The personal appearance of Miss Wigger might have suggested a modest distrust of his own abilities to Lavater, when that self-sufficient man wrote his famous work on Physiognomy.  Whatever betrayal of her inner self her face might have presented, in the distant time when she was young, was now completely overlaid by a surface of a flabby fat which, assisted by green spectacles, kept the virtues (or vices) of this woman’s nature a profound secret until she opened her lips.  When she used her voice, she let out the truth.  Nobody could hear her speak, and doubt for a moment that she was an inveterately ill-natured woman.

“Make your curtsey, child!” said Miss Wigger.  Nature had so toned her voice as to make it worthy of the terrors of her face.  But for her petticoats, it would have been certainly taken for the voice of a man.

The child obeyed, trembling.

“You are to go away with me,” the school-mistress proceeded, “and to be taught to make yourself useful under my roof.”

Syd seemed to be incapable of understanding the fate that was in store for her.  She sheltered herself behind her merciless mother.  “I’m going away with you, mamma,” she said—­“with you and Rick.”

Her mother took her by the shoulders, and pushed her across the room to her aunt.

The child looked at the formidable female creature with the man’s voice and the green spectacles.

“You belong to me,” said Miss Wigger, by way of encouragement, “and I have come to take you away.”  At those dreadful words, terror shook little Syd from head to foot.  She fell on her knees with a cry of misery that might have melted the heart of a savage.  “Oh, mamma, mamma, don’t leave me behind!  What have I done to deserve it?  Oh, pray, pray, pray have some pity on me!”

Her mother was as selfish and as cruel a woman as ever lived.  But even her hard heart felt faintly the influence of the most intimate and most sacred of all human relationships.  Her florid cheeks turned pale.  She hesitated.

Miss Wigger marked (through her own green medium) that moment of maternal indecision—­and saw that it was time to assert her experience as an instructress of youth.

“Leave it to me,” she said to her sister.  “You never did know, and you never will know, how to manage children.”

She advanced.  The child threw herself shrieking on the floor.  Miss Wigger’s long arms caught her up—­held her—­shook her.  “Be quiet, you imp!” It was needless to tell her to be quiet.  Syd’s little curly head sank on the schoolmistress’s shoulder.  She was carried into exile without a word or a cry—­she had fainted.

10.—­The School.

Time’s march moves slowly, where weary lives languish in dull places.

Dating from one unkempt and unacknowledged birthday to another, Sydney Westerfield had attained the sixth year of her martyrdom at School.  In that long interval no news of her mother, her brother, or her stepfather had reached England; she had received no letter, she had not even heard a report.  Without friends, and without prospects, Roderick Westerfield’s daughter was, in the saddest sense of the word, alone in the world.