Nobody can tell for half an hour together what quarter
it'll be pointing to. 'Tis the shifty wind that does the most mischief
and is hardest to bear with. When you came in just now, I'd have said you
were pointing straight south, but a few minutes later you've veered right
round to the north-east. What's the meaning of it, child? What's the
matter with 'ee. It doesn't give 'ee much pleasure to know you're
spoiling everybody else's, does it?"

Mona gulped down her tears. "No--o, I--I--it was Millie Higgins' fault.
She's been and got a dress----" And then she suddenly felt ashamed of
herself, and ashamed to repeat anything so petty, and she gulped again,
and this time she swallowed her bad temper too. "No--I'm--I'm 'set fair'
now, father!" she added, and, though there was a choke in her voice,
as though her temper was rather hard to swallow, there was a smile in her
eyes, and in a very little while granny's feather-bed was shaken up as
soft and smooth as ever granny herself could have made it, and the bed was
made up. And then by degrees everything in the room was got into place
just as its mistress liked it, so that when granny came up later on and
saw her new room, she exclaimed aloud in pleased surprise:

"Why, it looks like home already," she cried, "and that's our Mona's
doing, I know!"

CHAPTER X.

Mona sat reading, curled upon the window seat in her bedroom. She spent a
great deal of her time there. Sometimes sewing, but more often either
reading, or looking out at the view. For a few days she had been busy
making curtains for her window, and a frill to go across the top, and,
as granny had firmly refused to buy wide pink ribbon to fasten back the
curtains, Mona had hemmed long strips of some of the print left over from
her own pink dress.

But all this was done now, and Mona was very proud of her handiwork.
The frill was a little deeper on one side than the other, but that was a
trifle. Mona thought that the whole effect was very smart; so smart,
indeed, that she sometimes wished that her window was in the front of the
house, so that people going up and down the hill might see it.
"But I s'pose one can't have everything," she concluded, with a sigh.

Granny's window, which did look out on the hill, was anything but smart,
for she had had neither time nor strength to make her curtains, and Mona
had not offered to make them for her.

Granny had gone up to Lucy's that very afternoon, and tak