Page:Edmund Dulac's picture-book for the French Red cross.djvu/103

 A FAIRY TALE FROM THE FRENCH

upon a time there lived a gentleman who married twice. He had one fair daughter by his first wife. Ella was sweet and gentle, taking after her dear dead mother, who had been the most lovable of women. His second wife, a widow with two hard-featured daughters, was very proud and overbearing; and, if her two daughters had only never been born, or, being born, had died, she would then have possessed the vilest temper in all the world. As it was, the three were all equally gifted in that respect.

From the very day of the wedding the step-mother and her daughters took a violent dislike to the young girl, for they could see how beautiful she was, both outwardly and inwardly; and green envy soon turns to hate. They dared not show it openly, for fear of the father's anger; but he, poor man, finding he had taken too heavy a burden upon his shoulders, fell ill and died,—simply worried into his grave. Then his young daughter reaped the full measure of jealousy and spite and malice which her step-mother and sisters could now openly bestow upon her. She was put to do the drudgery of the household at no wages at all, and what was saved in this way was spent on the finery so sorely needed to make the two hard-featured ones at all passable. The poor girl scrubbed the floors, polished the brights, swept the rooms and stairs, cleaned the windows, turned the mangle, and made the beds; and in the evening, when all the work was done, she would sit by the kitchen fire darning the stockings for recreation. When bedtime came she would gaze awhile into the fire, answer the door to her step-sisters coming home from the theatre in all their finery; and then, with their stinging 65