ey
had all begun anew to dig and to rake. But if Laura's energy did not
fizzle out as quickly as usual--she was the model for the rest--Mother
was sure to discover that it was too cramped and dark for them in
there, and send Sarah to drive them off.

Here, safely screened from sight, Laura sat on a bench and made up her
bouquet. When it was finished--red and white in the centre with a
darker border, the whole surrounded by a ring of violet leaves--she
looked about for something to tie it up with. Sarah, applied to, was
busy ironing, and had no string in the kitchen, so Pin ran to get a
reel of cotton. But while she was away Laura had an idea. Bidding
Leppie hold the flowers tight in both his sticky little hands, she
climbed in at her bedroom window, or rather, by lying on the sill with
her legs waving in the air, she managed to grab, without losing her
balance, a pair of scissors from the chest of drawers. With these
between her teeth she emerged, to the excited interest of the boys who
watched her open-mouthed.

Laura had dark curls, Pin fair, and both wore them flapping at their
backs, the only difference being that Laura, who was now twelve years
old, had for the past year been allowed to bind hers together with a
ribbon, while Pin's bobbed as they chose. Every morning early, Mother
brushed and twisted, with a kind of grim pride, these silky ringlets
round her finger. Although the five odd minutes the curling occupied
were durance vile to Laura, the child was proud of her hair in her own
way; and when in the street she heard some one say: "Look--what pretty
curls!" she would give her head a toss and send them all a-rippling. In
addition to this, there was a crowning glory connected with them: one
hot December morning, when they had been tangled and Mother had kept
her standing too long, she had fainted, pulling the whole
dressing-table down about her ears; and ever since, she had been marked
off in some mysterious fashion from the other children. Mother would
not let her go out at midday in summer: Sarah would say: "Let that be,
can't you!" did she try to lift something that was too heavy for her;
and the younger children were to be quelled by a threat to faint on the
spot, if they did not do as she wished. "Laura's faint" had become a
byword in the family; and Laura herself held it for so important a fact
in her life that she had more than once begun a friendship with the
words: "Have you ever fainted? I have."