Annie Laurie and Azalea

This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler

[Picture: Book cover]

[Picture: Azalea and Carin and Annie Laurie]

Annie Laurie And Azalea

By Elia W. Peattie

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_Illustrations by_ _Joseph Pierre Nuyttens_

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[Picture: Publisher’s logo]

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The Reilly & Britton Co. Chicago

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Copyright, 1913 by The Reilly & Britton Co.

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_Annie Laurie and Azalea_

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_Annie Laurie and Azalea_ _beg to be presented to_ _Loraine_, _Catherine_, _Elizabeth and Bernice_

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE I TWO AND ONE MAKE—HOW MANY? 11 II ANNIE LAURIE PACE 30 III TRIAL WITHOUT JURY 47 IV A RAINY NIGHT 68 V THE SUMMERS 87 VI SUNDAY 100 VII THE SIGNAL 119 VIII THE MYSTERY 128 IX THE DISBROWS 147 X SAM 167 XI MARCHING ORDERS 181 XII “THE DOLL LADY” 198 XIII THE LONG RED ROAD 217 XIV HI’S HOUN’ DOG 231 XV THE VOICE IN THE MIST 247 XVI GOOD FOR EVIL 261 XVII AZALEA’S PARTY 281

List Of Illustrations

PAGE Azalea and Carin and Annie Laurie _Frontispiece_ Carin stood awaiting them, her hands outstretched 64 Back and forth went her lantern, saying: “All is 122 well! All is well!” “But you’ve come back, son, to face the music.” 192 “Come in,” she said in a strange voice 266

Chapter I Two And One Make—How Many?

The long red clay road, winding down from the cabin where the McBirneys lived on their high shelf of Tennyson mountain, was frosted delicately with white, and by the roadside the curious frost flowers lifted their heads, as airy-fine as fern. From the half-hidden cabins all around the semicircle of mountains that skirted the valley of Lee, shafts of smoke arose, showing that the people were about the business of the day. Straight, gray and shadowy these smoke-shafts lifted through the lilac-tinted air; and below in the little town, other shafts of smoke ascended as if in friendly answer.

Azalea McBirney, in her dark riding skirt and bright knitted cap and reefer, came running from the cabin with the manner of a girl very much behindhand.

“Ain’t he there yet, Zalie?” a voice called from the cabin. “Ain’t Jim brought them ponies around yet?”

“No, mother,” Azalea answered over her shoulder, starting toward the stable. “Maybe the ponies have been naughty again. I’ll go see.”

“You just stay where you be,” commanded James Stuart McBirney from the stable. “You’ve got all your work done, ben’t you? Well, that’s all you have to think about. This here is my job and I mean to do it whatever comes, though these here ponies certainly do act up on a morning like this.”

“Well, I _would_ just as soon get my breath for a moment,” Azalea remarked to nobody in particular, seating herself on the bench by the side of the door. “As Hi Kitchell’s mother says, ‘I bin goin’ like a streak o’ lightnin’ since sunup.’”

Her cheeks were, indeed, a trifle over-flushed, and forgetting for a moment how time was hastening along, and that she and Jim ought already to be on the road to school, she leaned her head against the side of the cabin and looked about her contentedly. She loved the scene before her; loved the pines with their light coating of hoarfrost; loved the waterfall with its gleaming icicles; loved the scent of the wood-smoke and the sight of “Molly Cottontail” scampering through the bushes.

Moreover, the kiss of Mary McBirney lay warm on her lips—Mary McBirney who had taken her in when she was a motherless and friendless girl, and whom she found it sweet to call mother. “Mother” was a longer word than Jim—otherwise James Stuart McBirney, the true son of the house—found it convenient to use when he spoke of the woman who was the background of his world. “Ma” was the term he chose, and Mary McBirney would not have cared to have him try any other.

For Jim was just Jim—her own freckled, shy, plucky fellow. He went down to the district school, riding on the pony the Carsons had given him, while beside him, quite as if she were his own sister, rode Azalea, who trusted him to see her through any danger of the road, who laughed as much as anybody could wish at his “hill billy” jokes, and who never, never forgot how he had welcomed her into his home, to share all he had, though there never had, at any time, been very much to share.

Yet, though she had been only the “child wonder” of a wandering “show” when she came to the McBirney’s—her own poor little mother lying dead in one of the wagons—it was she, and not Jim, the carefully reared boy, who had the grand little ways. Jim was a country boy, with a country boy’s straightforward, simple manners. But about Azalea there was something—well, something different. So different was she from the McBirneys that she seemed like a cardinal bird which had been storm-driven into one of the martin gourds that hung in the high cross-trees before the McBirney’s door.

All that was easily understood by the few who knew her story. Her grandfather had been Colonel Atherton, the richest, the proudest, and the most elegant gentleman in all the countryside. He had owned great plantations in the old slave days, and had built the beautiful manor house which their new, wonderfully kind neighbors, the Carsons, recently had bought. Azalea’s mother had exiled herself by a marriage with a man of whom no parent could approve, and as misfortune drove her ever lower and lower, she came at length to be a performer in the miserable roadside show with which she had come, in her last hour, to the scene of her father’s old home. That home had long since passed into other hands, and concerning it Azalea’s mother had told her daughter nothing. It had been by an accident that she later learned the truth.

When Mr. and Mrs. Carson, the friends who had from the first of their acquaintance with her endeavored to add to her happiness, learned her story, they asked her to come into their home to be a sister to their own girl, Carin. And Azalea in her secret heart had longed to go—more than she ever would have told, she longed to be with these accomplished and gracious friends, whose wealth made it possible for them to do almost anything they pleased, and who seemed pleased to do only interesting things. But when she remembered the welcome that had been given her by Mary McBirney, and indeed, by all of the McBirney family, and how she had, in a way, taken the place of their little dead Molly, she was able to put temptation from her; and the hour in which she had made her choice and been gathered in “Ma” McBirney’s arms was the happiest she ever had known.

So, though she was born Azalea Knox, the granddaughter of Colonel Atherton, she was now known as Azalea McBirney, the waif the McBirneys had taken into their cabin to grow up side by side with their son James Stuart. And all over the Valley of Lee an interest was felt in her; partly because of her being an orphan, and a child of quaint and lovable ways, and partly because of a strange happening. Not long after she had come to live with the good mountain folk, the owner of the show with which she had once traveled had kidnapped her, and the search for her had been long and anxious.

When she was rescued and brought back to the home where she was so welcomed and loved, all of the neighbors had a protective feeling for her, and rejoiced that the Carsons, who had come down from the North, and who seemed so eager to be of help to everybody, should have taken her in to be taught with their daughter. Never had there been such neighbors as the Carsons in Lee. They made goodness their business, it seemed. Through them the mountain folk were finding a market for their homemade wares—their woven cloth and their counterpanes, their baskets and chairs, and comfort had come into many a home where hitherto there had been cruel poverty.

But there on the bench by the doorway in the nipping morning air sits Azalea, with her nose and ears growing redder and redder!

“Jim,” she called, awakening from her reverie, “we’ll be late as sure as anything.”

“Coming right along now, sis,” answered the boy as he came running from the stable with the two ponies. “Hop into the saddle, Zalie, and we’ll just pelt it down the mountain. Here, I’ll hold him. There you are. Hi—they’re off.”

They surely were. Pa McBirney, busy in his little smithy, heard the clatter of hoofs and thrust his head from the door.

“Watch out, you two!” he warned.

“We will,” they called in chorus as they dashed on.

“My sakes,” said pa, coming in from the shop and wiping his hands on his leathern apron, “I trust to luck ma didn’t see ’em going off. Them young uns are getting too much spirit in ’em to suit me; and as for the ponies, I think they ought to be cut down on their feed.”

But neither Azalea nor James Stuart was wanting anyone to cut down on anything. As the firm-footed ponies took the cut-offs, minding neither curve nor steep, the children shouted with delight.

“Late?” yelled Jim mockingly. “Who said late? We couldn’t be late if we tried.”

They reached the parting of their ways, and Azalea, who was leading, turned in her saddle to wave to Jim.

“Good-bye, boy,” she called.

“So long, sis,” he answered, and turned to follow the creek, and then to mount the hill at the top of which stood the district school. But Azalea kept on along the low-winding road till she came to The Shoals, from whose four tall chimneys the smoke mounted into the tinted air. Benjamin, the polite black boy, was at the horse-block to help her dismount and to lead away Paprika, her pony; and Tulula Darthula, the maid, opened the door to welcome her. Azalea spoke a laughing word of greeting and ran on down the corridor to the schoolroom.

It was a small room, semicircular in shape, opening on the wintry garden. The rounding portion of the wall was all of glass, which in summer time gave way to screens, so that it then seemed an actual part of the garden. Now, the polished panes reflected the flames leaping in the fireplace, and revealed the frost-fringed hemlocks without. Before the fire sat Miss Parkhurst, the quiet, gray-eyed governess, and with her, Carin, the friend whose approval was more to Azalea than anything else in the world save the love of the new “mother.”

“Oh, here I am, late!” cried Azalea contritely. “Please forgive me, ma’am.”

Helena Parkhurst gave a pardoning smile.

“I really think we’re ahead of time this morning—Carin and I. Take off your things, child, and come up to the fire. We’ve been trying to have it at its best when you came.”

But Azalea’s fingers, stiffened with holding the bridle reins, made sorry work with her buttons, and Carin flew to her aid.

“You smell like winter, Azalea,” she laughed, sniffing; “all cold and clean.”

Azalea laughed happily. Whatever this blue-eyed, golden-haired friend of hers did seemed right to her—nay, better than merely right—complete. It warmed Azalea more than the glow of the room to have Carin snatch her cap from her, and pull her reefer off, and tumble her with affectionate roughness into the chair before the blaze.

“Colonial history again this morning,” said Miss Parkhurst after a time. “We’re to read about the Delaware and the Virginia Colonies, since Carin’s ancestors came from the first and Azalea’s from the second.”

“Well, they’ll be different enough, won’t they?” remarked Carin. “They were different sort of folk before they crossed the Atlantic, and their differences grew after they settled here. And yet here Azalea and I are, as alike as can be.”

“But I don’t think the differences of the colonists grew, Carin,” said Azalea, “and I’m terribly afraid you and I aren’t alike. I couldn’t be like you if I tried for ever and ever.” She gave a wistful sigh, and Miss Parkhurst, watching her without seeming to do so, saw the light of hero-worship in her eyes. She knew that Azalea was one of those who are born to love hungrily, and to live eagerly; and she was thankful that, having so hungry a heart, she was able, when it came to a matter of opinion, to form her own ideas, and to hold to them. Azalea’s heart was in leading strings to Carin, but her excellent little brain went on its independent way, though Carin had traveled and studied, and been all her life with charming and cultivated people, and Azalea had been tended no more than a patch of wayside daisies.

Miss Parkhurst brought the books they were needing from the library, and Carin taking hers, sighed happily: “Isn’t it beautiful to be here by ourselves—just the three of us? No one else would fall into our way of doing. How nice it is of you, Miss Parkhurst, to let us follow up whatever idea we’re interested in, and to help us learn all we can about that subject, instead of making us dash from one thing to another, till we haven’t a notion what we are trying to learn. I’d never get anywhere, studying in the old-fashioned way, jumping from subject to subject, and having to wait for a whole class of stupid creatures to come tagging along.”

“But you might be the stupid one, you know, Carin,” smiled Miss Parkhurst. “I’m afraid it doesn’t do to go around the world supposing yourself to be the cleverest one.”

Carin shrugged her pretty shoulders.

“I don’t think that,” she said. “I always think Azalea the cleverest one. I’m only saying that we three understand each other, and that we don’t have to spend half our time explaining, and that we’re just as contented together as mortals can be.”

