Rosy | Page 7

said I was spoilt
before you came home, but auntie wouldn't let him. She thought I was

quite good," and Rosy reared up her head as if she thought so too.
"I am very sorry to hear you speak so," said her mother. "I think if you
ask _yourself_, Rosy, you will very often find that you are not good,
and if you see and understand that when you are not good it is nobody's
fault but your own, you will surely try to be better. You must not say it
was your aunt's fault, or anybody's fault. Your aunt was only too kind
to you, and I will never allow you to blame her."
"I wasn't good last night," said Rosy. "I doubled up my hand and I hit
Colin, 'cos I got in a temper. I was going to tell you--I meant to tell
you."
"And are you sorry for it now, Rosy dear?" asked her mother, very
gently.
Rosy looked at her in surprise. Her mother spoke so gently. She had
rather expected her to be shocked--she had almost, if you can
understand, wished her to be shocked, so that she could say to herself
how naughty everybody thought her, how it was no use her trying to be
good and all the rest of it--and she had told over what she had done in a
hard, _un_sorry way, almost on purpose. But now, when her mother
spoke so kindly, a different feeling came into her heart. She looked at
her mother, and then she looked down on the ground, and then, almost
to her own surprise, she answered, almost humbly,
"I don't know. I don't think I was, but I think I am a little sorry now."
Seeing her so unusually gentle, her mother went a little further. "What
made you so vexed with Colin?" she asked. Rosy's face hardened.
"Mother," she said, "you'd better not ask me. It was because of
something he said that I don't want to tell you."
"About Beata?" asked her mother.
"Well," said Rosy, "if you know about it, it isn't my fault if you are
vexed. I don't want her to come--I don't want any little girl to come,
because I know I shan't like her. I like boys better than girls, and I don't
like good little girls at all."
"Rosy," said her mother, "you are talking so sillily that if Fixie even
talked like that I should be quite surprised. I won't answer you. I will
not say any more about Beata--you know what I wish, and what is right,
and so I will leave it to you. And I will give you a kiss, my little girl, to
show you that I want to trust you to try to do right about this."
She was stooping to kiss her, when Rosy stopped her.

"Thank you, mother," she said. "But I don't think I can take the kiss like
that--I don't want to like the little girl."
"Rosy!" exclaimed her mother, almost in despair. Then another thought
struck her. She bent down again and kissed the child. "I give you the
kiss, Rosy," she said, "hoping it will at least make you wish to please
me."
"Oh," said Rosy, "I do want to please you, mother, about everything
except that."
But her mother thought it best to take no further notice, only in her own
heart she said to herself, "Was there ever such a child?"
In spite of all she had said Rosy felt, what she would not have owned
for the world, a good deal of curiosity about the little girl who was to
come to live with them. And now and then, in her cross and unhappy
moods, a sort of strange confused hope would creep over her that
Beata's coming would bring her a kind of good luck.
"Everybody says she's so good, and everybody loves her," thought
Rosy, "p'raps I'll find out how she does it."
And the days passed on, on the whole, after the storm I have told you
about, rather more peaceably than before, till one evening when Rosy
was saying good-night her mother said to her quietly,
"Rosy, I had a letter this morning from Beata's uncle; he is bringing her
to-morrow. She will be here about four o'clock in the afternoon."
"To-morrow!" said Rosy, and then, without saying any more, she
kissed her mother and went to bed.
She went to sleep that evening, and she woke the next morning with a
strange jumble of feelings in her mind, and a strange confusion of
questions waiting to be answered.
"What would Beata be like? She was sure to be pretty--all people that
other people love very much were pretty, Rosy thought. And she
believed that she herself was very