“Well,” said Jessie, slowly, “he’s killed tigers. He killed the one in the skin Sara has in her room. That’s why she likes it so. She lies on it and strokes its head, and talks to it as if it was a cat.”

“She’s always doing something silly,” snapped Lavinia. “My mamma says that way of hers of pretending things is silly. She says she will grow up eccentric.”

It was quite true that Sara was never “grand.” She was a friendly little soul, and shared her privileges and belongings with a free hand. The little ones, who were accustomed to being disdained and ordered out of the way by mature ladies aged ten and twelve, were never made to cry by this most envied of them all. She was a motherly young person, and when people fell down and scraped their knees, she ran and helped them up and patted them, or found in her pocket a bonbon or some other article of a soothing nature. She never pushed them out of her way or alluded to their years as a humiliation and a blot upon their small characters.

“If you are four you are four,” she said severely to Lavinia on an occasion of her having—it must be confessed—slapped Lottie and called her “a brat”; “but you will be five next year, and six th