These confidences were all very well, if sometimes boring; but there were others which filled Laura’s thoughts and weighed heavily upon her. Only one girl in the hamlet had a stepmother, and she was a model stepmother, according to hamlet standards, for she had no children of her own, and did not beat or starve her stepchildren. One of Laura’s earliest memories was of the day on which Polly’s own mother died. Polly, although a little older than Laura, could not remember so far back, and Laura must have been a very small child at the time. She was standing on the doorstep of her home on a misty morning when she heard a cock crow, very loudly and shrilly, and her mother, standing close behind her, said: “At the house where that cock is crowing a little girl’s mammy has died this morning.”

At the time of the school confidences, Polly was an unattractive-looking little girl, fat and pale, with scanty mouse-coloured hair, and heavy and clumsy in her movements. She breathed very heavily and had a way of getting very close to the person to whom she was talking. Laura almost hated herself for not liking her more; but she was really sorry for her. The stepmother, so fair-spoken to outsiders, was a tyrant indoors, and the stepchildren’s lives were made miserable by her nagging. Every day—or every day when Polly could buttonhole Laura—there was some fresh story of persecution to be told and listened to. “I know. I know,” Laura would say sympathetically, meaning that she understood, and Polly would retort, “No, you don’t know. Nobody could but them as has to put up with her,” and Laura would feel that her heart must break with the hopeless misery of it all. Her mother found her crying one day after one of Polly’s confidences and demanded to be told the reason. “Polly’s not happy,” was all Laura could say, for she had sworn never to repeat what Polly had told her.