And just then the door opened and Mrs. Carson came into the room. Her face had lost something of the look of transparency it had worn when she first came to Lee, when she had been fresh from a terrible sorrow, but it was still pale and strangely tender to Azalea’s admiring eyes.

“I do hope you’ll excuse me, Miss Parkhurst,” she said in her soft voice, “for breaking into the study hour. But I’ve something important to talk over, and so I’ve come while all the members of the academy are together.”

She shook hands with Azalea as she spoke, and patted Carin caressingly on the shoulder.

“I’ve come,” she went on, “to talk to you about taking in another girl.”

“Another girl!” cried Carin in dismay. “What girl, please, mamma?” She had sprung to her feet, and stood before her mother with the color sweeping over her face; but Azalea, keeping her thoughts to herself, grew paler, and pinched the edge of the table in her effort to keep the tears of vexation and disappointment from coming to her eyes.

Another girl! And this perfect possession of Carin would be taken from her, and there’d be, as Carin put it, need to “explain” all of the time. How could Mrs. Carson spoil such a perfect thing as their association there? Who else would love to study, and to write, and paint and sing the way they did? Who else would make a game out of it all, and long to get to the schoolroom in the morning and hate to leave at night?

“It’s Annie Laurie Pace,” went on Mrs. Carson, apparently taking no heed of their misery. “Have you met her? Perhaps not, since she goes to the Baptist Meeting House, and you, Azalea, are such a faithful young Methodist, and Carin goes with me to the Episcopal Church. But anyway, I think you must have seen her—a tall girl, with red hair. She’s been helping me some at The Mountain Industries rooms, and I’ve become well acquainted with her. She’s ahead of anything she can get at the district school. Of course I don’t mean that she couldn’t do more mathematics and that sort of thing, but I am convinced that she has a strength and originality of thought which is very unusual. She came here this morning to borrow some books I had offered to lend her, and I have been talking with her for the last hour. I am so convinced that the work here under Miss Parkhurst and with you two shining little stars will give her precisely what she is hungering for, that I have invited her to join you.”

“But, mamma,” expostulated Carin, “we’ll be wretched with her! She’s a nice enough girl, I’m sure, and no doubt she’s bright, but she’ll never be able to really understand Azalea and me, will she, Azalea?”

Azalea said nothing. She was dreadfully embarrassed. She was wondering if Mrs. Carson had some secret reason for forcing another girl in with them? Could it possibly be that she—Azalea—who had been a wandering child, traveling with coarse people in a low circus, was, without knowing it, doing harm to Carin? Perhaps. Carin was so fine, so gay, so sweet, so “like a flower” as the song had it which Mrs. Carson sang, that very likely she seemed no more than a weed beside her.

“Probably that is all I am—a horrid, stupid weed,” said Azalea to herself bitterly as her thoughts flashed this way and that like troubled birds, seeking for what was wrong.

“You can see how Azalea hates the idea, mamma,” said Carin. “And as for me, if that girl comes in here, my education will be ruined.”

She looked a haughty and determined young person as she stood there, her chin lifted and her blue eyes darting cold fires. Mrs. Carson had a twinkle in her eye as she surveyed her. Carin had been a gentle princess in the schoolroom, with Miss Parkhurst for her willing guide and Azalea her adoring servitor. The truth was, the two girls had become so bound up in each other that they saw nothing beyond their own horizon. The dark-eyed girl from the mountain cabin, with her strange, romantic history, and the blue-eyed one from the mansion, loving romance above all imaginable things, had made a compact of undying friendship; and unconsciously, they had also determined to exclude the rest of the world.

“It may seem a little hard for you and Azalea to take Annie Laurie in just at first, Carin,” Mrs. Carson went on, with no show of yielding—indeed, quite as if everything were settled—“but she desperately needs the schooling, and I believe that, without realizing it, you need her. What do you think, Miss Parkhurst; am I right?”

To the increasing dismay of the friends, Helena Parkhurst nodded her nice little head.

“One of the chief reasons why a girl should go to school,” went on Mrs. Carson, smilingly, “is to learn to get along with other girls. You and Azalea are so wrapped up in each other that you actually don’t see other girls as they pass you on the road, and it never seems to occur to you to visit their homes, or to ask them here. It has been borne in upon me for some time that if I don’t watch out, you’ll become a pair of horrid little snobs. Of course you wouldn’t know that you were, and equally of course I wouldn’t admit it to anybody else. But such would be the case, I feel sure.”

“Oh, mother, we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t!” protested Carin. “Just try us a little longer and see.”

But at that moment there came a knock at the door, and Mrs. Carson arose to open it. The girls could see without in the hallway the figure of Annie Laurie Pace, the red-haired, surprisingly tall girl whom they had occasionally seen in town; and now it occurred to each of them that they had not particularly wished to know her.

“Did you say I was to come down here, Mrs. Carson, after I had found that book?” she asked shyly.

“Why, no,” said Mrs. Carson impulsively, “I didn’t say that, Annie Laurie, but now that you are here, come in and meet my daughter and her friend.”

She entered with a quiet dignity, and it took but one second for Carin and Azalea to see that here would be no timid imitator of their whims. If “follow-my-leader” was played, it was not at all certain that they would be in the fore.

“Carin,” said Mrs. Carson, recovering herself from a moment’s embarrassment, “make your new schoolmate welcome. Annie Laurie Pace, Azalea McBirney.”

Carin held out a chilly white hand.

“How do you do?” she said stiffly.

Azalea arose and gave her hand to the new girl. She had been a stranger herself—had many a time been among men and women unknown to her, waiting wistfully to see if she would be welcomed—and she understood, as Carin could not possibly, what brought the veiled look in the new girl’s eyes. Yet she could not venture to offend Carin—her own Carin, whose ways always seemed charming to her.

“How do you do?” she echoed. “I—I hope you are well, Annie Laurie. This—this is a very—pleasant school.”

The words stuck in her throat, and she was ashamed to find how much she wanted to cry.

The new girl looked toward Mrs. Carson.

“Ought I to stay, ma’am?” she asked. “You know I could manage at the other school some way. Wouldn’t it be better if—”

“You will do us a favor if you stay with us,” Mrs. Carson said. And: “Yes, stay, my dear,” urged Helena Parkhurst, making the girls realize for the first time that Annie Laurie had not been presented to Miss Parkhurst, and that the two must have been acquainted before. How long, the girls wondered, had this conspiracy been in the air? Had it really been decided only that morning?

“Will you take up your studies to-day, then, Annie Laurie?” Miss Parkhurst asked. “Mrs. Carson, do you think her father would object?”

“I can telephone him,” Mrs. Carson replied. “We already have had some conversation about the matter. He has been thinking of sending Annie Laurie away to school, but to do such a thing, he said, would leave him very, very lonely, since Annie Laurie is his only child.”

“Oh, it could be managed,” the girl broke in. “I know it could, but—”

Mrs. Carson raised a white hand.

“It will be quite all right,” she said with gentle firmness. “Miss Parkhurst, you have three pupils.”

She withdrew smilingly; and in spite of the leaping flame in the fireplace, and the sunshine stealing like pale gold in at the window, a chill settled down over the room. It crept into the farthermost corners, and gleamed cold as little bergs from the eyes of the three girls.

The three girls?

There were two girls—and one girl. And the sum was not yet three.

Chapter II Annie Laurie Pace

Annie Laurie Pace was making ready for church.

Her Sunday frock of dark blue serge lay on the bed; her silk petticoat rustled as she stepped briskly about the room; and her heavy coat and gloves, and her hat with the ostrich plumes, were primly awaiting her need. All was durable about her clothing, and orderly within the room.

A very clean room it was, somewhat bare and bleak, with a ceiling too high for its size. The floor was uncarpeted, the walls white and without pictures. No unnecessary thing was in sight—not even a pretty foolish trinket on the dresser. Through the windows with their dark green shades Annie Laurie could look out into the dairy yard with its whitewashed houses. Beyond stretched the pastures in which grazed the fine herd that was the pride of her father, Simeon Pace.

Usually, Annie Laurie sang as she dressed for church. She had a warm full voice, with notes in it not unlike the whistle of an oriole. But this morning no song came from her lips. She had a set, almost stern look; her chin came out a little farther than was necessary, and there was battle in her eye.

Her aunts, dressing in the next room, spoke of it.

“Annie Laurie is not herself,” declared Miss Adnah to Miss Zillah. “I can see that she is terribly put about. I do hope and pray that we haven’t made a mistake in letting her leave the district school and go in with Carin Carson and that other girl. It looks to me as if Mrs. Carson was the only person that wanted her—except, perhaps, the governess, Miss Parkhurst—and staying where we’re not wanted is not a thing that we could ever put up with, we Paces.”

“Don’t worry about Annie Laurie, sister,” replied Miss Zillah, setting her queer lid-like hat on her short gray curls. “She made the change of her own free will, remember. She’s run up against a stone wall for the first time in her life, and I’ll be interested to see whether she climbs over or burrows under it. Those two girls she’s studying with don’t like her—or at least they don’t like to have her intruding on them. I don’t know as I blame them very much. There they were, enjoying each other’s society, and in comes a stranger and thrusts them apart, you may say. Annie Laurie is as unlike them as she can be—quite of a different class, indeed.”

Miss Adnah snapped the fasteners of her gloves sharply.

“What do you mean by a different class, sister?” she said reprovingly. “Is it possible you consider the Paces inferior to anyone in this community?”

“Now, Adnah dear, I didn’t say anything about inferiority. I spoke of a difference. What the Paces know, they’ve mostly taught themselves; and what they have, they’ve honestly earned. They’re proud of it. But they’re no prouder of being what they are—well-to-do, reliable, respectable members of the community—than the Carsons are of being highly cultivated, rich, much-traveled gentle-folk, or the McBirneys of being industrious, independent mountain people. The truth is, Adnah, if there were fewer kinds of pride in this community, and less of each kind, it would be a better thing.”

“The team is up, aunts,” called Annie Laurie in her clear voice.

“Very well, child; we are ready,” came the reply.

Of course they were ready. It was seldom, indeed, that anyone in that house kept anyone else waiting. Simeon Pace, holding his fine large grays in check, knew almost to a second how long before the front door would open and three tall, upright figures emerge. And this morning was no exception. At the right instant his sisters, in their well-preserved cloaks, came out together, followed by his daughter. The door was locked, the key placed in the crotch of the sycamore, the aunts were helped to their places by Annie Laurie’s strong arms and then she swung herself into the seat beside her father, and took the reins from his hands. As she did so, she happened to hit her father’s left arm, which gave forth a sound like the rattling of an eave trough in the wind.

And truth to tell, it was made of the same material, for where Simeon Pace’s muscular member of flesh and blood had once swung, there now was an unjointed tin substitute for it, hollow as a drum. An ill-advised visit to a sawmill five years before was responsible for this defect, which indeed, might have been all but concealed had Mr. Pace been willing to buy one of the excellent modern imitations of an arm. His sisters and his daughter continually urged him to do this, but Simeon said that his tin arm had helped him when his trouble was new, and that he refused to throw it on the trash heap as a reward for faithful service. It was nothing to him that his gestures startled nervous folk. He remained loyal to his battered, awkward tin convenience, and seemed to take an innocent joy in waving it in the air, offering it as a support to old ladies, and sawing it up and down when he became excited. All the Paces were independent and Simeon was the most independent of them all.

He led his women folk well up to the front of the church and eyed them with critical kindness as they filed past him into the pew, confident that their thoughts would not wander from the preacher’s words during the service. So it was good for his fatherly satisfaction that he did not look into his daughter’s mind, for barely a sentence of the sermon did she hear that day. Her thoughts were slipping back and forth like shuttles in a loom. The past week in Mrs. Carson’s home has been a strange—and in some ways, a distressing—one. True, never had she learned so much in so short a space of time. If she asked a question everyone tried to answer it. Little as the other two girls had seemed to like her, when it came to a question of ideas, they paid instant and warm attention. An idea was an idea with them, and entitled to respect.

