CHAPTER V.
A LONELY CHILD.
Mrs.Rushton having adopted Hetty, set about extracting the utmost amount of amusement possible from the presence of the child in her home.
She soon grew anxious to get away from her brother's "unpleasantly sensible remarks," and Isabel's gentle excuses for her conduct, which annoyed her even more, as they always suggested motives for her actions which were far beyond her ken, and seemed far-fetched, over-strained, and absurd.

So she took the child to London, where she introduced her to her friends as her latest plaything.
Hetty had frocks of all the colours of the rainbow, and learned to make saucy speeches which entertained Mrs.Rushton's visitors.
She sat beside her new mamma as she drove in her victoria in the park; and on Mrs.Rushton's "at home" days was noticed and petted by fashionable ladies and gentlemen, her beauty praised openly to her face, her pretty clothes remarked upon, and her childish prattle laughed at and applauded as the wittiest talk in the world.
Certainly there were many days when Hetty's presence was wearisome and intolerable to her benefactress, and then she was banished to a large gloomy room at the top of the London house, and left to the tender mercies of a maid, who did not at all forget that she was only Mrs.
Kane's little girl from the village of Wavertree, and treated her accordingly.

She was often left alone for hours, amusing herself as best she could, crying when she felt very lonely, or leaning far out of the window to feel nearer to the people in the street.

The consequence of all this was to spoil the child's naturally sweet temper, to teach her to crave for excitement, and to suffer keenly, when, after a full feast of pleasure, she was suddenly snubbed, scolded, deserted, and forgotten.
She began to hate the sight of the bare silent nursery upstairs, where there were no pretty pictures to bear her company, no pleasant little adornments, no diversions such as a mother places in the room where her darlings pass many of their baby hours.

It was a motherless, blank, nursery, where the only nurse was the maid, who came and went, and looked upon Hetty as a nuisance; an extra trouble for which she had not been prepared when she engaged to live with Mrs.Rushton.
"Sit down there and behave yourself properly, if you can, till I come back," she would say, and seat Hetty roughly in a chair and go away and leave her there, shutting the door.