You won't be here very long, you know, Lotta; for you'll be twenty next birthday, and I suppose you'll be leaving school before you're twenty-one.

Most of the girls leave at eighteen or nineteen at latest; and you've been here so long, and are so much farther advanced than others are.

I am not going to be a pupil again--that's out of the question; for I'm just twenty-two, as you know.

But Priscilla has been good enough to let me stay as a kind of second teacher for the little ones.

It will be dull work going through the stupid abridgments of history and geography, and the scrappy bits of botany and conchology, with those incorrigible little ones; but of course I am very grateful to my cousin for giving me a home under any conditions, after papa's dishonourable conduct.