If the combined wit of Miss Parkhurst and her pupils failed to supply a good answer to an inquiry, plenty of books were at hand to consult, and as a last reference, there were Mr. and Mrs. Carson, who seemed to have been almost everywhere and to know something about almost everything. As Annie Laurie had heard them talk, speaking with interest about all manners of people, her little local standards began to vanish like mist before the sun. For the first time it was borne in upon her that Lee, North Carolina, was not the center of civilization. All the world, it appeared, was full of interest—full of good neighborly folk. All one had to do was to learn their language to find out how very nice they really were. It was such a new and brilliant idea to Annie Laurie that it almost dazzled her.

She had been used to thinking herself a bright girl—a girl who could keep at the head of her classes—so it was but natural in those first angry hours when she raged at the cold reception Carin and Azalea had given her, that she should have thought: “Just wait till we get down to lessons, and then I’ll show them.”

But to her surprise, she had not been able to “show them.” Carin and Azalea did not attack their studies so fiercely as she did. They seemed to make more of a game of them and less of a task. They laughed over things that puzzled her. But for all that they were clever, and it did not seem strange to them that Annie Laurie should be clever too. Her cleverness, as they knew, was Mrs. Carson’s excuse for asking her to join them. After that first chilly day they had been polite enough. But they somehow put her in the wrong. She felt awkward and strange. She fatally said the wrong thing—or the right thing in the wrong place. Even her clothes had seemed stiff and unlovely beside theirs, though they were of good material and honestly and thoroughly made. However, as Annie Laurie had more than once reflected, their clothes were made for them by their mothers, who asked nothing better than to see them looking their best. That Mary McBirney was not really Azalea’s mother made no difference—she loved Azalea almost as much, judging from what Azalea said.

Annie Laurie stole a glance at her two excellent aunts—always so really kind and just to her—but rather stern, like her father. The Paces seldom laughed; they almost never kissed each other; they said what they thought—and they quite lacked that pretty foolishness which Mrs. Carson sometimes indulged in with Carin.

Annie Laurie could remember that her own mother had been something like Mrs. Carson. It was she who had given her the name after the sweet old song. She had laughed and danced and sung, and the aunts had not quite liked it, although they mourned her deeply when she died, still in her youth. And they had treasured as keepsakes the things which had been hers.

But what was the preacher saying all this time? Something about Ananias and the doom which overtook him because of his lies. It was not a subject in which she could feel much interest. Sometimes, up at her house they suffered from too much truth telling—hard, cold truth telling—but not a soul of them would have been guilty of a lie.

“Plant a lie in the garden of your soul,” said the minister, “and it will flourish worse than any poisonous weed. And do not think that you can uproot it when you will, for it will grow and grow, till it is stronger than you, and not all your prayers and tears can tear it out of your life.”

Annie Laurie wondered why he should be talking like that to those friendly, good neighbors, who seemed to be doing the best they could’ from morning till night. She wished he would talk about something that would help her through the coming week, for she dreaded going back with those girls who did not like her. Why couldn’t preachers know what was going on in the back of one’s mind? She looked up wearily and met the gaze of “that Disbrow boy,” as her aunts always called Sam Disbrow, the son of the undertaker. For some reason they did not like him. They “had no use for the whole kit and b’ilin’ of Disbrows.” Yet, someway, Annie Laurie, though she had grown up with this sentiment ringing in her ears, thought Sam Disbrow rather a nice boy. At this moment he seemed to be as impatient as she was at the way the minister was scolding about liars. Evidently liars failed to interest Sam, also.

It happened that Annie Laurie and Sam were near together as the people came out of church, and while the rest stood talking in the bright winter sunshine, they talked, too.

“How are you liking it at your new school, Annie Laurie?” he inquired.

The girl flushed hotly—it was easy for a person with such white skin as Annie Laurie’s to blush. Sam knew this and made allowances, but he saw there was something more than ordinary the matter. He looked at her a moment, half closing his eyes, and turning his head a little on one side in a way he had.

“They’ve been snubbing you—those girls!” he declared. “I knew they would—knew it as well as anything.”

“I don’t see how you could know that,” said Annie Laurie with a sudden feeling that she ought not say anything against Carin and Azalea. “They’re the nicest girls I ever knew; the nicest girls anywhere about here. If I haven’t been able to—to make them understand me, it’s my own fault, I suppose.”

“Nonsense!” cried Sam. “They’re not nice if they’ve been making you unhappy. How can you let them do it? No fellow could put it over me, now, I tell you. If he didn’t treat me fair and square, I’d have it out with him. We’d soon see who was the best man.”

“Girls don’t do things that way, Sam.”

“I know they don’t. They sit around and mope and sniff and feel mean, instead of making a good healthy row. I didn’t think you were such a hypocrite.”

“Hypocrite?” gasped the girl, too surprised to feel angry. “How am I a hypocrite, Sam?”

“Because you’re pretending to be contented when you aren’t. You probably act as if you liked those girls. And you don’t—you can’t—if they’re snubby. I say, stir up a fuss. Have a row. Tell ’em what you think of ’em. That will clear the air.”

“I’m under too many obligations to Mrs. Carson to do a thing like that, Sam.”

“Obligations!” snorted Sam. “Nobody is under obligations to be a doormat.”

All the way home the girl kept thinking of what Sam Disbrow had said to her. She would have liked to talk the whole matter over with her Aunt Zillah, but something held her back from complaining of the girls. Deep down within her was the feeling that if only she could manage right, they would yet be friends, true, “forever and forever” friends. If that should prove to be so, it wouldn’t do for this one and that one to be remembering that she had criticised them.

And yet, how they had tormented her with their way of seeing and yet not seeing her, and answering and yet not answering. And she was lonely—desperately lonely. She longed to see the gleam come in the girls’ eyes when they looked at her, which they turned upon each other. All the long, quiet Sunday afternoon she thought of it, though she tried to read. She knew Azalea and Carin were together, for she had heard them planning a horseback ride, while she was alone, and as she told herself sadly, likely to be alone every Sunday, since she knew no one she really wished to be with—save those two, of course.

She had an hour of trying to hate them, but she failed miserably. For all they had made her suffer, she could not get as far as hating them. She failed to sleep well that night. Her mind whirled like a merry-go-round, always bringing back the same thoughts and persons. Azalea and Carin, Carin and Azalea. The bright and charming faces kept returning, but never once did they seem to bear the smiles of friendship and understanding.

Naturally she was far from being herself when she went down to breakfast the next morning, and when her Aunt Adnah said, “You see to it, Ann, that you’re not put upon there at Mrs. Carson’s,” her patience snapped like a wind-filled bag.

“Oh, please leave me alone, Aunt Adnah,” she cried hotly. “I’ll take care of myself all right.”

“My dear, my dear,” murmured Miss Zillah, “ought you to be speaking like that to your Aunt Adnah?”

Annie Laurie knew very well that she ought not, and she was morally certain that if Carin and Azalea could have heard her, they would have cried: “There, see! You call her a nice girl?”

Well, maybe she wasn’t a nice girl, but certainly she was an unhappy one.

She put her head up as high as she could comfortably carry it on her very slim neck and marched away to school. It was a wonderful winter morning—the sort that got into the blood of horses and made them prance. Perhaps it was in Annie Laurie’s blood, too, as she entered the schoolroom that morning. Miss Parkhurst had not yet come, and Carin and Azalea sat together laughing over some charts of the South Sea Isles. Miss Parkhurst had laid out an interesting course for them, all relating to the Archipelago; and geography, history, biography, poetry and fiction were to be woven together until the life of the “burning isles” appeared before them in a series of vivid mental pictures.

If Annie Laurie had been aware of the amount of explosive material in her brain and heart that morning, perhaps she would have had the discretion to remain at home. She really was about as dangerous as a keg of gunpowder, and it chanced that Carin’s first words were as a match to produce the inevitable explosion.

“I don’t suppose you’d care about reading Stevenson’s ‘Ebb Tide,’ would you, Annie Laurie? Not, I mean, as a part of the South Sea study?” She put the question in that cold, detached little voice which she had used from the first to the “new girl.” “We couldn’t expect a thorough person like yourself to enjoy such an unbusiness-like way of getting at things. I said to Miss Parkhurst that probably Azalea and I had better keep that for reading after hours, and during school we’ll study any old Smithsonian Institute reports you and she manage to look up.”

There was a little click in Annie Laurie’s throat, but no spoken word. Carin, looked up, saw the anger blazing in the girl’s eyes, and started to say that she was only joking; but before she could frame the words Annie Laurie found her tongue.

“Why wouldn’t I like to read Stevenson as well as you two?” she demanded. “Why do you make out that I try to do things in the hard and stupid way? You’ve certainly made them hard and stupid enough for me the past week. You’re supposed to have such fine manners, and Azalea is thought ‘so sweet.’ I haven’t seen your fine manner or her sweetness. I imagined it was going to be lovely here with you two—that my life would grow to be interesting when we three were friends. Well, perhaps it would—if we could be friends. But we can’t. First, because you won’t be—and second because I won’t. I’m through. I shouldn’t have come. I’m disgusted that I gave you a chance to snub me. I’m going now, and after this when you poke fun at me you’ll have to do it behind my back.”

“Why—why—Annie Laurie—” gasped Carin, “I didn’t know—”

But Annie Laurie already had left the room and was stalking down the corridor. Carin sank back in her chair and covered her face with her hands. As for Azalea, her book crashed to the floor.

“Oh, Carin,” she cried, “what have we done?”

Miss Parkhurst still was absent, but if she had been there, it is doubtful if the girls would have consulted her. The battle which had been threatening all week was on, and the victory at present was, oddly enough, with the fleeing enemy.

She was already out of the front door by the time Azalea had reached the hall; and once she was in the open, her dignity deserted her and she ran toward the gate as if fleeing from a lava stream. Azalea, who had stopped to snatch her cap and reefer, reached the gate only to see her racing along the road as fast as her long legs would carry her.

Meantime, Hi Kitchell, the boy who had traveled with Azalea in those old, half-forgotten days, and who was now happily settled with his mother and “the kids” in the cabin in which the Carsons had placed them, opened his sharp eyes to see two girls racing along the frozen road, stumbling over hard ruts, and then plunging on again. He knew them both—liked Annie Laurie and swore by Azalea. He saw the anger in the first girl’s face and the anxiety in Azalea’s every gesture. He couldn’t for the life of him see why, if Annie Laurie felt like that, she didn’t turn around and “baste” Azalea. But if she did he’d be on Azalea’s side all right enough.

Goodness, how they were running! He simply couldn’t stand not knowing what it all was about. He knew it was none of his business, but for all of that, a second later he was pelting down the road after them. He could run like a rabbit and it was not long before he overtook them.

But that was just at the moment when Annie Laurie reached her home and, dashing in, slammed the door behind her; and Azalea, panting on the doorstep, furiously rang the bell.

Chapter III Trial Without Jury

Miss Adnah was washing dishes in her spotless kitchen when the inner door burst open and a wild-eyed Annie Laurie stood before her.

“Child!” gasped Miss Adnah.

Annie Laurie stood panting breathlessly, her hands on her sides, her eyes blazing.

“Well, you said I wasn’t to let myself be put upon,” she managed to say at length. “So I didn’t. I had my say. I’m through!”

“What have you done?”

“I’m through,” she went on shrilly. “To-morrow I’ll go back to the district school. The other thing wasn’t for me.”

The anger in her eyes began to give way in misery. Miss Adnah stared at her, trying for once to get at the girl’s point of view. Then came the frantic ringing at the bell.

