Miss Murray with the school books, and I would sit alone with her in the schoolroom, trying to study my first reader, while she sat reading or sewing, but scarcely ever speaking. “Then came the noon dinner of boiled mutton and potatoes. “And after that more school for an hour or two. “Then a walk on the sands, all around the point, if the tide was low; or, if the tide were high and the cape covered with water, we took a walk on the waste behind the manor house. “Sometimes I got a letter from my father, inclosed in one to the steward or to my governess.” CHAPTER XXIV A NEW MOTHER “One day I received a terrible shock. Child as I was, I felt it severely. It came so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that it fell like a thunderbolt upon me. “It was a morning in November when the carrier’s cart stopped at the manor house, and left a box directed to me, in the care of the steward. “When it was opened, it revealed a beautiful cake wrapped in many folds of silver paper. I was delighted, for I had not tasted cake for months. “But, oh! I did not taste it even then! The letter that lay on the top of the cake poisoned it. “That letter told me that my father had married and was spending his honeymoon in Paris. I had a stepmother! A being whom, I knew not how, or why, unless perhaps from the idle talk of servants, I had learned to hate as an evil and to dread as an enemy—though it never occurred to me that my father would give me one. And yet he had married within five months after my mother’s death. “I could not touch the poisoned cake! I know not what became of it.