ng-brush between her white teeth, a little fold of concentrated
attention between her slender brown eyebrows.

"Yes. Did you want anything?"

Greta jumped up, leaving the rest of the box of chocolates to dissolve
among the White Class, and came over, threading her way between the long
rows of desk-stalls.

"Of course I want something."

"What is it?" asked Lynette, laying down the little tool.

"What everyone has a right to expect from the person who is her dearest
friend--sympathy," said Greta, jumping up and sitting on the corner of the
desk, and biting the thick end of her long flaxen pigtail.

"You have it--when there is anything to sympathise about."

Greta tapped the letter, trying to frown.

"Do you call this nothing?"

"You have saved me from doing so."

"Lynette Mildare, have you a heart inside you?"

"Certainly; I can feel it beating, and it does its work very well."

"Am I, then, nothing to you?"

Lynette smiled, looking up at the piquant, charming face.

"You are a great deal to me."

"And I regard you as a bosom-friend. And the duty of a bosom-friend,
besides rushing off at once to tell you if she hears anybody say anything
nasty of you behind your back--a thing which you never do--is to
sympathise with you in all your love-affairs--a thing which you do even
seldomer."

Greta stamped with the toe of the dainty little shoe that rested on the
beeswaxed boards of the class-room, and kicked the leg of the desk with
the heel of the other.

"Please don't spill the white of egg, or upset the gold-leaf. And as I
shall be pupil-teacher of the youngest class next term, I suppose I ought
to tell you that 'seldomer' isn't in the English dictionary."

"I'm glad of it. I like my own words to belong to me, my own self. I
should be ashamed to owe everything I say to silly Nuttall or stupid old
Webster. You're artful, Lynette Mildare, trying to change the
conversation. I say you don't sympathise with me properly in my affairs of
the heart--and you never, never tell me about yours."

The beautiful black-rimmed, golden-tawny eyes laughed as some eyes can,
though there was no quiver of a smile about the purely-modelled,
close-folded lips.

"Don't tell me you never have, or never had, any," scolded Greta. "You're
too lovely by half. Don't try to scowl me down--you are! I'm pretty enough
to make the Billy Keyses stand on their silly heads if I told them to, but
you're a great deal more. Also, you have st