“Mercy on us,” cried Miss Adnah, “what can that mean?”

“Don’t go, aunt. Don’t you go. It’s Azalea McBirney. She followed me. You mustn’t—”

“Stand out of my way, Ann. How can you put yourself between me and the door? When the bell rings, it is to be answered. I do not approve of your actions, allow me to say.”

But just then the breathless voice of Azalea was heard in the hall. Miss Zillah had got to the door before them, and had admitted her.

“Don’t try to talk, my dear,” they heard Miss Zillah saying. “Whatever it is, it can wait till you get your breath. Come in, please, and sit down.”

In the kitchen, Annie Laurie was declaring that whatever came she would not go into the parlor.

“I won’t talk the matter over, that’s all,” she said. “It’s no use for you to try to make me go in there.”

Miss Adnah moved back from her niece with a look of displeasure.

“You’d better quiet down, Ann,” she said severely. “I can’t imagine what you’ve done or what’s been done to you, but I do feel certain that you are making a mountain out of a molehill.”

At that moment something bobbed up at the window and then bobbed down again.

“Mercy, what’s that?” cried Miss Adnah.

“A head,” said Annie Laurie disgustedly.

“A head! Whose?”

“Hi Kitchell’s. He must have seen us running and followed.”

“The inquisitive little imp! A pretty sight the three of you must have made. Never have I heard such goings on in the house of Simeon Pace. Let me pass, Ann. I must look into this matter.”

Annie Laurie never yet had disobeyed when her aunt spoke in that manner, and she stood aside, lifting her eyebrows with annoyance at the “Ann” which was the sign of Miss Adnah’s displeasure. She began to grow a little calmer, but at the same time the feeling of heaviness at her heart increased. It actually seemed as if it had turned into a stone and was dragging her down. And worse still, there was a hand of iron at her throat. That sharp despair of the young was upon her—that foolish despair, which sees no way out of hard circumstance.

Meantime Miss Adnah had gone on into the hall. She had meant to make her way at once into that grim parlor upon which her best efforts at cleanliness were so rigorously expended, but the sound of voices made her pause. She heard a girl’s excited voice broken by tears.

“Oh, you’re Annie Laurie’s aunt, aren’t you?” said the voice. “Which aunt, please? Her aunt Zillah? Oh, yes. She has told me about you. Oh, Miss Pace, it’s so dreadful! We’ve broken Annie Laurie’s heart, that’s what we’ve done. We didn’t intend it, you know. It came about because—may I tell you everything?”

“Yes, tell me everything,” answered Miss Zillah.

“Of course Zillah will be soft with her,” thought Miss Adnah. “She’s soft with everybody. I’d like to go in and shake her—upsetting Annie Laurie like that.”

There were long panes of glass running down beside the front hall door, and at this moment the ferret face of Hi Kitchell, seamed with anxiety, peered in one of them. This was really too much for Miss Adnah. She rushed to the door and threw it open, sending Hi off backward into the althea bush. It was no trick at all for Miss Adnah to stoop and pick him up as if he were a slug.

“What do you mean, you unmannerly, prying boy?” she demanded. “Peeking in folk’s windows, like you were a wild Indian!”

“Tell me what you’re doing to Azalea,” squealed Hi defiantly. “Azalea’s all right, ma’am. I don’t want anything done to her.”

“Well, she wasn’t invited here any more than you,” snapped Miss Adnah, dropping him on the brick walk. “You run home and leave us to conduct our own affairs. Hear?”

“Oh, aunt!” Annie Laurie whispered agonizingly, “Azalea will hear you.”

“Why didn’t you stay in the kitchen, miss? You seemed very anxious not to leave it a few minutes ago. I won’t have boys looking in my windows.”

“But it’s only Hi. He’s crazy about Azalea—like her little brother, you know. Azalea will think we’re dreadful.”

“Dreadful? We may be a terror to evil doers—well, hear that telephone, will you? Ringing like mad. Never did I know such a morning. No, I’ll answer it, Ann. Hello! Hello! Yes. The Pace residence. Who? Carin Carson. Very well, what is it? Yes, Ann is home. All right? Of course she’s all right. Why shouldn’t she be? You want to speak to her? She’s busy just now.”

“Oh, oh, don’t speak like that, aunt,” implored Annie Laurie. “Not in that tone of voice. Let me have the telephone, Aunt Adnah, please—please. I was bad, honestly, aunt—not at all the way I ought to have been. Carin’s sorry, I reckon.”

But Miss Adnah had hung up the receiver, and she turned toward Annie Laurie with a stormy look in her eye.

“I reckon I did you an injustice, Ann. It must have been something pretty bad they did to you. You can back down as much as you please, but for my part I mean to teach them that if they think they can fool with the Paces, they are making a mistake.”

“But my child,” the clear tones of Miss Zillah could be heard saying from the drawing room meantime, “why didn’t you like Annie Laurie? She seems the nicest sort of a girl to me. I’ve taken care of her—I and my sister, that is—since she was a little one, and she’s all that a daughter should be to us. Of course I realize that we may not have succeeded in taking her mother’s place to her. That was hardly to have been expected. But we have done the best we could for her, and when we saw her coming on in school so splendidly, and realized that she was likely to do something fine, we were very proud indeed. I can’t tell you how grateful we were to Mrs. Carson for giving her a chance for special instruction, and for being in with girls like you and Miss Carin. But we saw from the first that something was going wrong. The child seemed too excited to eat. Once or twice I’ve heard her cry out in the night—she sleeps next me, and after she’s asleep I open the door between our rooms so as to hear if anything goes wrong.”

“And a very silly habit it is,” muttered Miss Adnah from the hall.

“Oh, don’t say any more, Miss Pace,” Azalea broke in with a sob in her voice. “If anybody in this world ought to have been good to Annie Laurie it is myself, for I haven’t any mother, either, you know, though of course Mrs. McBirney is as good to me as any mother could be. I can’t explain the way we’ve acted. It all came about from Carin and myself having some lovely secrets together, and games we liked to play that we didn’t want to share with any one. And we were writing poems, and Carin was painting me. We were happy in each other all the time. Then Annie Laurie came and—and we didn’t know her. It wouldn’t have made any difference who the girl was that broke in on us, we wouldn’t have liked it. Mrs. Carson said we were getting selfish and snobbish, and I suppose we were. And Annie Laurie was proud, too—and—and well, a little—”

“Say it, my dear. I am not laboring under the delusion that Annie Laurie is wearing a halo on her head.”

“Well, sulky. So she didn’t give us a chance to see the—the nice side which she simply must have since you love her so. And we wouldn’t show ours to her. We were all stupid, I think. But of course we didn’t have an idea how she really felt until this morning when she got so angry. And then I was—was just paralysed.”

“You talk very well, my child, for a person suffering with paralysis. I can see very well how it came about, however. Now may I ask why you came here?”

“To say how sorry we were—and to beg Annie Laurie to come back with us.”

“But have you the right to do this? Did Mrs. Carson tell you to come?”

Azalea, who had been sitting on the very edge of Miss Zillah’s horsehair sofa, now got to her feet, her face flaming till it was almost as red as her knitted reefer.

“No,” she said frankly. “She—she didn’t tell me to come, Miss Pace. I just ran after Annie Laurie as hard as I could.”

“And very sweet it was of you, my dear. It shows you have a generous heart, and that you couldn’t imagine Mrs. Carson or her daughter would feel any differently from you. But you can see for yourself that I must wait till I hear from them.”

“We have heard from them,” cried Annie Laurie eagerly from the hall. “Carin telephoned, Aunt Zillah; but Aunt Adnah wouldn’t let her talk.”

“I should think not, indeed,” came the voice of Aunt Adnah.

“Oh, come in, Annie Laurie, please,” cried Azalea, running toward the hall door.

Annie Laurie made a motion as if for flight, then brought herself up sharply, and faced Azalea. Miss Zillah had arisen and stood smiling and trembling a trifle, too, like a rose bush softly shaken by the wind. Her lips moved slightly, and Annie Laurie, flashing a glance at her as she came into the room, understood that Aunt Zillah was putting up one of her gentle supplications for peace.

“Oh, Annie Laurie,” Azalea burst forth, “I’ve come to ask you to forgive me. You really, really must. I had no idea how you were feeling. I’m terribly unhappy about it. Don’t you think you can forgive me?”

“What is there for me to forgive?” asked Annie Laurie. “You didn’t want me—you and Carin—and you showed it. That’s all there is to it. I shan’t bother you any more.”

“Well, I want you now,” declared Azalea. “You can see yourself that it would be impossible for Carin and me to be happy with you leaving that way, all hurt and angry. I don’t blame you a bit, really. Except, of course, I think you shut up like a clam when you saw that we didn’t like a third person in the classes. It wasn’t that we objected to you in particular. We were selfish, that’s all, and fond of our own good times; but it won’t be like that again, honestly it won’t. Your aunt says I mustn’t speak for Carin and Mrs. Carson, and I see that I mustn’t, but I know so well that I am saying just what they would want me to say, that I can’t keep still.” She turned toward Miss Zillah, and caught the worn hand of the woman in hers. “Truly,” she said, “they’d be saying just what I am, if they were here.”

“That boy again!” exploded Miss Adnah from the hall. “He’s looking in the hall window again.”

“It’s only poor Hi,” explained Azalea. “You see, he’s always afraid something is going to happen to me.”

“Well, if I had my way, it would,” snapped Miss Adnah.

“Oh, sister, sister,” murmured Miss Zillah.

And just then the eyes of Azalea and Annie Laurie met. There was a flash between them and then something exploded—exploded in helpless laughter. Miss Zillah, unable to believe her senses, called faintly, “Adnah! Adnah!” And Adnah, on the point of making another sortie into the yard for the prying Hi, answered her appeal, and came to the parlor. There she saw the two girls in convulsions of laughter, and Zillah stiff and incredulous on the piano stool. Miss Adnah surveyed the scene for a moment in wrath.

“Come, Zillah,” she commanded, and dragged her sister from the room.

The girls heard the kitchen door slam behind the two, and rocked again with painful mirth.

“Oh, oh,” half-sobbed Annie Laurie at length, “how ridiculous we’ve been!”

“Dreadful,” agreed Azalea. “I’m just as ashamed of myself as I can be. Can’t I go and apologize to your aunts?”

“Not on any account,” said Annie Laurie firmly. “They’ll never understand. Never! You couldn’t expect them to.”

“Will you come back with me, Annie Laurie? We’re bound to like each other now after we’ve laughed together like that.”

Annie Laurie gave a final gurgle.

“I know,” she said. “Let’s go out and tell Hi.”

“No, just let’s walk out together, arm in arm. That will make it all right. Let’s never, never tell anyone what happened.”

“Very well, then. And you think I ought to go back?”

“I know it. You must go on Carin’s account and on mine—just prove we’re not so horrid as you thought us.”

The telephone rang again. They could hear Miss Zillah begging to be allowed to answer it and Miss Adnah refusing. So Annie Laurie took down the receiver.

“Yes, Mrs. Carson,” Azalea heard her say. “Yes, it’s Annie Laurie. Yes, Azalea is here. Forgive Carin? Yes, Mrs. Carson. I reckon it was my fault, too. Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t _your_ fault, whosever it was, ma’am. We’ve been bad, that’s all. Everybody is bad sometimes, I suppose. I never was so horrid before, though, honestly. You say Carin never was, either. Well, I’m coming back now. Azalea and I were just starting. What is it? Oh, yes, we’ll not talk of it. Very well, Mrs. Carson. Good-bye.”

She turned to Azalea.

“Come,” she said, “if we go right along we’ll be able to finish our South Sea Island study hour.”

