funny it sounded! Lottie laughed and so did I, only very nervously.
Then all at once Miss Grant grew very comically grave, and asked us
whether we thought we should soon make her cross? And then followed
such a funny talk, I think I shall never forget it. Miss Grant was half
lying on the sofa now, Lottie and I were bobbing up and down beside her,
sometimes looking right into her blue laughing eyes, sometimes hiding
our own rosy faces, that she mightn't see how queer she made us feel.

"You don't much like the idea of having a governess, I see," she said;
"you fancy it will be lessons, lessons all day long now, a great deal of
crying, and punishments, very hard things to learn, and no fun any more.
If that's what it really is going to be, I shall get so unhappy that I
shall soon run away home again! And then you think I shall have to grow
cross and ill-tempered, too--that is the worst part of it all."

She pretended to be ready to cry, and Lottie, who didn't quite like to
give up her own opinion, muttered something about "She thought they
always were!"

"Are they?" asked Miss Grant, just as if she really wanted to know, and,
when we laughed and hid our faces, she went on: "I think I know how it
is. This is what you will do to me: You will begin by getting into all
the mischief you can think of, and that will give me a headache; and
then you will be cross and rude, and that will give me great, deep lines
in the forehead; and last of all, you will do vulgar things, that will
make my mouth get into the 'don't' shape, which is so ugly, you know;
and, by and by, when I look at myself in the glass, I shall find myself
turned into a grey-headed old woman, and I shall say, 'Sissy gave me
those wrinkles between my eyes, I always had to frown at her so;' and
then, 'Those ugly lines by my mouth came when Lottie vexed me so.' What
a funny thing it will be to have to remember you in that way when you
are grown-up people!"

Of course, we did not like this way of taking it for granted that we
were rude, troublesome children, yet there was a funny look in Miss
Grant's eyes that seemed as if she didn't really mean what she said. And
the end of it all was that we made a compact, as she called it, that we
would be ever so good-tempered, and then she and we would have the
happiest time together that you can fancy.

And I think it all came true. Thanks to our papas and mammas, we were
not quite the rude children we might have been. They