A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett Read Free Book Online Page B

same—I am only a little girl
like you. It's just an accident that I am not you, and you are
not me!"
    Becky did not understand in the least. Her mind could not grasp
such amazing thoughts, and "an accident" meant to her a calamity
in which some one was run over or fell off a ladder and was
carried to "the 'orspital."
    "A' accident, miss," she fluttered respectfully. "Is it?"
    "Yes," Sara answered, and she looked at her dreamily for a
moment. But the next she spoke in a different tone. She
realized that Becky did not know what she meant.
    "Have you done your work?" she asked. "Dare you stay here a few
minutes?"
    Becky lost her breath again.
    "Here, miss? Me?"
    Sara ran to the door, opened it, and looked out and listened.
    "No one is anywhere about," she explained. "If your bedrooms are
finished, perhaps you might stay a tiny while. I thought—
perhaps—you might like a piece of cake."
    The next ten minutes seemed to Becky like a sort of delirium.
Sara opened a cupboard, and gave her a thick slice of cake. She
seemed to rejoice when it was devoured in hungry bites. She
talked and asked questions, and laughed until Becky's fears
actually began to calm themselves, and she once or twice
gathered boldness enough to ask a question or so herself, daring
as she felt it to be.
    "Is that—" she ventured, looking longingly at the rose-colored
frock. And she asked it almost in a whisper. "Is that there
your best?"
    "It is one of my dancing-frocks," answered Sara. "I like it,
don't you?"
    For a few seconds Becky was almost speechless with admiration.
Then she said in an awed voice, "Onct I see a princess. I was
standin' in the street with the crowd outside Covin' Garden,
watchin' the swells go inter the operer. An' there was one
everyone stared at most. They ses to each other, 'That's the
princess.' She was a growed-up young lady, but she was pink all
over—gownd an' cloak, an' flowers an' all. I called her to
mind the minnit I see you, sittin' there on the table, miss. You
looked like her."
    "I've often thought," said Sara, in her reflecting voice, "that
I should like to be a princess; I wonder what it feels like. I
believe I will begin pretending I am one."
    Becky stared at her admiringly, and, as before, did not
understand her in the least. She watched her with a sort of
adoration. Very soon Sara left her reflections and turned to her
with a new question.
    "Becky," she said, "weren't you listening to that story?"
    "Yes, miss," confessed Becky, a little alarmed again. "I knowed
I hadn't orter, but it was that beautiful I—I couldn't help it."
    "I liked you to listen to it," said Sara. "If you tell stories,
you like nothing so much as to tell them to people who want to
listen. I don't know why it is. Would you like to hear the
rest?"
    Becky lost her breath again.
    "Me hear it?" she cried. "Like as if I was a pupil, miss! All
about the Prince—and the little white Mer-babies swimming about
laughing—with stars in their hair?"
    Sara nodded.
    "You haven't time to hear it now, I'm afraid," she said; "but if
you will tell me just what time you come to do my rooms, I will
try to be here and tell you a bit of it every day until it is
finished. It's a lovely long one—and I'm always putting new
bits to it."
    "Then," breathed Becky, devoutly, "I wouldn't mind HOW heavy the
coal boxes was—or WHAT the cook done to me, if—if I might have
that to think of."
    "You may," said Sara. "I'll tell it ALL to you."
    When Becky went downstairs, she was not the same Becky who had
staggered up, loaded down by the weight of the coal scuttle. She
had an extra piece of cake in her pocket, and she had been fed
and warmed, but not only by cake and fire. Something else had
warmed and fed her, and the something else was Sara.
    When she was gone Sara sat on her favorite perch on the end of
her table. Her feet were on a chair, her elbows on her knees,
and her chin in her hands.
    "If I WAS a princess—a REAL princess," she murmured, "I could
scatter largess