n she was quite ready on the next occasion to repeat the offence--as
ready as Mrs Vallance was to forgive it. Mary was vain, too, as well
as wilful; but this was not astonishing, for from a very little child
she had heard the most open remarks about her beauty. Wensdale was a
small place, but there were not wanting unwise people in it, who
imagined that their nods and winks and whispers of admiration were
unnoticed by the child. A great mistake. No one could be quicker than
Mary to see them, to give her little neck a prouder turn, and to toss
back her glittering hair self-consciously. So she knew by the time she
was nine years old that she had beautiful hair and lovely eyes, and a
skin like milk--that she walked gracefully, and that her feet and hands
were smaller and prettier than Agatha Chelwood's. All this strengthened
a way she had of ordering her companions about imperiously, as though
she had a right to command. "No common child," she often heard people
say, and by degrees she came to think that she was very _un_common
indeed--much prettier and cleverer than any of the other children.
"You've no call to be so tossy in your ways, Miss Mary," said Rice, the
outspoken old nurse at the White House; "handsome is as handsome does."
But Mary treated such a remark with scorn.

If the little clog, standing on the mantel-piece in her bed-room, could
have spoken, what strange and humbling things it would have told her!
For to belong to poor people would have seemed dreadful to Mary's proud
spirit. As it could not, however, she remained in ignorance of her real
condition, and even in her dreams no remembrance of her real mother, or
of the gypsies and her playfellows Bennie and Mossy, ever came to visit
her.

Things at Wensdale had not altered much since Mary had been left there
as a child of two years old. The roses still flourished in the vicarage
garden under Mr Vallance's loving care, and he still thought them much
finer than Chelwood's. At the White House there were now three children
in the nursery and four in the school-room, of whom the eldest was a
girl of ten named Agatha. These were Mary's constant companions; she
joined them in some of their lessons and in all their pleasures and
plans of amusement. Not a picnic or a treat of any kind took place
without her, and though quarrels were not unknown, Mary would have been
very much missed on these occasions. It was she who invented the games
and gave names