ALICE went to work. Quiet, not too tense to be disturbing, reigned below. This was the way it should have been done in the first place, Alice reflected, writing busily.
Suddenly her mind was diverted by a little noise—such an ambiguous noise that it had the effect on her nerves of being more disturbing than thunder. This rustle continued, hesitated, continued again. When you analyzed it, it was only the squeaking of a board or a faint rustle that you could hardly call a footfall, but it cried in the loudest tones to Alice, "This means you!"
The noise halted, and then its cause came into view. It was Sara, who, with the greatest consideration in the world, had spent five nerve-racking minutes in her progress down the hall to Alice's room. She walked to her mother in the same careful way. She might have been walking over the thinnest of ice, she might have been walking on the tips of her toes across egg shells, so deliberate was she and so careful not to disturb her dear mother.
Finally she arrived before Alice. Her eyes were swimming with affection, her lips with cruel inaudibility formed the words:
"Sweet Mother!"
Her soul was a pool of sunshine, reflecting on its surface only love. In this heavenly pool Alice flung the rough stone of an irritable:
"Well, Sara?"
Doubt was now reflected in the pool. Sara looked at
