“What could it be?” said Ermengarde. “Could it be—robbers?”
“No,” Sara began cheerfully. “There is nothing to steal—”
She broke off in the middle of her words. They both heard the sound that checked her. It was not on the slates, but on the stairs below, and it was Miss Minchin’s angry voice. Sara sprang off the bed, and put out the candle.
“She is scolding Becky,” she whispered, as she stood in the darkness. “She is making her cry.”
“Will she come in here?” Ermengarde whispered back, panic-stricken.
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