She put her head in the kitchen door. “Good-bye, aunts,” she said. “Try to forget about it all. I’m going back.”

“Annie Laurie,” came the austere voice of her Aunt Adnah, “how can you?”

Annie Laurie ran in and threw her arms around her aunt’s neck.

“Because I have to, auntie,” she said, “to be happy and—”

“And good,” broke in Aunt Zillah. She followed them out into the hall. Her pale face was shining, and her short curls bobbed about on her trembling head. She knew that her prayer for peace had been answered. It did not matter to her that it had come in gusts of laughter. Miss Zillah was not one to quarrel with ways and means.

As for the girls, they set out on the road with vigor. The air was full of life, the mountains were brown beneath their purple bloom, and the roadway was beginning to fill with folk driving in to market. Azalea and Annie Laurie knew almost every one—knew Mr. Disbrow, the undertaker, driving his black horses—which now were hitched to a somewhat rickety buggy—they knew “Haystack” Thompson, who was eating up the road with his great strides, his fiddle under his arm; they knew Elder Mills, twisted and tormented with rheumatism, who was about to “accept a call” in Florida, thus leaving vacant the pulpit of the Methodist church; they were well acquainted with the grocer, and the miller, and the postmaster, and the sheriff. From each they received a salutation, and from most of them an inquiry as to why they were not in school. Annie Laurie, used to the “yea and nay” of the Pace household, wondered what they ought to answer, and she was astonished that Azalea had no difficulty at all in finding a fit reply.

“Oh, we’ve been to school this morning,” she said smilingly. “And we’ve learned a hard lesson, too. Now we’re on our way back again.”

But they had got no more than half the way to The Shoals when the familiar surrey of the Carsons appeared, with Mrs. Carson sitting in it.

“Goodness,” cried Annie Laurie, “she’s coming for me! What trouble I have put everybody to.”

But Mrs. Carson didn’t seem to think that anybody was making her trouble. She wore that pleasant, dreamy smile of hers—her “moonlight” smile, as Carin called it, and her voice was as even and low as ever as she bade Benjamin turn the horses, and invited the girls to get in beside her.

“I thought I’d come to meet you,” she said blandly, and quite as if nothing had happened. They rode along together in silence for a while, almost wondering if anything unpleasant really had occurred, Mrs. Carson seemed so unconscious of it. But when they got out of the carriage at the house door she said:

“I’m so glad you’ve talked everything out. You’ll find it much better always, I believe—to talk things out. By the way, Carin is up in her studio. Lessons are to be up there this morning, for a change. Azalea, will you kindly show Annie Laurie the way? Your luncheon will be served there too. We thought we’d celebrate the formation of the Triple Alliance.

“What, ma’am?” said Azalea.

“The Three Girls’ Alliance,” smiled Mrs. Carson. “Drive back to town, please Ben. I must do my marketing.”

As she rode off, Annie Laurie looked at Azalea in a puzzled way.

“How quiet she is,” she said. “I can’t make her out. Nothing seems to matter to her, yet she’s always doing good. I never heard of anyone who did so much good. Can you understand her?”

Azalea shook her head.

“No—and yet a great sorrow, such as hers—it makes you still, I reckon. My mother—I call Mrs. McBirney my mother, you know—is still. Yet she has lost only one child, and little Molly died right in her arms. But Mrs. Carson lost her three sons in a theatre fire in Chicago, and it did something to her, I suppose. The heart went out of her, though not the goodness.”

“Oh, dear no,” agreed Annie Laurie, “not the goodness.”

They left their outer wraps in the vacant schoolroom, and then made their way up the wide mahogany stairs, with the gleaming white banisters and mahogany rail. Curious old prints lined the side of the wall, and Annie Laurie wanted to pause and look at them, but Azalea urged her on.

“If you stopped to look at every interesting thing in this house,” she said, “you’d never get anywhere.”

They went on past the floor where the bedrooms were, and then up a narrower flight of stairs to the third story.

“Half of this story is Carin’s,” explained Azalea. “The servants sleep in the other half.”

A tall, curious door, much paneled, with a shining brass knob, stood before them. There was also a knocker of brass, shaped like a lyre. Azalea rapped with it.

“Come in,” said the voice of Carin, and Azalea threw wide the door and motioned Annie Laurie to enter.

What she saw then she was never to forget. It was as bright to her, as different from anything she ever had seen, as the green Azores are to one who has ridden long upon the gray Atlantic. The room was paneled high in white, and above it, decorations of tropical flowers and parokeets made the wall gay. Muslin curtains hung at the dormer windows, beneath draperies of delicate green. Near the north window was Carin’s easel, with the unfinished portrait of Azalea upon it. Chairs of green wicker stood about; a huge divan was piled with dainty pillows; in the white wooden fireplace, with its tiles of parrots, palms and pagodas, a bright fire burned. Japanese rugs of gray and white lay on the floor, and in jars of pale green, or gray, were beautiful blossoming plants.

But exquisite as the room was, and deeply as it satisfied Annie Laurie’s beauty-starved heart, it was as nothing to the girl who was the center of it.

[Picture: Carin stood awaiting them, her hands outstretched]

In her crimson school frock, soft and graceful, her golden hair shining on her shapely head, her eyes full of tears of repentance, Carin stood awaiting them, her hands outstretched. It all seemed so different from what Annie Laurie knew of her, that at first she hesitated to go forward, but Carin came on, still with that look of solicitude in her face.

“Oh, Annie Laurie,” she said, “I see everything now. I see how I acted and how I made you feel. You’ll have to forgive me. I never was like that before. It was as if imps got inside me, and the worst of it was that I seemed to want to hang on to them. I knew I was wicked, but I liked to be that way. I just wouldn’t give up, though I was unhappy all the time. I told mother all about it, and she said that was the way it was when you got perverse. You liked it. Perversity seemed sweeter than anything. She said it was like being a drunkard. You enjoyed the thing that ruined you. I can see just what she meant. I’ll tell you now, Annie Laurie, that after the first day or two I found myself liking you, and I hated to admit it. I tried not to as hard as I could. I didn’t like mamma’s putting a girl in with us without talking it over, do you see? But I do like you—I had to. The whole trouble was that I couldn’t bear to give up. But you’ve made me, and now I’m well again. For it’s just like a spell of sickness, having a horrid, wicked idea like mine and holding on to it. Do you understand?”

Annie Laurie’s face had flushed softly; her eyes were misty, her handsome, large mouth slightly tremulous. She withdrew her hands from Carin’s, and put her arms close about her.

“When I say I forgive,” she said, “I do.”

“And do you say it?”

Annie Laurie laughed deep in her throat—and again her voice reminded one of an oriole’s.

“I do say it,” she said. “Your mother called it the Triple Alliance—the Three Girls’ Alliance.”

“We must swear fealty!” cried Azalea. She ran to the table and brought back Howard Pyle’s “Robin Hood,” in which the story of the forester and his faithful crew is told in equally beautiful words and pictures.

“Swear!” she commanded. Carin, laughing somewhat uncertainly, dropped her slender white hand on it. Annie Laurie laid her firm brown one over it; Azalea placed on top her sensitive, odd hand, which always quivered when she cared about anything.

“We swear,” they said in chorus.

The door opened and Miss Parkhurst entered, her arms full of books.

Chapter IV A Rainy Night

After that, the short days of winter passed as happily for the three girls as days can be expected to pass in a world which some discouraged person called “a vale of tears.” Alert as their minds were, each was decidedly different from the other, and they had the effect of spurring each other on. Carin was, of course, really more interested in her drawing and painting than in anything else, although she was a good student, too. Annie Laurie simply devoured books, and her happiest diversion was music. A good teacher came weekly from Rutherford, a town near by, to give her instruction. But Azalea took neither drawing nor singing lessons. She had much housework to do before and after school, and her long ride down the mountain each morning and back again at night, with the fatigue it entailed, had to be taken into account. Then she helped with the sewing and with the weaving, and so had neither time nor strength for anything else. Once Mrs. Carson said to her husband:

“Perhaps we were wrong not to insist on having Azalea live with us. It is true that few children have so much love and care given them as she has there with the dear McBirneys. But she has to share their poverty too, and their hard work. Do you think she will be worn out, Charles? Children seem so precious to me. I can’t bear to see their strength wasted.”

“My dear, she is being made into a very capable girl,” Mr. Carson answered reassuringly. “She is having the sort of training our pioneer ancestors had, and they grew stronger for their tasks and hardships. You and I are not going to live forever, you know, and our Carin will never want to take up the work we’re doing here among the mountain people. She’ll be off to Paris or Rome, I suppose, picture seeing and making. But here’s Azalea, in the most practical arts and crafts school possible. She sees the mountain handicrafts made every day right before her eyes, and when she’s grown she’ll be able to teach others. She’ll come in here and take up the work where we leave off.”

“Charles Carson,” cried his wife indignantly, shocked for once out of her sweet placidity, “what do you mean by speaking of us as if we were old? Why, we’re hardly middle-aged.”

“Aren’t we?” said Mr. Carson rather wearily, yet smiling too. “I didn’t know, Lucy. Sometimes it seems to me as if I had lived a long time.”

His wife was silent. She knew what he meant. Who could know better? The day of blight that took from them their three fine sons had left them disinclined to go on playing the game of life. They had tried many things, and at length had come into this quiet valley, where there was so much uncomplaining poverty, where the people had latent talents that only needed encouragement to make them bread-winning forces, and they had endeavored to make themselves necessary.

They had bought the beautiful old home that long years before had belonged to Azalea’s grandfather, Colonel Atherton, and they had showered their favors right and left and tried to make their influence felt in all parts of the county. Their love of doing something, of building up, was as a fresh wind blowing in a sultry plain. For a lassitude had hung over the beautiful valley of Lee—a lassitude born of long years of loneliness, lack of opportunity and monotony. Too little had happened; there had been too few ways of earning money; too few strangers had come that way. One day was so like another that a spell lay upon the people, and they moved as in a long dream. But it was different now. There was some use in making the strong, hand-woven cloth, the durable, quaint chairs and the curious baskets, for Mr. Carson saw that they were profitably marketed.

Mr. Carson had induced the mother of Hi Kitchell, a little worn woman with three children to support, to come down from the mountains and oversee his industries for him. He had given her a little home on the level spot known as the Field of Arrows, an ancient Indian camping ground, and here the young women came to learn the weaving of baskets and of cloth. The front room was the shop, where the people came to buy these interesting wares.

Here, too, the three girls came sometimes after school for a cup of tea and some homemade cake—for Mrs. Kitchell served these comforts to all who wished them—and sitting around her fire, they listened to her stories and told tales of their own adventures. Sometimes there would be a dozen or more in the tea room, whiling away the tedium of a winter afternoon. Hi and the other children helped with the serving, and now and then “for the fun of it” Jim McBirney or Sam Disbrow took a hand. There always was plenty to do at the Mountain Industries, it seemed, however slack work might be elsewhere.

One day of cold rain, Azalea and Annie Laurie had stopped in at Mrs. Kitchell’s for a cup of tea before they made their way to their distant homes. There was no one there that afternoon, save the sharp-eyed, busy Mrs. Kitchell, and she, having served them, went back to the loom-room and left them to themselves. The girls were excellent friends now. They trusted and admired each other—counted on each other, as true friends should.

“Azalea,” said Annie Laurie, “I never understood rightly about your ‘cousin Barbara.’ I’ve heard you speak of her, but I’m not quite clear as to who she is.”

Azalea laughed lightly.

