"But you know it perfectly--splendidly." "That won't do. I have to make all the proper pauses, you know, just as our recitation mistress required, and there mustn't be a syllable too many or a syllable too few in any of the words, and there mustn't be a single word transposed. That is the proper way to say poetry, and I know perfectly well that I cannot repeat Gray's _Elegy_ like that." I said I was sorry, and she took the book from my hands. Presently she went away to a distant part of the playground, and I saw her lips moving as she paced up and down. I walked quickly myself, for I wanted to keep warm, and just before I went into the house Rita Swan came up to me. "Well, Dumps," she said, "I wonder how you'll like it?" "Like what?" I asked. Rita began to laugh rather immoderately. She looked at Agnes, who also came up at that moment. "I don't believe Dumps knows," she said. "Know what?" I asked angrily. "Why, what is about to happen. Oh, what a joke!" "What is it?" I asked again. I was so curious that I didn't mind even their rude remarks at that moment. "She doesn't know--she doesn't know!" laughed Rita, and she jumped softly up and down. "What fun! What fun! Just to think of a thing of that sort going to take place in her very own house--in her very own, own house--and she not even to have a suspicion of it!" "Oh, if it's anything to do with home, I know everything about my home," I said in a very haughty tone, "and I don't want you to tell me." I marched past the two girls and entered the schoolroom. But during the rest of the morning I am afraid I was not very attentive to my lessons. I could not help wondering what they meant, and what there was to know. But of course there was nothing. They were such silly girls, and I could not understand for one moment how I had ever come to be friends with them. At one o'clock I went home, and there, lying on the parlour table, was a letter addressed to me. Now it is true, although some girls may smile when they read these words, I had never before received a letter. I have never made violent friendships. I met my school friends, for what they were worth, every day; I had no near relations of any sort, and father was always at home except for the holidays, when he took us children to some very cheap and very dreary seaside place. There was really no one to write to me, and therefore no one ever did write. So a letter addressed to Miss Rachel Grant made my heart beat. I took it up and turned it round and round, and looked at it back and front, and did all those strange things that a person will do to whom a letter is a great rarity and something precious.