and bare, the grate was broken and rusty, and the battered footstool, tilted sideways on its injured leg, the only seat in the room. She sat down on it for a few minutes and let her head drop in her hands. The mere fact that Lottie had come and gone away again made things seem a little worse—just as perhaps prisoners feel a little more desolate after visitors come and go, leaving them behind.

“It’s a lonely place,” she said. “Sometimes it’s the loneliest place in the world.”

She was sitting in


314 of 716

do!”

“Oh, miss!” breathed Becky. “Thank yer, miss, kindly; it ain’t good enough for that. The—the flannin wasn’t new.”


7

The Diamond Mines Again

When Sara entered the holly-hung schoolroom in the afternoon, she did so as the head of a sort of procession. Miss Minchin, in her grandest silk dress,


314 of 1186