“She isn’t really my cousin at all,” she said. “I have no kin, Annie Laurie. But I have told you, have I not, how my poor mamma and I were traveling with a dreadful show when she died; and how we had got as far as the McBirney’s cottage, and Ma McBirney—as Jim calls her—had my dear mamma buried right there near the house, where her own little Molly’s grave is? Then she asked the show people to let her take me, and they wouldn’t. And so the dear, brave thing took me anyway, and ran away up into the mountains with me and hid with me in a cave. And Pa McBirney and some of his friends stayed down at the house, with shotguns, and scared the show folk away. Well, Sisson, Hi Kitchell’s uncle, who was at the head of the show, was terribly angry, and he made up his mind he would have me back again. So one time, when we all went off to a ‘Singing,’ he managed to get me, and to carry me away, and for weeks I was taken from one place to another in the mountains, away off the beaten tracks, always hiding. Oh, it was such a time, Annie!”

“I know,” said the other sympathetically. “Of course I heard about that. We were all so excited, wondering if you’d be found, and I just cried when I heard that you were, and that good old Haystack Thompson was bringing you home. I didn’t know you—and I couldn’t even remember having seen you—but I felt interested in you from that moment.”

“Well, perhaps you heard that I managed to run away from the people who were hiding me, and I went down the mountain in the night, and came to the little town at the foot of it, and crept into a house there, and into a sleeping-porch with a bed in it. Oh, I was so tired—so tired it was almost like dying. I don’t really remember getting in that bed; but I was found there in the morning by Mr. Summers, who is a Methodist minister, you know. His wife is Barbara Summers. And they have the dearest baby you ever saw or heard of—Jonathan Summers, he is, bless him. Well, Mrs. Summers is just a little dear thing with brown eyes—she’s no bigger than I am. And from the minute we saw each other, we loved each other and felt at home. So we decided that we’d be kin. I write to her one week, and she writes to me the next. She sends me pictures of Jonathan that she takes with her little camera, and I send her presents when I can—little woven table-covers or baskets. You’ve no idea how sweet she is, Annie Laurie.”

“You seem to make friends whenever you please, Azalea. It’s so easy for you! The Paces aren’t like that. It’s hard for them to let themselves go and say the thing that comes into their minds. We’re stiff, someway. But when we do make friends, we keep them.”

“Be sure to keep me, Annie Laurie. I nearly lost you through my own carelessness, and I mean to hang on to you now. Well, come, let’s start for home.”

But as it turned out, it was raining most dismally. A dark cloud had tumbled off the mountain and settled down over the valley, and though it was not late, it seemed almost like night.

“Goodness me,” said Annie Laurie, “I don’t like to think of you riding away up on the mountain a night like this. Why, you’d be drenched.”

“I ought to have accepted Carin’s invitation and stayed all night with her,” said Azalea. “Mother doesn’t expect me on bad nights. She’s not to worry about me if I don’t come when it rains or snows.”

“Oh, stay with me, Azalea! It’s just the chance I’ve been wanting. You’ve never been in my home except on that funny day when we all had conniption fits—especially Aunt Adnah. But, honestly, Aunt Adnah is a brick if you know her.”

Azalea giggled. “Yes, she did seem to have some of the properties of a brick—hardness, for example. She hit me between the eyes.”

“Well, she’ll make it up to you now, if you’ll give her a chance. Of course she wouldn’t say that she wants to make up, but she does.”

“I’d just love to stay all night with you,” Azalea said. “I’ll take the pony back to the Carsons’ stable, and then we’ll walk over to your house.”

“Very well. I’ll go with you to the stable.” They put the pony in the stall, and then, wrapped in their raincoats, tramped along over the red pine needles to Annie Laurie’s home.

“Don’t feel at all backward, will you, Azalea?” the other girl said as they stood on the doorstep. “You just have a little pluck and everything will come out all right.”

Azalea laughed.

“You don’t half understand me yet, Annie Laurie,” she said. “You’re so much more serious than I am. I can’t help enjoying things even when they are serious. I know I oughtn’t to feel that way, but I think it will be awfully funny to see your Aunt Adnah’s face when she finds I’ve had the impudence to come again.”

Annie Laurie frowned a trifle. She was not quite sure she liked to have her aunt regarded as amusing. However, they went in together. The door of the grim little parlor was closed, but the living-room door stood open and Annie Laurie led the way in. There was an ugly brussels carpet on the floor, and a center table covered with a chenille cloth; on it was the reading lamp, and ranged about it were comfortable chairs. A black marble clock ticked noisily on the mantel shelf, and a low fire smouldered among the ashes. The scrim curtains had many colored figures in them, and helped to keep out the light of the declining day. Azalea could not help contrasting it with the exquisite rooms at The Shoals, and with the quaint, charming rooms in the McBirney cabin. She could understand some of the bitter things that Annie Laurie had said to her—could see that, somehow, life had been commonplace for this girl from the first, and that, though she did not altogether realize it, it was this common-placeness which made her dissatisfied.

“Wherever can the aunts be?” said Annie Laurie. “The fire is out in the kitchen, and there are no signs of supper. Usually at this hour, things are humming like a bee hive. Take off your things, Azalea. I’ll hang them up where they’ll dry. You sit right down before the fire, and I’ll bring in some wood.”

“But let me help, Annie Laurie.”

“No, no. You’re company. I don’t often have company.” She went away with Azalea’s things and then came back and stood looking at her guest with her glowing eyes. “Azalea,” she said intensely, “I never have company!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not. I’m not supposed to want it. I’m to study and work, and mend and practice my music, and be doing something from early till late. It isn’t that they’re not kind to me—my aunts and my father—but they’re so dreadfully serious and conscientious.”

“It _does_ throw a damper over everything, being conscientious like that,” mused Azalea.

Annie Laurie looked startled to hear her own secret idea put in words.

“For goodness sake,” she cried, “don’t let the aunts hear you say that!”

Azalea laughed teasingly.

“I’d really like to try that on Aunt Adnah,” she said.

Annie Laurie was getting used to her friend, and she made no reply. She ran upstairs for a moment, and came down clothed in a warm brown wrapper, and carrying another one of equally uninviting color on her arm.

“Slip into this, Azalea,” she commanded, “and let me hang your dress out in the hall near the heater. There now, lie down on the sofa—so. I’ll lie down too with my head the other way, and we’ll wrap ourselves in my grandfather’s old army blankets. I’m dead tired, aren’t you? I don’t see _where_ the aunts are.”

She yawned wearily, and Azalea caught the contagion and stretched her pretty mouth in imitation.

“Oh, it’s cosy, isn’t it?” Azalea murmured. Neither spoke again. Their eyes were fixed on the smouldering coals, which seemed to hypnotize them, and presently they both slept.

Just how long they lay there, comfortably resting, Azalea could not tell, but when she opened her eyes the twilight had deepened. Annie Laurie was still deep in sleep. The fire had quickened, and by its glow Azalea could see that some one had entered the room. For a moment she was startled, but then she saw that it was Annie Laurie’s father, Simeon Pace; so she lay still, not liking to speak, since she was not sure he would know her. He did not see the two girls on the sofa, and it was quite evident that he thought himself alone. Azalea watched him sleepily, and saw him take off his coat and throw it on the chair. Then he began twisting his arm in a most inhuman manner, and Azalea’s blood was frozen as she saw him loosen it at the elbow and lay it beside the coat, until she chanced to remember about its being merely a tin substitute for an arm. His next act was to take a long pocketbook or wallet from the mantel, draw something from it, stuff it into his hollow arm and deftly strap the arm into place again.

“How funny,” thought Azalea. “How Jim will laugh when I tell him about it!”

Then she remembered that she had been unintentionally spying, and that it would not be at all fair to tell what she had seen. She knew Ma McBirney would not like her to mention anything she had seen under such circumstances. So she lay as still as a lizard, hardly breathing, and finally Mr. Pace left the room. A moment later she heard the two aunts bustling about in the kitchen. There was a poking at the stove, a lighting of lamps, a rattling of dishes, and it was evident that the household was being set in motion again.

“Where are you, Annie Laurie, child?” called the voice of Miss Zillah. “We’ve been out to the sewing circle, and it was so late before the refreshments were served that we couldn’t hold our business meeting till after five. Then on the way home we heard Mrs. Disbrow was worse and Hannah laid up with a cold and we dropped in to see them, though I must say they’re a shiftless lot. We thought you and your father wouldn’t mind if supper was a little late. What you lying there for, child? And mercy me, how big you look! Why, no wonder, there’s two of you. It’s you, Azalea? How do you do?”

“I’m very well, ma’am,” said Azalea rather shyly. “I hope you didn’t mind my coming. It was so rainy and horrid, Annie Laurie asked me to spend the night.”

“Why, you’re as welcome as sunrise, of course. Sister Adnah, here is Azalea McBirney. She’s come to spend the night with us.”

Azalea wondered what was going to happen then. Miss Adnah had been quite vicious on the occasion of her former visit; but the mischievous spirit in the girl made her rather enjoy the uncertainty. Miss Adnah, she decided, could do no more than eat her up. But Miss Adnah was over her bad temper. She came in holding out her hand gravely.

“It was a wise thing for you to stay in the valley to-night,” she said primly. “I’m sure Mrs. McBirney wouldn’t want you to climb the mountain in such a drizzle.”

She avoided committing herself to a mere piece of flattery. She didn’t say she was glad Azalea was there, but for some reason, the girl did not feel chilled. She knew Annie Laurie wanted her, and it seemed to her that as the daughter of the house, Annie Laurie ought to enjoy some privileges. However, a few minutes later, when she was in Annie Laurie’s sober, tidy room, putting on her dress and freshening her hair, she overheard Miss Zillah saying softly to Annie Laurie in the next room:

“Sister Adnah thinks you should not invite anyone to the house without first asking permission, my dear. As for myself, I’m glad to see you have friends and feel free to ask them, but it would be well to make certain preparations.”

“Not at all, Aunt Zillah,” answered Annie Laurie hotly. “I’ve never had a girl to stay all night—never. I asked Azalea because it was raining. I couldn’t tell it was going to rain, or that I was going to ask her. I’m old enough now to use some sense, I hope, and I want it so that I can act without first having a period of fasting and prayer. You and Aunt Adnah were late to-night—”

“My dear, it is the first time we have been late to our duties, so far as I can remember, since we assumed them.”

“Oh, you don’t understand at all. I’m glad you were late. Why shouldn’t you be, if you wished? And your duties—why do you speak of what you do in the house like that? It’s not a duty to live and work and eat and sleep and all. It’s a pleasure. At least, that’s the way Carin and Azalea look at it. What I wanted to say was that for once you acted on impulse. You stayed till meeting was out, and you stopped in to see some sick neighbors. Well, I think that’s fine. Now, I asked my friend to stay all night. No preparation is needed. The cellar is bursting with food, the pantry is plumb full of it; there’s milk and cream to float a town and butter enough to grease all the engines in the world—”

“Annie Laurie!”

“Well, Aunt Adnah wears my patience out. I’m going to ask my friends here when it seems best.”

“My dear, you know we only ask you to use judgment.”

“Judgment? I don’t know what that means. I’ll use hospitality, if you like, and courtesy—”

“To your aunts, among others, I hope.”

“Bless your heart!” Azalea heard Annie Laurie cry softly. “You’re a dear, Aunt Zillah. Was I ever rude to you?”

“Not directly, my dear child. But you sometimes speak of my sister in a manner which I cannot regard as really respectful.”

“Forgive me, Aunt Zillah. I’ve too much mustard and pepper in my disposition. But there’s the supper bell. Azalea! Azalea, are you ready?”

They sat down at a bountiful table, and Simeon Pace folded his hand of flesh and his hand of tin together and prayed long and loud—something about the “sundering of joints and marrow.” Azalea, who was very hungry, hardly seemed to get the drift of these words. But she was startled from her dazed reverie by a sharp inquiry from Mr. Pace.

“So you two girls were asleep there before the fire, were you? Did you see me when I came in?” He turned his large eyes—so like and yet so unlike Annie Laurie’s—upon first one girl and then the other.

