with her bare feet.

"There, Manx Catt," she exclaimed, "I reckon you won't have a taste of
them either!"

A gasp of dismay escaped the frightened woman, but again the grim smile
flitted across the face of the father, though he looked like a thunder
cloud as he roared at the child, "Go straight to your room and to bed!
You shall not have a thing to eat today!"

With her feet stained a dirty purple, Tabitha marched into the house and
upstairs, rushed to her little bed in the corner, and threw herself full
length on the counterpane, regardless of the fact that drops of berry
juice still dripped from her brown legs. For fully ten minutes she lay
there, fighting back the angry tears and battling with the fierce rage
against her father.

"I hate him, I hate him!" she told herself over and over again. "It's
bad enough to have him name me Tabitha without his acting so hateful
every time he comes home. I wish he would go off to the mines and stay
forever. He might take Aunt Maria, too, though she ain't so bad. We
could get along with her all right; sometimes she is splendid, even if
she is so fussy. Oh, dear, why can't we have a nice mother like other
children have? I reckon ours wouldn't have died if she had known Aunt
Maria would have to take care of us and Dad would be so horrid."

Her list of woes was fast increasing, and the tears were very near the
bubbling-over point, when she heard heavy steps on the stairs.

"Oh, my sakes! that's Dad. Wonder if he will lick me this time. I 'spect
he will some day, and Tom says he licks awful hard. Wonder if he will
use a whip like sneaky Sneed Pomeroy. Wisht I was as big as Tom; he
don't get licked any more, he's too big. Dad told me to go to bed and I
ain't undressed. Maybe it's just as well if he's going to lick me."

The steps had reached the upper floor now, and she cowered in a
trembling heap in the middle of her bed waiting for the door to open and
let her father enter. But they continued down the hall without so much
as pausing before her door, and now as her heart began to beat normally
again, she heard Aunt Maria's voice saying, "There's a dreadful clutter
to move if we take everything. Some of those boxes we brought from Dover
have never been opened though we've been here two years now. Doesn't
seem as if we had to take all that truck with us wherever we go. There
hasn't been a thing in the stuff that we've needed."

"Then don't take it," cut in the man's heavy voice.