purse and looked in it, a painful doubt arose in her mind. It was
nice to be considered good-hearted, but was she really so?
And unselfish? "If I was, wouldn't I make my last year's hat do?
Wouldn't I give back the eighteenpence?" What tiresome questions they
were to come poking and pushing forward so persistently. Anyhow, her
mother knew now that she wanted a hat, and she knew that she had the
money, and that she was going to spend it on herself--and yet she had
called her unselfish!

And downstairs, Lucy, with an anxious face, and a weight at her heart, was
thinking to herself, "If Mona had lived much longer the idle, selfish life
she has been living, her character would have been ruined, and there is so
much that is good in her! Poor child, poor Mona! She has never had a
fair chance yet to learn to show the best side of her, and I doubt if I'm
the one to teach her. I couldn't be hard with her if I tried, and being
her stepmother will make things more difficult for me than for most.
I couldn't live in the house with strife. I must try other means, and,"
she added softly, "ask God to help me."

CHAPTER IV.

For a while, after that talk with her mother, Mona worked with a will.
She swept, and scrubbed, and polished the stove and the windows and helped
with the washing and ironing, until Lucy laughingly declared there would
soon be nothing left for her to do.

"That's just what I want," declared Mona. "I want you not to have
anything to do. Perhaps I can't manage the cooking yet, but I'll learn to
in time." Excited by the novelty and change, and buoyed up by the
prospect of her new hat, and new frocks and aprons too, she felt she could
do anything, and could not do enough in return for all that was to be done
for her, and, when Mona made up her mind to work, there were few who could
outdo her. She would go on until she was ready to drop.

As the spring days grew warmer, she would get so exhausted that Lucy
sometimes had to interfere peremptorily, and make her stop. "Now you sit
right down there, out of the draught, and don't you move a foot till I
give you leave. I will get you a nice cup of tea, and one of my new
tarts; they're just this minute ready to come out of the oven."

A straight screen, reaching from floor to ceiling, stood at one side of
the door, to keep off some of the draught and to give some little privacy
to those who used the kitchen. Mona dried her hands and slipped
gratefull