to be bitter on the difference between
herself and other children. But both master and pupil understood it so.

'Always running about and screeching, always playing and fighting,
always skip-skip-skipping on the pavement and chalking it for their
games! Oh! I know their tricks and their manners!' Shaking the little
fist as before. 'And that's not all. Ever so often calling names in
through a person's keyhole, and imitating a person's back and legs. Oh!
I know their tricks and their manners. And I'll tell you what I'd do, to
punish 'em. There's doors under the church in the Square--black doors,
leading into black vaults. Well! I'd open one of those doors, and I'd
cram 'em all in, and then I'd lock the door and through the keyhole I'd
blow in pepper.'

'What would be the good of blowing in pepper?' asked Charley Hexam.

'To set 'em sneezing,' said the person of the house, 'and make their
eyes water. And when they were all sneezing and inflamed, I'd mock 'em
through the keyhole. Just as they, with their tricks and their manners,
mock a person through a person's keyhole!'

An uncommonly emphatic shake of her little fist close before her eyes,
seemed to ease the mind of the person of the house; for she added
with recovered composure, 'No, no, no. No children for me. Give me
grown-ups.'

It was difficult to guess the age of this strange creature, for her poor
figure furnished no clue to it, and her face was at once so young and so
old. Twelve, or at the most thirteen, might be near the mark.

'I always did like grown-ups,' she went on, 'and always kept company
with them. So sensible. Sit so quiet. Don't go prancing and capering
about! And I mean always to keep among none but grown-ups till I marry.
I suppose I must make up my mind to marry, one of these days.'

She listened to a step outside that caught her ear, and there was a soft
knock at the door. Pulling at a handle within her reach, she said,
with a pleased laugh: 'Now here, for instance, is a grown-up that's my
particular friend!' and Lizzie Hexam in a black dress entered the room.

'Charley! You!'

Taking him to her arms in the old way--of which he seemed a little
ashamed--she saw no one else.

'There, there, there, Liz, all right my dear. See! Here's Mr Headstone
come with me.'

Her eyes met those of the schoolmaster, who had evidently expected
to see a very different sort of person, and a murmured word or two
of salutation passed between them. She was a