“But—but,” said Mabel, turning from red to white—“it isn’t, I hope, from a printed book. I have thought of that I have been so frightfully miserable that I’ve thought of everything; but that would be so terribly unsafe.”
“This is not unsafe at any rate,” said Annie, “Now you begin. Write what I tell you.”
Annie’s look of triumph and her absolutely fearless manner impressed Mabel. She wrote as best she could to Annie’s dictation, and soon two of poor Susan Martin’s attempts at verse were copied in Mabel’s writing.
“There you are!” said Annie. “That ‘sunset’ one will take the cake, and that pretty little one about ‘my favourite cat’ will come home to every one.”
“But I haven’t a favourite cat,” said Mabel, “and why ever should I write about it?”
“Did you never in the whole course of your life,” was Annie’s answer, “hear of a poet’s licence? You can write on anything, you know, if you are a poet.”
“Can I?” replied Mabel. “Then I suppose the cat will do.”
“It will do admirably.”
“I hope,” said Mabel, “they won’t question me afterwards about the animal. It sounds exactly as though it were my own cat, and every one in the school knows that I can’t even touch a cat.”
“What a pity you didn’t tell me that before,” said Annie, “and I would have chosen something else! But there’s no time now; we must fly downstairs immediately.”