laughed, and Miss Waspe said,--

"I don't quite know what you mean, dear."

Blanche explained. "Well, it's like this. I simply can't keep a secret.
I feel as if I shall burst if I don't tell somebody, so I always tell
mother, and then it's all right, and, of course, I never want to tell
anybody else. Do you think it is right for me to do that?"

Miss Waspe could not help smiling at this confession, and she replied,
"I think if you tell the person who wants to confide in you that you
must tell your mother, and the person still chooses to trust you with
the secret, then you are quite right to tell her."

"But supposing," argued Blanche, "that the person tells you the thing
before he or she says, 'Don't tell any one,' ought I to try to do
without telling mother? It would be an awful risk," she added solemnly.

"Well," replied Miss Waspe, "personally, I don't like secrets, except,
perhaps, about presents or pleasant surprises for people. I think I
should advise you, for the present, at any rate, to make the stipulation
that you be allowed to tell your mother anything and everything, but at
the same time you must learn to control yourself and keep your own
counsel so far as other people are concerned."

"I'll try," said Blanche, looking very solemn, "but I haven't much
hope."

After that the girls teased their good-natured governess with many other
"problems," as they called them, such as, "Whether would you choose to
be very pretty and very poor, or very rich and quite plain?" and
another, "Whether would you prefer to walk in a very fashionable place
with a person you love, who is so badly dressed as to attract attention,
or with a nicely-dressed person for whom you did not care so much?"

Miss Waspe rather encouraged the girls to give their opinions on all
sorts of subjects, as she liked them to think.

"Learn to think and to see," she would say. And one day she told them
how, when she was a girl, she had been made to learn some lines by
heart, which had helped her to begin thinking for herself. "I think they
frightened me into it," she said, laughing. "They were written by
Carlyle; you will know something of his works some day, I hope. This is
what he says: 'Not one in a thousand has the smallest turn for thinking;
only for passive dreaming, and hearsaying, and active babbling by rote.
Of the eyes that men do glare withal, so few can see.' It sounds rather
like a scolding, doesn't it? Well, I don't want you to b