“I believe she scarcely ever looked at her,” sighed Mrs. Crawford.  “When her Ayah was dead there was no one to give a thought to the little thing.  Think of the servants running away and leaving her all alone in that deserted bungalow.  Colonel McGrew said he nearly jumped out of his skin when he opened the door and found her standing by herself in the middle of the room.”

Mary made the long voyage to England under the care of an officer’s wife, who was taking her children to leave them in a boarding-school.  She was very much absorbed in her own little boy and girl, and was rather glad to hand the child over to the woman Mr. Archibald Craven sent to meet her, in London.  The woman was his housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor, and her name was Mrs. Medlock.  She was a stout woman, with very red cheeks and sharp black eyes.  She wore a very purple dress, a black silk mantle with jet fringe on it and a black bonnet with purple velvet flowers which stuck up and trembled when she moved her head.  Mary did not like her at all, but as she very seldom liked people there was nothing remarkable in that; besides which it was very evident Mrs. Medlock did not think much of her.

“My word! she’s a plain little piece of goods!” she said.  “And we’d heard that her mother was a beauty.  She hasn’t handed much of it down, has she, ma’am?”

“Perhaps she will improve as she grows older,” the officer’s wife said good-naturedly.  “If she were not so sallow and had a nicer expression, her features are rather good.  Children alter so much.”

“She’ll have to alter a good deal,” answered Mrs. Medlock.  “And there’s nothing likely to improve children at Misselthwaite—­if you ask me!”

They thought Mary was not listening because she was standing a little apart from them at the window of the private hotel they had gone to.  She was watching the passing buses and cabs, and people, but she heard quite well and was made very curious about her uncle and the place he lived in.  What sort of a place was it, and what would he be like?  What was a hunchback?  She had never seen one.  Perhaps there were none in India.

Since she had been living in other people’s houses and had had no Ayah, she had begun to feel lonely and to think queer thoughts which were new to her.  She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to any one even when her father and mother had been alive.  Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be any one’s little girl.  She had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of her.  She did not know that this was because she was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know she was disagreeable.  She often thought that other people were, but she did not know that she was so herself.

She thought Mrs. Medlock the most disagreeable person she had ever seen, with her common, highly colored face and her common fine bonnet.  When the next day they set out on their journey to Yorkshire, she walked through the station to the railway carriage with her head up and trying to keep as far away from her as she could, because she did not want to seem to belong to her.  It would have made her very angry to think people imagined she was her little girl.