CHAPTER II.
HOW NANCE CAME TO BE HERSELF And little Nance?
The most persistent memories of Nance's childhood were her fear and hatred of Tom, and her passionate love for her mother,--and Bernel when he came.
"My own," she called these two, and regarded even her father as somewhat outside that special pale; esteemed Grannie as an Olympian, benevolently inclined, but dwelling on a remote and loftier plane; and feared and detested Tom as an open enemy.
And she had reasons.
She was a high-strung child, too strong and healthy to be actually nervous, but with every faculty always at its fullest--not only in active working order but always actively at work--an admirable subject therefore for the malevolence of an enemy whose constant proximity offered him endless opportunity.
Much of his boyish persecution never reached the ears of the higher powers.

Nance very soon came to accept Tom's rough treatment as natural from a big fellow of fourteen to a small girl of eight, and she bore it stoically and hated him the harder.
Her mother taught her carefully to say her prayers, which included petitions for the welfare of Grannie and father and brother Tom, and for a time, with the perfunctoriness of childhood, which attaches more weight to the act than to the meaning of it, she allowed that to pass with a stickle and a slur.

But very soon brother Tom was ruthlessly dropped out of the ritual, and neither threats nor persuasion could induce her to re-establish him.
Later on, and in private, she added to her acknowledged petitions an appendix, unmistakably brief and to the point--"And, O God, please kill brother Tom!"-- and lived in hope.
She was an unusually pretty child, though her prettiness developed afterwards--as childish prettiness does not always--into something finer and more lasting.
She had, as a child, large dark blue eyes, which wore as a rule a look of watchful anxiety--put there by brother Tom.

To the end of her life she carried the mark of a cut over her right eyebrow, which came within an ace of losing her the sight of that eye.

It was brother Tom did that.
She had an abundance of flowing brown hair, by which Tom delighted to lift her clear off the ground, under threat of additional boxed ears if she opened her mouth.