Page:Robins - My Little Sister.djvu/54

42 Bettina pinched her finger, the whole house would be stirred up to sympathise. No smallest ache or ailing of ours but our mother's sensitiveness shared. And yet. ..

The woman with her burden had moved away—a draggled figure in the rain.

A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart an impulse of actual hatred towards my mother as the hop-picker disappeared.

Hatred of Bettina, too.

I kept thinking of the pudding in the fire. And of Martha Loring. If Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright above the greyness of that wretched time.

Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered, something of her spirit still survived.

Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with the misery of having to admit the sentence just.