only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?"

"It is the child no one ever saw!" exclaimed the man, turning to his
companions. "She has actually been forgotten!"

"Why was I forgotten?" Mary said, stamping her foot. "Why does nobody
come?"

The young man whose name was Barney looked at her very sadly. Mary even
thought she saw him wink his eyes as if to wink tears away.

"Poor little kid!" he said. "There is nobody left to come."

It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found out that she had
neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away
in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had
left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even
remembering that there was a Missie Sahib. That was why the place was so
quiet. It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and
the little rustling snake.

CHAPTER II

MISTRESS MARY QUITE CONTRARY

Mary had liked to look at her mother from a distance and she had thought
her very pretty, but as she knew very little of her she could scarcely
have been expected to love her or to miss her very much when she was
gone. She did not miss her at all, in fact, and as she was a
self-absorbed child she gave her entire thought to herself, as she had
always done. If she had been older she would no doubt have been very
anxious at being left alone in the world, but she was very young, and as
she had always been taken care of, she supposed she always would be.
What she thought was that she would like to know if she was going to
nice people, who would be polite to her and give her her own way as her
Ayah and the other native servants had done.

She knew that she was not going to stay at the English clergyman's house
where she was taken at first. She did not want to stay. The English
clergyman was poor and he had five children nearly all the same age and
they wore shabby clothes and were always quarreling and snatching toys
from each other. Mary hated their untidy bungalow and was so
disagreeable to them that after the first day or two nobody would play
with her. By the second day they had given her a nickname which made her
furious.

It was Basil who thought of it first. Basil was a little boy with
impudent blue eyes and a turned-up nose and Mary hated him. She was
playing by herself under a tree, just as she had been playing the day
the cholera broke out. She was making heaps of earth and