"How do you know" asked the Scientist on the Hearth, "when you didn't take the trouble to ask a question?"
"I didn't have to ask questions; I only had to look at Sara," responded Alice. "Why don't you ask her what the matter was?" she suggested. The suggestion was a malicious one, and Alice knew it.
"Sara, darling, come to Father," said Tom guilelessly. "What were you crying about?"
"Did you brang something for me?" inquired Sara.
"What did you cry for a little while ago?"
"I wasn't cwying. Was I cwying, Mother?" Candid innocence was in her earnest eyes. "I was a good girl."
Alice turned to the window and inspected the world with an appearance of abstraction.
"Didn't you cry at all?" Sara shook her head meditatively and looked pensively back into the past.
"I never cwyed yesterday," she brought out with profound conviction.
"I'm not talking about yesterday: I'm talking about to-day."
"She means by 'yesterday' anything that has happened," Alice explained without turning her head.
"But you did cry yesterday," Tom went on with patience. "Just a little while ago. Think." There was silence. Sara seemed to be peering back into remotest antiquity. She looked up at her father with confiding eyes. He smiled encouragingly. The illuminating words which Sara spoke were:
"I see a eenty, weenty bird in the tree!"
"Sara," pleaded her father, "don't think about birds: think of why you cried."
"All right," she agreed cheerfully. Anything to please Father. She frowned her brow engagingly.
