I do not know how long my martyrdom in the town house had endured before I resolved to make an end of it myself. Nor do I yet quite understand how the scene that led to an excess of misery so terminated began.

I had been more contented that day than usual. The nurse had let me sit by the nursery fire while she bathed and dressed the latest addition to our family circle, a baby boy with a pink wrinkled face. Compared with that gurgling morsel of humanity, I felt very wise and old indeed. After that the nursemaid came and took me on her knee, and while perched there she sang me a song. I slept in the next room, and was not often allowed into the nursery, or I am sure the nurse and nursemaid would have made life easier for me.

Then I wandered into the play-room, and here great doings were afoot. They were getting up a transformation scene. On the top of each[Pg 80] ladder a little girl sat, representing a fairy, and in the middle of the room a small child lay with a white cloth about her. When somebody clapped hands she sprang up, caught her skirts in either hand, and began to dance as she had seen the fairies in the pantomime.

They were all in high spirits that day, and let me look on without snubbing or laughing at me. Like all creatures unaccustomed to much mercy, this small favour filled me with joy, and I expanded upon a whiff of social equality.

Children resemble dogs in their dislike of intruders, and to these young people I daresay I, with my sulky miserable face, pale and woe-be-gone from association with sorrow and from unassuaged longing for other days, was an unattractive enough intruder. One there was who always resented my appearance in their midst more than the rest, my mother\'s favourite, the five-year-old queen of the establishment. My mother used to call her queen, and tell her that she was at liberty to do what she liked to me, as I was only a slave.

What a surprising amount of good must lie at the bottom of a nature so trained, that it ever developed into good-natured and generous womanhood! But to expect that the child in[Pg 81] those days should have been other than a little vixen to me, would be to expect the impossible.

The play was interrupted for dinner, and after dinner the troop marched up again to the play-room to resume their game. I stayed down-stairs, and stole into the storeroom to talk to Mrs. Clement. Near tea-hour she sent me on some message, and that, of course, was a proud moment for me. Children love to be sent on messages between their elders. They instantly become as inflated as a general\'s aide-de-camp, and hardly need a horse in imagination to place them in their own esteem above the level of other children.

How it all came about I know not. The queen and the slave encountered somewhere on the way. We met like two young puppies and snarled. The queen had a despotic notion of her own rights. She might snarl at me, but I had not the right to reply. If she struck me it was part of my punishment for being in her way, and my duty was to bear it.

I don\'t suppose she reasoned this way any more than the young puppy does when it flies at the throat of a mongrel it dislikes. Anyhow, she struck me. I was a proud, fierce [Pg 82]little devil, and being two years her senior, I laid her low, with an ugly red stain on her white cheek.

As I do not remember how it began, so I do not recall how it ended. There is a dark blank of several hours—centuries it seemed to me—and I was in my cot sobbing myself to sleep, and telling myself that I could not bear it, and to-morrow would run away to my dear everyday parents.

Next morning I sullenly submitted to be dressed and taken down to breakfast. But the red-and-white bowl I ate my bread and milk out of no longer delighted my eye, and no amount of sugar could take the taste of bitterness out of that bread-and-milk. My stepfather came into the room, and looked at me in reproachful silence. Usually he kissed me and flung me up to the ceiling. But now that the poor miserable little worm had turned and struck the idol of the house, his own child, he had no kind word for me. He only knew of the affair what he had been told, and how many thoughtless big people can understand what goes on in the hearts of sore and lonely babies?

He may have noted the sadness of my face, but what did he know of the inward bruise, the[Pg 83] hunger for love and sympathy, the malady of life that had begun to gnaw at my soul at an age when other little girls are out racing among the flowers in a universe bounded and heated and beautified by the love of mother and father?

Mrs. Clement must have been very busy, for she did not come to comfort me. Perhaps she, too, thought I was a fiend. But I was too proud to seek to explain matters to any one. If they wanted to believe I was bad, they might think I was as bad as ever they liked.

In my open-worked pinafore and little house slippers, bare-headed and bare-armed, I stole anxiously down-stairs. The baker was carrying in the bread, and the hall-door was open. This was my chance, and I seized it. Ah, there were the wide long streets, and however cruel the big people might be who went up and down them, at least they could not hurt me, for............