“I didn’t,” said his daughter.

“And you, Miss Azalea?”

“I awoke while you were in the room,” she said, feeling somewhat like Jack when he talked with the Giant Eater.

“So?” he looked at her sharply. “Why didn’t you speak?”

“I—I wasn’t sure you’d know me, sir.” She paused a moment and sat steady under the look he kept upon her. “Anyway, I was just as good as asleep—half dreaming.”

“And you never tell your dreams, I hope? It’s a bad habit.”

Azalea smiled at him.

“I never, never tell them, sir,” she said.

“Good,” cried Simeon Pace. “A sensible girl wouldn’t, of course. Let me serve you some meat, Miss Azalea.”

And she understood clearly that she had given a tacit promise that she would not tell what she had seen; and Simeon Pace felt the reliable character of her, beneath her soft, girlish aspect, and trusted her.

Chapter V The Summers

While they were at supper a strong cold wind sprung up, so that Mr. Pace had to heap wood on the fire. And afterward, when the two girls ran to the door, they could see that the sky had cleared and the stars were out, looking, it seemed, unusually large and bright and sociable.

“Why not go to prayer meeting?” said Azalea.

“At your church or mine?”

“Oh, if you don’t mind, Annie Laurie, at mine this time. Dear old Elder Mills is leaving, you know. You’ve heard how sick he is with the rheumatism, haven’t you? He’s going down to Florida where the climate will be better for him. They say he’s wonderful these last few weeks. He’s trying to say everything he can think of that will help the people he’s known so long. I love to hear people talk when they are really, really in earnest, don’t you?”

Annie Laurie looked at her friend understandingly.

“You are just like me, Azalea; you always want mountains to be higher than they really are, and stars brighter, and sermons deeper, and friends more loving. Nothing is ever quite big enough to suit me—nor quite _hard_ enough.”

“Not intense enough, Carin would say.”

“That’s it. Yes, let’s go to prayer meeting. I’ll ask father if I may.”

They presently were on their way, walking briskly because they were late. The little Methodist church was full of the old friends of Elder Mills, who as he stood before them, his white hair hanging around his shoulders, his face haggard with pain, yet had a look in his eyes of exaltation and joy which seemed to make a light thing of his physical distress.

“Oh, I want you to love one another,” he said during the evening. “I want you to forgive one another. Be honest, be brave in saying what you think, live truly, avoid lies. Above everything, avoid lies—in word and in act.”

“For goodness sake,” thought Annie Laurie, “Can’t preachers find anything else to talk about but lies? Whether I go to my own church or another, that seems to be the theme.” She remembered how she had caught Sam Disbrow’s eye that day at the Baptist church when the minister had been talking about lies, and how queer it had been to realize that she was reading Sam’s mind, and could tell that he, like herself, was wondering why the preacher kept harping on that. Annie Laurie’s mind drifted off to Sam’s home—to his mother who never was well, to their untidy little house, and to his cross-eyed sister, who never would make friends with anybody. Sam seemed so different from the rest of the family, with his hearty downright ways, his energy, his determination to make something of himself.

Was meeting over? She aroused herself as from a dream.

“There’s to be a business meeting,” Azalea said to her as the people arose. “They’re to talk about who is to be our new minister. Since it is not conference time, we are to ask for some one we want, and then if the bishop thinks best we can have him.”

“I see,” said Annie Laurie vaguely. Though she did not really see.

The two girls started out together, crowding softly by their elders who were gathered about in the aisles talking over the trial that had come to the church in losing Elder Mills, and in being obliged to bring a new minister in at the middle of the session. And then, suddenly, a beautiful idea came to Azalea. Why couldn’t they ask the Rev. Absalom Summers? He was in that tiny backwoods village where there were so few to hear or enjoy him; and he was such a wonderful man, all wrapped up in his religion, and talking about it as if it must be the business of everyone. And if he came, her “pretend cousin” Barbara, his wife, would come also, and that blessed baby, Jonathan. To think was to act with Azalea, now as always. She broke from Annie Laurie and ran up to her old friend and protector, Haystack Thompson.

“Oh, Mr. Thompson, dear,” she whispered, “if only you could manage to put in a word for Mr. Summers! You know what he is—how he talks and sings and laughs and keeps everybody stirred up. He’d put life into any church, wouldn’t he? He’s just wasted down in that little valley where he lives. Hardly anybody comes to church, and those who do, don’t like him. They think he’s too new-fashioned. But here he’d be appreciated.”

“Well, now,” drawled Mr. Thompson, running his hand through his wild head of hair—the hair that gave him his nickname of “Haystack”—“I don’t know but there might be something in that. He sure has got a lot of ginger in him, ‘the power of the Lord,’ he calls it, and I reckon maybe that’s what it is. Anyway, as you insinuate, Zalie, the Seven Sleepers would have had a hard time of it trying to keep up their slumbers anywhere around his neighborhood.”

“And then Mrs. Summers,” went on Azalea breathlessly; “think what she would mean to the church! She’s so lively, you know, and so interested in everyone—sorry for them when she ought to be, and happy with them all other times.”

“Sharin’ their sorrows an’ their joys with ’em, I reckon you mean, daughter.”

“Yes; and the baby—”

“Of course, the baby! He’d be a drawin’ card to any congregation.”

“Oh, Mr. Thompson, if I could have that baby around I’d—”

“Yes?”

“I’d—I’d be good all the rest of my days.”

“Be a practicin’ Christian, eh? Well, as you say, Summers is a mighty fetching man—don’t know of any with more—well, more radiation. I reckon I’d better mention him to the bretherin. Perhaps the bishop would hear to his being moved up this a-way—particularly if I told him you was wantin’ to play with the baby.”

Azalea never cared how much fun her kind old Haystack made of her. He had followed her over mountains and through valleys, in sun and rain, in a certain terrible episode of her life, when she had been stolen away from Mrs. McBirney and all but forced back into her hateful life with a traveling show, and she let him joke and fleer all he pleased, knowing him, as she did, for one of her staunchest friends.

“Yes, please do,” she urged. “They’re just going into meeting now. Just tell them how he laughs and talks and cuts up!”

“Fine recommendations for a pastor!”

“Well, they are,” insisted Azalea. “Of course they are. He wants everyone to be as good and happy as he is, and if they aren’t, he’ll find out why.”

Haystack Thompson brought his huge brows together and regarded Azalea with his sharp eyes. Neither spoke for a moment. Then: “Yes-sum,” he said, and moved toward the front to join the representative members of the congregation.

So it came about that a month later Azalea had the great happiness of knowing that her friends, the Reverend Absalom Summers and his wife and baby were coming to Lee as the result of her suggestion. It was rather a joke among those who knew of it. “Azalea’s choice” they called the new minister. But it was no joke to Azalea. It meant more to her than she ever could explain.

“You see,” she said to Carin, “it’s ideas that count—right ideas. Now, I’m a person of no importance whatever. But because I happened to have the right idea, those men listened to me and did what I wanted them to do.”

“And the point of it all is,” laughed Carin, “that if you have enough right ideas and can find enough persons to listen to them, you’ll be important, see?”

“Don’t laugh,” said Azalea. “If you knew what it meant for me to have the Summerses come—”

“I know well enough—know too well. After they come, what chance will I have of getting your attention?”

“Carin, how can you? No one can take your place. My friends are all separate. I can’t spare one, and not one can take the place of another.”

They were in Carin’s pony cart as they held this conversation, on their way down to the station, and it seemed as they drove along the one macadamized road in the county, that everyone they knew was bent in the same direction.

True, it was nighttime, but the lanterns and lamps revealed the identity of the travelers. Amusements were not many at Lee, and the coming of the new Methodist minister and his family was an event worthy of notice. Moreover, the fame of the Reverend Absalom Summers had gone abroad. His strong bright gifts, his hearty, brotherly nature, his way of finding nothing too small for his interest or too great for his inquisitiveness, had won him friends. So they gathered—these friendly, waiting neighbors—in the draughty little waiting room of the station and waited for the nine o’clock train.

The peculiarities of this nine o’clock train were well known. It had acquired a habit of arriving at about a quarter of ten, and it was not until the hands of the clock and of the frequently consulted watches of the male members approached that hour, that anyone thought of going out to look up the track. But there it was, sure enough, faithful to the time it had chosen for itself. Its flaring headlight could be seen away up the mountains. The air was nipping, and the company of watchers shivered together, but they would none of them go back into the station now that the headlight really was in sight.

Moreover, though they would not say so, they loved to be out among the mountains—those mountains that were as the very soul of their lives, that held them together, that gave meaning to their secret motives, to their religion, to their daily work. They loomed now, darkest purple against the starry sky. The wind swept down from them, fresh with an indescribable freshness. An owl called—was silent—then called again. Lights shone out from the houses in the village, and from the scattered cabins along the mountain sides. Now and then there was a movable light high on the mountain, as some hill farmer made his way to his house from a neighbor’s, or from his visit to town, or from looking after his stock.

The headlight disappeared as the train swept around the horseshoe bend. Then it burst upon them like a menacing star. It rushed towards them. There was a shriek as of a giant taken prisoner. The train was there! The conductor got down and exchanged greetings, and an enormously tall and thin man appeared, carrying many bundles.

“There he is! It’s the Elder. There’s Mr. Summers,” cried the people. They surged forward, pulled the man from the steps, seized his bundles, and waited while he assisted a little lady to alight.

“Why, she isn’t as large as we are, Azalea,” whispered Carin.

“I know,” Azalea whispered back, quivering as she hugged her companion’s arm. “I told you—”

But Carin was not to know what Azalea had told her, for at that moment the voice of the little lady was heard saying:

“And where’s Azalea?”

It was, for Azalea, a thrilling moment. Afterward, thinking it all over, she could not tell why her heart so leaped at that first word. Was it because she had no kin, really, that this voice of loving friendship was so sweet to her? Was it that she was proud—she who had been a wanderer and a beggar—to be asked for before all the people? Was it just abounding love for Barbara Summers, her “pretend cousin”?

It made no difference, really. There was Barbara, her dark eyes shining; there was her babe in her arms, fresh and wonderful from sleep; and there was his mother offering him to Azalea.

The two kissed above the baby.

“Honey bunch!” murmured Azalea, and gathered him into her arms.

She saw nothing of how the people came forward to make Mr. Summers and his wife welcome; heard nothing of what Pa McBirney said to them, urging them into his comfortable old mountain wagon. Even the voice of Carin was vague in her ears, though she knew she was murmuring her appreciation of golden curls and blue eyes, of tiny teeth, of dimples, or chubby little hands. But nothing that anybody could say would be too much, Azalea thought. Her hungry heart, never yet satisfied, with all the love that had come to her, wrapped a thousand quivering tendrils about this little laughing child.

“You riding with Miss Carin, Zalie?” asked Pa McBirney.

“Yes, thank you, father. We’ll drive right up to the parsonage, won’t we, Carin?”

“As fast as Mustard can take us,” replied Carin. “The baby won’t mind leaving you a moment, will he, Mrs. Summers?”

Barbara Summers shook her head. She was not given to passing Jonathan over to the care of others, but there was something in the satisfied expression of Azalea’s face that forbade her to take him away.

Carin turned the head of the little yellow pony toward the Methodist parsonage. They had a hill to climb and a dark, curving little road to traverse. But five or six vehicles were ahead of them, and Mustard, who felt like a mere boy in the horse world, and who always was pleased if he could get in a grown-up affair of any kind, trotted along importantly. Lights shone out from among the armored pines. Azalea got out and carried Jonathan through the freshly decorated rooms, with their newly polished furniture and snowy curtains, to the bedroom where the little iron cot awaited Jonathan.

