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But fine weather brought worse things than disappointment. It brought the long daily walks, and picnics, sometimes, when an aunt who was doing her duty by roly-poly nephews and a taciturn niece, thought it time for a treat. And then would come the scenes, delays, excuses, direct petition, and the final ‘temper,’ the white-hot rebellion that exhausted alike the bored nursemaid and bewildered aunt, and did indeed at first accomplish Laura’s object of being left behind. For, locked in the night-nursery to consider its sins, the ha’porth of misery, perched on its high chair like a tousled bird, would be fiercely rejoicing that once more it had staved off catastrophe—a mother arriving and departing again while her little girl was out for a walk.

But such a reason could not be explained to Aunt Adela, Who Smelt of Lanoline.

Laura hated Aunt Adela as she hated every one in those first interminable months in that alien household. Her all-satisfying intimacy with her mother had created in her a habit of indifference to the rest of even her own tiny world, and now, stranded among semi-strangers, she was at first so shy and so fastidious that, in the happiest circumstances, it would have taken time before she learned how to make or receive advances. But it is not easy to be polite with a hidden trouble gnawing, like a fox, at one’s vitals: and Laura did not try over hard. For Laura, fighting for her memories like a dog for its bones, with a more insidious foe than honest Aunt Adela, had lost already much of her treasure, dropping one by one as she struggled the pretty ways her mother had taught her, and growing, in her bitter loneliness, into a very wild apple of a small girl, over whom aunt and household and visitors shook their heads in despair.