“I’d rather not say. My mamma doesn’t wish me to tell things, Miss Parker. When it’s sober true that people do things, she won’t let me tell.”
Miss Parker pressed Dotty a little closer to her side.
“Very well, my dear. But it seems that, at any rate, you talk to Tate, and it makes your neck and face ache if you don’t talk; so perhaps I ought to separate you. What do you think?”
“Yes’m; no’m; I don’t know.”
“But I think I know, Dotty. I shall let you sit with Lina Rosenberg. She is a very quiet child, and if you shut your lips together very tight, I think you may keep from whispering.”
Dotty longed to say that her mother would not approve, for Lina was a naughty girl.
“Would that be telling a tale?” thought she. And just as she had decided that it would not be “a tale,” and it was her duty to tell it, and just as she had opened her lips to inform Miss Parker that the little Jewess had betwitched her, Miss Parker rang the bell, and there was not a moment’s time for another word.
The exchange was made. Dice Prosser (her true name was Lodoiska—too long for every day) was taken away from Lina, and placed with Tate, and Dotty and Lina were to sit together. It was not a pleasant arrangement. Tate forgot that Dotty had called her the “wickedest girl in the world,” and as the child went away, books and all, she bade her farewell with her eyes.
As for Dice, she was one of the dull ones, whom nobody either likes or dislikes. She had a half-awake look, as if she had been taken out of bed and sent to school in the middle of a nap.
“I’d rather sit alone if I was Tate,” thought Dotty; “it would make me real lonesome to sit with Dice Prosser.”