flyaway hair above them.

“Oh, people will only like me when I laugh,” she cried, and her face crinkled into its familiar expression of merriment, and she watched the fine dark eyebrows curve upward, and the dimples dance crookedly into the flushed cheeks.

“Ye—es,” she said slowly. “It isn’t so bad then. But I will—be a belle, anyway. You see if I’m not, I will be one and surprise them all. Maybe I’ve never tried to make myself look pretty before. I will try awfully hard now. And I’ll turn out the most wonderful belle of them all, I shouldn’t wonder. So there, now.”

She danced back from the mirror, her hair-brush in her hand.

“I’ll begin at the top,” she said, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

Just then Miss Carrol knocked at the door.

“Come in,” sang Peggy blithely, her spirits more or less restored by the prospect of the task she had set herself.

The door rattled.

“I can’t,” announced Miss Carrol’s voice.

“Oh, I forgot,” cried Peggy, and she ran to the door and turned the key. Flinging it open, she laughed up into Miss Carrol’s face. “Come in,” she invited a second time, “I’m very glad to see somebody even if you’ve only come to scold me. Have you come to scold me?”

Miss Carrol shook her head, and explained that Mrs. Forest had relented, and she was to be of the matinée party, after all.

Peggy hugged her gratefully.

“Excuse me,” she said, “for mussing up your dress, but I just had to. People have been hurting my feelings all the morning and now you come and are—kind. And it means that I can be one right now. I’ll be one for this!”

“One what?” asked the youngest teacher, puzzled. “You girls have the oddest things in your minds half the time. What is it you’re going to be now?”

Peggy hesitated, and then she came over and whispered.

“A belle,” she said with her lips near Miss Carrol’s ear. “One of the teachers said I couldn’t be one.”

To her hurt surprise, her 

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