Polly thought they were together because they liked to be; doing the farm work because it suited them better; while she had known from babyhood that for some reason her mother did not care for her as she did for Adam.  She thought at first that it was because Adam was a boy.  Later, when she noticed her mother watching her every time she started to speak, and interrupting with the never-failing caution:  “Now be careful!  Think before you speak!  Are you sure?” she wondered why this should happen to her always, to Adam never.  She asked Adam about it, but Adam did not know.  It never occurred to Polly to ask her mother, while Kate was so uneasy it never occurred to her that the child would notice or what she would think.  The first time Polly deviated slightly from the truth, she and Kate had a very terrible time.  Kate felt fully justified; the child astonished and abused.

Polly arrived at the solution of her problem slowly.  As she grew older, she saw that her mother, who always was charitable to everyone else, was repelled by her grandmother, while she loved Aunt Ollie.  Older still, Polly realized that she was a reproduction of her grandmother.  She had only to look at her to see this; her mother did not like her grandmother, maybe Mother did not like her as well as Adam, because she resembled her grandmother.  By the time she was sixteen, Polly had arrived at a solution that satisfied her as to why her mother liked Adam better, and always left her alone in the house to endless cooking, dishwashing, sweeping, dusting, washing, and ironing, while she hoed potatoes, pitched hay, or sheared sheep.  Polly thought the nicer way would have been to do the housework together and then go to the fields together; but she was a good soul, so she worked alone and brooded in silence, and watched up the road for a glimpse of Henry Peters, who liked to hear her talk, and to whom it mattered not a mite that her hair was lustreless, her eyes steel coloured, and her nose like that of a woman he never had seen.  In her way, Polly admired her mother, loved her, and worked until she was almost dropping for Kate’s scant, infrequent words of praise.

So Polly had to be content in the kitchen.  One day, having finished her work two hours before dinnertime, she sauntered to the front gate.  How strange that Henry Peters should be at the end of the field joining their land.  When he waved, she waved back.  When he climbed the fence she opened the gate.  They met halfway, under the bloomful shade of a red haw.  Henry wondered who two men he had seen leaving the Holt gate were, and what they wanted, but he was too polite to ask.  He merely hoped they did not annoy her.  Oh, no, they were only some men to see Mother about some business, but it was most kind of him to let her know he was looking out for her.  She got so lonely; Mother never would let her go to the field with her.  Of course not!  The field was no place for such a pretty