A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett Page B

slippers, which were too large for her.
Her eyes and nose were pink with crying.
    "I know I shall—if I'm found out." she said. "But I don't
care—I don't care a bit. Oh, Sara, please tell me. What is
the matter? Why don't you like me any more?"
    Something in her voice made the familiar lump rise in Sara's
throat. It was so affectionate and simple—so like the old
Ermengarde who had asked her to be "best friends." It sounded as
if she had not meant what she had seemed to mean during these
past weeks.
    "I do like you," Sara answered. "I thought—you see, everything
is different now. I thought you—were different.
    Ermengarde opened her wet eyes wide.
    "Why, it was you who were different!" she cried. "You didn't
want to talk to me. I didn't know what to do. It was you who
were different after I came back."
    Sara thought a moment. She saw she had made a mistake.
    "I AM different," she explained, "though not in the way you
think. Miss Minchin does not want me to talk to the girls. Most
of them don't want to talk to me. I thought—perhaps—you
didn't. So I tried to keep out of your way."
    "Oh, Sara," Ermengarde almost wailed in her reproachful dismay.
And then after one more look they rushed into each other's arms.
It must be confessed that Sara's small black head lay for some
minutes on the shoulder covered by the red shawl. When
Ermengarde had seemed to desert her, she had felt horribly
lonely.
    Afterward they sat down upon the floor together, Sara clasping
her knees with her arms, and Ermengarde rolled up in her shawl.
Ermengarde looked at the odd, big-eyed little face adoringly.
    "I couldn't bear it any more," she said. "I dare say you could
live without me, Sara; but I couldn't live without you. I was
nearly DEAD. So tonight, when I was crying under the
bedclothes, I thought all at once of creeping up here and just
begging you to let us be friends again."
    "You are nicer than I am," said Sara. "I was too proud to try
and make friends. You see, now that trials have come, they have
shown that I am NOT a nice child. I was afraid they would.
Perhaps"—wrinkling her forehead wisely—"that is what they were
sent for."
    "I don't see any good in them," said Ermengarde stoutly.
    "Neither do I—to speak the truth," admitted Sara, frankly.
"But I suppose there MIGHT be good in things, even if we don't
see it. There MIGHT"—DOUBTFULLY—"Be good in Miss Minchin."
    Ermengarde looked round the attic with a rather fearsome
curiosity.
    "Sara," she said, "do you think you can bear living here?"
    Sara looked round also.
    "If I pretend it's quite different, I can," she answered; "or if
I pretend it is a place in a story."
    She spoke slowly. Her imagination was beginning to work for
her. It had not worked for her at all since her troubles had
come upon her. She had felt as if it had been stunned.
    "Other people have lived in worse places. Think of the Count of
Monte Cristo in the dungeons of the Chateau d'If. And think of
the people in the Bastille!"
    "The Bastille," half whispered Ermengarde, watching her and
beginning to be fascinated. She remembered stories of the French
Revolution which Sara had been able to fix in her mind by her
dramatic relation of them. No one but Sara could have done it.
    A well-known glow came into Sara's eyes.
    "Yes," she said, hugging her knees, "that will be a good place
to pretend about. I am a prisoner in the Bastille. I have been
here for years and years—and years; and everybody has forgotten
about me. Miss Minchin is the jailer—and Becky"—a sudden light
adding itself to the glow in her eyes—"Becky is the prisoner in
the next cell."
    She turned to Ermengarde, looking quite like the old Sara.
    "I shall pretend that," she said; "and it will be a great
comfort."
    Ermengarde was at once enraptured and awed.
    "And will you tell me all about it?" she said. "May I creep up
here at night, whenever it is safe, and hear the things you have
made up in the day? It will seem as if we were more 'best
friends'