Let Me Alone Read Online Free

out, but she had no false illusion of security.
    The final execution was swift and sudden. It was evening in the bare, clean upper room that Miss Wilson called the nursery. The room was dark and uninteresting, blank in its cleanliness. The cheap, rose-patterned cotton curtains that she had hung at the window looked tawdry and out of place. Anna was saying her prayers, an odd young shoot inher white nightgown, kneeling beside the clumsy wooden bed.
    Suddenly James Forrester came in. It was very unusual for him to come into that room. Miss Wilson’s heart gave a rapid leap of alarm, the terrible, nerve-torturing apprehension of the dependant. Anna was peering at him through her fingers, uncertain whether to go on with her prayers.
    ‘Get up,’ he said quietly to her.
    She obeyed at once, and stood looking at him with a child’s curious trustfulness that is already half suspicion. He had so much power over her.
    ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
    ‘Saying my prayers,’ she answered, in her clear, thin voice, looking straight at him.
    ‘What are they?’
    She stood in confused silence, not knowing how to reply. Then she glanced round doubtfully at Miss Wilson who had drawn near and would have spoken had not James motioned her imperiously to remain silent. Finally Anna flushed and said:
    ‘Prayers are talking to God.’
    ‘That is nonsense,’ her father said calmly. ‘There is no such person as God, and you are only making yourself ridiculous by kneeling down there in your silly white shirt to talk to someone who doesn’t exist.’
    The child said nothing, staring with bewildered grey-blue eyes at the tall, strange man whose lips were dark and closed and angry-looking.
    Again Miss Wilson tried to interfere, and again she was silenced. She stood looking on, almost in tears, her old face creased and reddened, not daring to speak a word.
    ‘Are you determined to be a little performing monkey,then?’ said James to his daughter. ‘Do you want to be a little saintly monkey this time, in a little white shirt?’
    ‘No!’ said Anna flatly, looking him straight in the eyes.
    The father seemed satisfied.
    ‘Never let me see you kneeling again,’ he said; and signed to Miss Wilson to follow him out of the room.
    That night he told her that she must go. She dared not plead with him or protest; her spirit was so broken, so abject, the spirit of the poor, friendless, unwanted elderly spinster who has no rights and for whom there seems to be no place.
    In the silent darkness she watched over Anna lying asleep in the high bed. Upon her bare old knees she prayed for the child whose future seemed so sinister and so obscure, and her tired heart yearned over her.

CHAPTER 2
     
    A NNA did not cry when Miss Wilson went away. Although the parting meant the end of all that was pleasant, familiar, safe and normal in her unpropitious childhood, something cold and unchildlike in her almost rejoiced. She was proud to think that she was to be alone with her father; as though she were being admitted to a kind of equality with him. In her secret heart she was glad to get rid of the tiresome, devoted old creature whom she almost despised. And so, when the one human being in the whole world who loved her was leaving her for ever, she did not shed a single tear.
    Miss Wilson herself attained a certain dignity at the last. She had slept less than an hour the previous night. All through the long, dark, silent hours she had lain awake, weeping and praying for the child whom she must perforce abandon. In the night she had become definitely an old woman. New lines had appeared upon her face, and in her eyes, dim with many tears, a dullness of despair was gathering. But in the morning, in the bright, limpid sun of the mountain morning, she stood up stiff and proud to go off bravely with her flag still flying in the face of her conquering enemy.
    James smiled his thin, unpleasant smile when he watched her trudging down the hill, this pathetic little