Broad Arrow by Caroline Leakey — Read

MAIDA had just entered the fifth year of her transported life, of which she had now to experience but two more changes--the ticket-of- leave and the conditional pardon. Both were still distant. According to the regulations then in force, she had to serve yet three years (together with the two months abstracted from the reckoning by reason of her punishment in the Factory) before she would be eligible for her ticket, and she must then hold that ticket a given period ere she could claim her conditional pardon. But all save her mistress had given up speaking to her of either the one or the other. To both these indulgences she displayed so utter an indifference that her master deemed it useless to encourage her with the hope of them, and Mr. Herbert considered it more a mortification than otherwise to her, to have either of these presented as incitements to good behaviour. Mrs. Evelyn would still threaten her with a protracted term of involuntary servitude, when the quiet curl of Maida's lip alone showed how little the threat affected her.

She had dropped into a peculiar position in the family--a position of her own forming, one on which her fellow-servants dared as little to encroach as to question its existence, though to spite it they persecuted her in every possible way; a position which her master did not choose to molest, for all his wife's protestations against convict upstartism.