Several years passed after that, in which Mrs. Carteret did by Molly, as by every one else, all the duties that were quite obviously evident to her, and did not go about seeking for any fanciful ones.  And Molly grew up, sometimes happy, and sometimes not, saying sometimes the things she really meant when she was in a temper, and acquiescing in Mrs. Carteret’s explanation that she had not meant them when she had regained her self-control.

Until Molly was between fifteen and sixteen, Mrs. Carteret was able to keep to her optimism as to their mutual relations.

“The child is, of course, very backward.  I tried to think it was want of education, but I’ve come to see it’s of no use to expect to make Molly an interesting or agreeable woman; and very plain, of course, she must be.  But, you know, plenty of plain, uninteresting women have very fairly happy lives, and under the circumstances”—­but there Mrs. Carteret stopped, and her guest, the wife of the vicar, knew no more of the circumstances than did the world at large.

But when Molly was about the age of fifteen she began to display more troublesome qualities, and a certain faculty for doing quite the wrong thing under a perverse appearance of attempting good works.  There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret’s stamp so much as good done in the wrong way.  She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by.  It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a gypsy’s baby.  And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing an old man of rather doubtful antecedents to be dying from exhaustion, Molly had herself sought whisky from the nearest inn.  She had bought a whole bottle of whisky, though indeed, being seized with qualms, she had poured half the contents of the bottle into a ditch before going back to the cottage.  And it was undoubtedly Mrs. Carteret’s duty to protest when she found that Molly had held a baby with diphtheria folded closely in her arms while the mother fetched the doctor.

Can any one blame Mrs. Carteret for finding these doings a little trying?  And it showed how freakish and contradictory Molly was in all her ways that she would never join nicely in school feasts, or harvest homes, or anything pleasant or cheerful.  Nor did she make friends even with those she had worried over in times of sickness.  She would risk some serious infection, or meddle, with her odd notions, day after day in a cottage; and then she would hardly nod to the convalescent boy or girl when she met them again in the lanes.