“Cross enough, do you think?  Oh, yes, to be sure I can!  Cross enough to eat you up at one mouthful, and little Sissy after you!”

How 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 had saved us ever so much trouble, and ever so many tears, by teaching us that hardest lesson “do as you are told,” before we were old enough to understand its difficulty.  And Miss Grant was always so bright and happy that she scarcely ever let us suspect, even in the naughtiest times, that we were “making the lines come.”