had finished her story, she was quite out of breath with excitement, and would lay her hand on her thin, little, quick-rising chest, and half laugh as if at herself.

“When I am telling it,” she would say, “it doesn’t seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are—more real than the schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story—one after the other. It is queer.”

She had been at Miss Minchin’s school about two years when, one foggy winter’s afternoon, as she was getting

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