her a home, and that is more than she has any right to expect from me."
Sara did not expect much, and was far too proud to try to continue to be intimate with girls who evidently felt rather awkward and uncertain about her. The fact was that Miss Minchin's pupils were a set of dull, matter-of-fact young people. They were accustomed to being rich and comfortable, and as Sara's frocks grew shorter and shabbier and queerer-looking, and it became an established fact that she wore shoes with holes in them and was sent out to buy groceries and carry them through the streets in a basket on her arm when the cook wanted them in a hurry, they felt rather as if, when they spoke to her, they were addressing an under servant.
"To think that she was the girl with the diamond-mines," Lavinia commented. "She does look an object. And she 's queerer than ever. I never liked her much, but I can't bear that way she has now of looking at people without speaking— just as if she was finding them out."
"I am," said Sara, promptly, when she heard of this.
"That 's what I look at some people for. I like to know about them. I think them over afterward."
The truth was that she had saved herself annoyance several times by keeping her eye on Lavinia, who was quite ready to make mischief, and would have been rather pleased to have made it for the ex-show pupil.
Sara never made any mischief herself, or interfered with any one. She worked like a drudge; she tramped through the wet streets, carrying parcels and baskets; she labored
