“Our Big Woman is a wicked devil, I’m thinking, and I wouldn’t trust [shouldn’t wonder] but she’ll burn in hell.”

What definite idea I attached to this denunciation I do not now recall, but I remember that it impressed me deeply, and that many a night afterwards, during the miserable half-hours before I fell asleep with my head under the clothes in the cold bedroom over the hall to which (as Nessy MacLeod had told me) the bad fairies came for bad children, I repeated the strange words again and again.

Another compensation was the greater opportunity I had for cultivating an acquaintance which I had recently made with the doctor’s son, when he came with his father on visits to my mother.  As soon as the hoofs of the horse were heard on the gravel, and before the bell could be rung, I used to dart away on tiptoe, fly through the porch, climb into the gig and help the boy to hold the reins while his father was upstairs.

This led to what I thought a great discovery.  It was about my mother.  I had always known my mother was sick, but now I got a “skute” (as old Tommy used to say) into the cause of her illness.  It was a matter of milk.  The doctor’s boy had heard his father saying so.  If my mother could only have milk morning, noon and night, every day and all day, “there wouldn’t be nothing the matter with her.”

This, too, impressed me deeply, and the form it took in my mind was that “mammy wasn’t sed enough,” a conclusion that gained colour from the fact that I saw Betsy Beauty perched up in a high chair in the dining-room twice or thrice a day, drinking nice warm milk fresh from the cow.  We had three cows, I remember, and to correct the mischief of my mother’s illness, I determined that henceforth she should not have merely more of our milk—­she should have all of it.

Losing no time in carrying my intentions into effect, I crept into the dairy as soon as the dairymaid had brought in the afternoon’s milking.  There it was, still frothing and bubbling in three great bowls, and taking up the first of them in my little thin arms—­goodness knows how—­I made straight for my mother’s room.

But hardly had I climbed half-way up the stairs, puffing and panting under my burden, when I met Nessy MacLeod coming down, and she fell on me with her usual reproaches.

“Mary O’Neill, you wilful, underhand little vixen, whatever are you doing with the milk?”

Being in no mood for explanations I tried to push past, but Nessy prevented me.

“No, indeed, you shan’t go a step further.  What will your Aunt Bridget say?  Take the milk back, miss, this very minute.”

Nessy’s loud protest brought Betsy Beauty out of the dining-room, and in a moment my cousin, looking more than ever like a painted doll in her white muslin dress with a large blue bow in her yellow hair, had run upstairs to assist her step-sister.

I was now between the two, the one above and the other below, and they laid hold of my bowl to take it from me.  They tugged and I resisted and there was a struggle in which the milk was in danger of being spilled.