ll that a new pupil
is, for a short time, a somewhat uncertain thing; and of this new pupil
the entire school had talked the night before until it fell asleep
quite exhausted by excitement and contradictory stories. A new pupil
with a carriage and a pony and a maid, and a voyage from India to
discuss, was not an ordinary acquaintance.

"My name's Ermengarde St. John," she answered.

"Mine is Sara Crewe," said Sara. "Yours is very pretty. It sounds
like a story book."

"Do you like it?" fluttered Ermengarde. "I--I like yours."

Miss St. John's chief trouble in life was that she had a clever father.
Sometimes this seemed to her a dreadful calamity. If you have a father
who knows everything, who speaks seven or eight languages, and has
thousands of volumes which he has apparently learned by heart, he
frequently expects you to be familiar with the contents of your lesson
books at least; and it is not improbable that he will feel you ought to
be able to remember a few incidents of history and to write a French
exercise. Ermengarde was a severe trial to Mr. St. John. He could not
understand how a child of his could be a notably and unmistakably dull
creature who never shone in anything.

"Good heavens!" he had said more than once, as he stared at her, "there
are times when I think she is as stupid as her Aunt Eliza!"

If her Aunt Eliza had been slow to learn and quick to forget a thing
entirely when she had learned it, Ermengarde was strikingly like her.
She was the monumental dunce of the school, and it could not be denied.

"She must be MADE to learn," her father said to Miss Minchin.

Consequently Ermengarde spent the greater part of her life in disgrace
or in tears. She learned things and forgot them; or, if she remembered
them, she did not understand them. So it was natural that, having made
Sara's acquaintance, she should sit and stare at her with profound
admiration.

"You can speak French, can't you?" she said respectfully.

Sara got on to the window-seat, which was a big, deep one, and, tucking
up her feet, sat with her hands clasped round her knees.

"I can speak it because I have heard it all my life," she answered.
"You could speak it if you had always heard it."

"Oh, no, I couldn't," said Ermengarde. "I NEVER could speak it!"

"Why?" inquired Sara, curiously.

Ermengarde shook her head so that the pigtail wobbled.

"You heard me just now," she said. "I'm always like that. I can't SAY
t