“Never saw I such a brat among all I have brought into the world,” old Posset quavered.  “She hath the voice of a six-months boy.  It cracks my very ears.  Hush thee, then, thou little wild cat.”

This was but the beginning.  From the first she grew apace, and in a few months was a bouncing infant, with a strong back, and a power to make herself heard such as had not before appeared in the family.  When she desired a thing, she yelled and roared with such a vigour as left no peace for any creature about her until she was humoured, and this being the case, rather than have their conversation and love-making put a stop to, the servants gave her her way.  In this they but followed the example of their betters, of whom we know that it is not to the most virtuous they submit or to the most learned, but to those who, being crossed, can conduct themselves in a manner so disagreeable, shrewish or violent, that life is a burden until they have their will.  This the child Clorinda had the infant wit to discover early, and having once discovered it, she never ceased to take advantage of her knowledge.  Having found in the days when her one desire was pap, that she had but to roar lustily enough to find it beside her in her porringer, she tried the game upon all other occasions.  When she had reached but a twelvemonth, she stood stoutly upon her little feet, and beat her sisters to gain their playthings, and her nurse for wanting to change her smock.  She was so easily thrown into furies, and so raged and stamped in her baby way that she was a sight to behold, and the men-servants found amusement in badgering her.  To set Mistress Clorinda in their midst on a winter’s night when they were dull, and to torment her until her little face grew scarlet with the blood which flew up into it, and she ran from one to the other beating them and screaming like a young spitfire, was among them a favourite entertainment.

“Ifackens!” said the butler one night, “but she is as like Sir Jeoffry in her temper as one pea is like another.  Ay, but she grows blood red just as he does, and curses in her little way as he does in man’s words among his hounds in their kennel.”

“And she will be of his build, too,” said the housekeeper.  “What mishap changed her to a maid instead of a boy, I know not.  She would have made a strapping heir.  She has the thigh and shoulders of a handsome man-child at this hour, and she is not three years old.”

“Sir Jeoffry missed his mark when he called her an ugly brat,” said the woman who had nursed her.  “She will be a handsome woman—­though large in build, it may be.  She will be a brown beauty, but she will have a colour in her cheeks and lips like the red of Christmas holly, and her owl’s eyes are as black as sloes, and have fringes on them like the curtains of a window.  See how her hair grows thick on her little head, and how it curls in great rings.  My lady, her poor mother, was once a beauty, but she was no such beauty as this one will be, for she has her father’s long limbs and fine shoulders, and the will to make every man look her way.”