Polly a New-Fashioned Girl by L.T. Meade — Read

When the Maybrights returned home from their disastrous picnic at Troublous Times Castle, Maggie and George brought up the rear. In consequence of their being some little way behind the others, Maggie did not at once know of the fact of Flower's disappearance with the baby. She was naturally a slow girl; ideas came to her at rare intervals; she even received startling and terrible news with a certain outward stolidity and calm. Still, Maggie was not an altogether purposeless and thoughtless maiden; thoughts occasionally drifted her way; ideas, when once born in her heart, were slow to die. When affection took root there it became a very sturdy plant. If there was any one in the world whom Maggie adored, it was her dear young mistress, Miss Polly Maybright. Often at night Maggie awoke, and thought, with feelings of almost worship, of this bright, impulsive young lady. How delightful that week had been when she and Polly had cooked, and housekeeped, and made cakes and puddings together! Would any one but Polly have forgiven her for taking that pound to save her mother's furniture? Would any one in all the world, except that dear, warm-hearted, impulsive Polly, have promised to do without a winter jacket in order to return that money to the housekeeping fund? Maggie felt that, stupid as she knew herself to be, slow as she undoubtedly was, she could really do great things for Polly. In Polly's cause her brain could awake, the inertia which more or less characterized her could depart. For Polly she could undoubtedly become a brave and active young person.

She was delighted with herself when she assisted Miss Maybright to descend from her bedroom window, and to escape with her on to the moor, but her delight and sense of triumph had not been proof against the solitude of the sad moor, against the hunger which was only to be satisfied with berries and spring water, and, above all, against the terrible apparition of the wife of Micah Jones. What Maggie went, through in the hermit's hut, what terrors she experienced, were only known to Maggie's own heart. When, however, Mrs. Ricketts got back her daughter from that terrible evening's experience, she emphatically declared that "Mag were worse nor useless; that she seemed daft-like, and a'most silly, and that never, never to her dying day, would she allow Mag to set foot on them awful lonely commons again."