"We will play that you are my little
girl. And Emily shall be your sister."

Lottie's dimples all began to show themselves.

"Shall she?" she said.

"Yes," answered Sara, jumping to her feet. "Let us go and tell her.
And then I will wash your face and brush your hair."

To which Lottie agreed quite cheerfully, and trotted out of the room
and upstairs with her, without seeming even to remember that the whole
of the last hour's tragedy had been caused by the fact that she had
refused to be washed and brushed for lunch and Miss Minchin had been
called in to use her majestic authority.

And from that time Sara was an adopted mother.

5

Becky

Of course the greatest power Sara possessed and the one which gained
her even more followers than her luxuries and the fact that she was
"the show pupil," the power that Lavinia and certain other girls were
most envious of, and at the same time most fascinated by in spite of
themselves, was her power of telling stories and of making everything
she talked about seem like a story, whether it was one or not.

Anyone who has been at school with a teller of stories knows what the
wonder means--how he or she is followed about and besought in a whisper
to relate romances; how groups gather round and hang on the outskirts
of the favored party in the hope of being allowed to join in and
listen. Sara not only could tell stories, but she adored telling them.
When she sat or stood in the midst of a circle and began to invent
wonderful things, her green eyes grew big and shining, her cheeks
flushed, and, without knowing that she was doing it, she began to act
and made what she told lovely or alarming by the raising or dropping of
her voice, the bend and sway of her slim body, and the dramatic
movement of her hands. She forgot that she was talking to listening
children; she saw and lived with the fairy folk, or the kings and
queens and beautiful ladies, whose adventures she was narrating.
Sometimes when she had finished her story, she was quite out of breath
with excitement, and would lay her hand on her thin, little,
quick-rising chest, and half laugh as if at herself.

"When I am telling it," she would say, "it doesn't seem as if it was
only made up. It seems more real than you are--more real than the
schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story--one after
the other. It is queer."

She had been at Miss Minchin's school about two years when, one foggy
win