“Shut the door, Carin dear,” she whispered happily. “Let’s undress him. His mother said we’d find his nightie in that bag.”

Chapter VI Sunday

“Once there was a bear, And he made his pasture there; And he crept, and he crept, and he crept, ’Till he got away up there!” “Gurgle—gurgle—gurgle!” “And once there was a bear—”

This conversation took place between Azalea McBirney and Jonathan Summers one Sunday morning while Jonathan’s mother was at church. Azalea had been to Sunday-school, and had run over to ask her “Cousin” Barbara if she wouldn’t like to attend service to hear her husband preach. Barbara would—Oh, most undeniably she would. It was her firm conviction that if all men could hear her husband, and would give heed to what he said, they would be able to resist all temptations and would live in peace with the world. So she kissed Azalea and permitted her to button her into her pretty golden-brown frock, and then, clapping her large hat over her wayward hair and putting on her gloves as she hastened down the street, she was off, her heart beating high with loving pride of the man whose life was united with her own, and who had already found warm friends in his new parish.

Jonathan had been asleep when his mother left him, but it was not long before he opened his eyes and looked about him to see whom he could get to serve him. For Jonathan was, in his own opinion, the Prince of the World, and everyone in it was to do his bidding. He preferred, of course, his chief slave—the one called “Mamma”—and not seeing her, he opened his mouth and let out a more or less cheerful roar, not so much showing rage, as a healthful imitation of it.

Azalea was delighted. She picked him up, fed him his bottle, arranged him among the sofa pillows, and then, taking a dimpled hand in her own, she pointed delicately to the rosy palm.

“Once there was a bear, And he made his pasture there.”

It must have been a particularly small bear to have pastured in such a tiny pink palm, but Jonathan saw nothing inconsistent in it, and remarked enthusiastically:

“Gurgle—gurgle—gurgle.”

The bear began creeping slyly up Jonathan’s arm. It snuggled for a moment at his elbow, went on—and Jonathan shivered happily—up to his shoulder, and then settled right down in his neck, and seemed to think it a good place to stay. At least, Jonathan laughed delightedly.

Azalea looked at him with her soul in her eyes.

“Mercy me,” she sighed. “How well I understand kidnappers!”

Then she remembered that she had once been kidnapped herself, and that she had not liked it at all.

“Oh, Jonathan,” she cried, looking at him critically, “it seems impossible that anything as soft and lovely as you are can grow up to be just a hard, common, big man! If only I could put you in some kind of a preserve jar and keep you the way you are, I’d just give anything. Tired of sitting still? Well, come to Azalea, and we’ll go exploring. It’s a pretty house, isn’t it? But my goodness, you ought to have seen it a little while ago! It was as dull as Monday washday.

“Then, when it was decided that your papa and mamma were coming here to live, we all turned in and worked like sixty to make it look nice. Haystack Thompson—that’s the man that throws you up so high, you know—prepared it with his own hands. But you make up your mind we didn’t let him pick out the paper. Haystack is a dear, but he couldn’t be trusted to pick out wall paper. No, sir, my friends Carin and Annie Laurie and I did that. Brown for the sitting room, and green for the dining room, and pink and pale blue for the bedrooms.

“And we got these pretty print hangings and covers—at least, Mrs. Carson paid for them and we picked them out. And Ma McBirney wove these rugs—brown for the sitting room and green for the dining room. Aren’t they beauties? And Mr. Carson had the furniture done at his shop—the very best he could make. And Sam Disbrow, he brought this fern, and somebody else sent the palm, and Carin gave the pictures, and Annie Laurie made the table cover, and I don’t know what all. You see, some of these people don’t belong to your church at all, Jonathan. They just gave these things because you were so sweet that they couldn’t bear to have you come into any but a pretty house. Dear me, boy, stop pulling my hair! You treat me just as if I were a step-child. And I’m not. I’m your pretend cousin—which is ever and ever so much nicer than being a real cousin, because you do your own picking out.”

Jonathan replied after his own manner, and the morning wore on pleasantly. Azalea put the potatoes and the stew over to cook, and made some apple sauce. Then she set the table; and “toted” Jonathan some more. For once she forgot to think. The sad little thoughts that would mope around in the back of her mind, because she was, after all, a child without a father or a mother, kept entirely out of sight that morning. She was so busy that she could waste no time whatever on merely thinking; and the first thing she knew she saw the people pouring along the street from church.

Annie Laurie drove by with her aunts and her father, and waved to Azalea. Sam Disbrow walked by with his father, and Azalea thought what a dull time Sam had of it, with that heavy looking father with his hanging head and big, rolling eyes, both going home to a mother who was always sick, and to that queer sister of Sam’s, who had too much work to do, and who never seemed to want to talk with anybody. And then the Carson carriage rushed by with black Ben driving, and Mr. Carson, so handsome and straight, beside him, and Carin and Mrs. Carson on the back seat in their beautiful furs, smiling and bowing to everybody.

Then the McBirney wagon came, with Mr. and Mrs. Summers in with Pa and Ma McBirney and Jim. And Azalea was thanked and kissed, and had the pain of seeing Jonathan tear himself away from her to rush to his mother’s embrace, and then Azalea went out and got in with her foster parents, and Pa McBirney hissed to his horses in an odd way he had, and they started for their long drive up the mountain.

“It sure is a mighty curious thing how that man goes on, Mary,” said Mr. McBirney to his wife as they were driving by the prosperous dairy farm of Simeon Pace. “He’s jest rolling up money, but no one can tell what he does with it. Heller, the banker, he says nary a cent of it comes his way. Pace don’t believe in banks—got stung some time I reckon, and lost his nest egg by the busting of a bank. Anyhow, he hangs on to what he gets nowadays. It beats all to see anyone so old-fashioned. Heller says he supposes he hides it away in his old stocking or buries it in the yard. I suppose I’m something of a mossback myself, but anyway I know enough to bank my money when I get it—which ain’t any too often.”

“He don’t look like such an old-fashioned man, Simeon Pace don’t,” mused Mrs. McBirney. “He certainly does keep his place up right smart. Them cattle o’ his’n is the best to be seen in the country, and everything around the place is right up in G.”

“Well, old-fashioned he is, but he’s far-seeing too. About five years ago he bought the Caruth Valley and all the uplying land beyond it. I couldn’t see what his idea was, but now I hear that he’s selling it out to Mr. Carson for five times what he paid for it. Mr. Carson wants it for the water power on it. He’s adding to his factory, you see.”

“That will mean work for a good many more of us mountain folks,” observed Mrs. McBirney. “The way Mr. Carson has opened up things for us is just stirring to think about. I don’t know as his efforts are appreciated, but I, for one, know who I have to thank when I see the new things in the house and the good new clothes we’ve been able to get for the children. Why, only this morning I was calling Jim’s attention to it. ‘Look at you,’ I said, ‘in your store clothes and brown shoes and new overcoat and all. You look like a rich man’s son,’ says I. And I declare to goodness when I got out this here new cloak o’ mine, and this bonnet Mrs. Carson made for me out of silk velvet and a real ostrich tip, I could hardly believe it was me. I’m so used to wearing rusty black that I don’t know as I feel quite at home in good deep black like this a-here.”

Jim McBirney, who was sitting on the back seat with Azalea, not caring to listen longer to the conversation of his elders and knowing it was bad manners to disturb them, began whispering.

“I went to Sam Disbrow’s house last evening, sis.” When Jim said “evening” he meant afternoon.

“Did you, Jim? What was it like?”

“Shades all down—rooms all hot—Mrs. Disbrow lying on the settle—Hannah sitting by her, knitting and knitting, and her eyes so crossed you couldn’t think how she could do anything but cross stitch.”

“I’m sorry for Hannah. That’s a dreadful life to lead—being shut up all the time with a sick person. I’ve a good mind to give her a party if mother will let me.”

“Give Hannah Disbrow a party? Why, she’d run like a hare if she saw anybody coming, and she’d drop her ice cream and go home crying. I know Hannah.”

He spoke as if he had made girls and their outlandish ways his particular study.

“Well, anyway, I’m going to see her. And I’ll get the other girls to go.”

“Oh, yes, th’ other girls! Why, Zalie, you can’t move around by your lone no more; you’re just hitched on to them friends of yours. Ain’t you ever going to have any separate thoughts again?”

Azalea laughed lightly, and at the chime of her merriment Mary McBirney turned around to look at the occupants of the rear seat. It was at such times that Azalea loved her most—when the light of love flooded her face with its high brow and soft eyes. It always made Azalea feel as if there must be a lamp burning there behind the kind face. She gave a pleasant, inarticulate murmur that served better than words to let the children know that her love was round about them. Then she turned back to resume her conversation with her husband, and the horses—nimble mountain-climbers—pulled on up the road steadily, stopping now and again to breathe, and then sweeping around another curve of the ever winding road.

Azalea amused herself by noticing the little plateaus or “benches” along the mountain side. She played a little game with herself, building imaginary houses in this cove or on that bench among the maples. There was one place in particular, where three lofty tulip trees guarded a spring of cold water, and where there was a little almost level cove from which one could look off for miles and miles along the purple valley, where she put first one sort of a house and then another.

When she began thinking of it, she built—in her mind of course—a little house of cedar logs, with an open chamber between, like the one she now called home; but as time went on she changed her plans. Barbara Summers had tried to persuade her that a rambling bungalow of pine, with high chimneys and wide porches would be the thing; and Carin had been in favor of a cement bungalow with a pergola with trumpet vines growing over it. Annie Laurie thought it would be better to have a tent pitched there, and to eat off wooden plates and use paper napkins.

“Then you could heave everything into the fire,” said this practical young woman, “and there’d be no dishes to wash.”

As they passed the place this Sunday Azalea asked Jim what kind of a house he thought it would be best to put up there, but Jim was not fond of playing at air castles.

“We-all don’t own the land,” he said, “and we ain’t got the money for the house, so what’s the use of talking?”

Azalea felt just a trifle out of patience.

“The use of talking,” she said rather sharply, “is that it interests you.”

“Keeping still interests me all right.”

“Keep still, then, if you want to. I’m sure I’ve plenty to think about.”

It was then that Mary McBirney began singing softly:

“‘Sweet are the hillsides, pleasant are the valleys, Bright is the sky o’er the home of my heart.’”

Both Azalea and Jim knew very well why she was singing. She never could bear to reprove them; and she had a little theory that music could drive out any evil spirit. Such music as she made ought to, certainly, the children thought, sitting for a moment in silence, ashamed of their stupid quarrel. Neither one was of the sort to sulk. Jim gave a little twist on his seat, and joined in the fourth line:

“‘And my home, gentle friend, is wherever thou art.’”

Azalea loved the quaint old song. It was one of many such which Mary McBirney knew.

“I’d love to see the words and music of the songs you sing, mother,” Azalea had said to her once. “Where can I find them? Are they in any of the books you have?”

But Mary McBirney had shaken her head with a smile.

“The mountain folks have many a song that never yet has been writ down, child,” she said. “In the lonely nights in the little cabins away back on the mountains, all still and peaceful, the folks weave the songs out of their hearts. Grandmothers and mothers and daughters have sung them, and not one of them all had the knowledge to write them down. They make me think of wild roses. They grow beside the roadway, and they are the sweetest of them all.”

“‘Early in the morning I can hear the thrushes singing,’” Mary McBirney sang on, and Azalea, joining in, put all her love for the sweet woman into the words:

“‘Dear as the voice that I love best of all.’”

They stopped at the waterfall for the horses to drink. The cataract leaped down delicately and gayly from the height above, paused at the roadway, rippling along among the pebbles at the edges and rushing between the great boulders in the center of the ford, and then with a wild laugh plunged off over the edge and foamed down the mountain side. The sky was rather overcast on this particular day, and the trees wore a patient look; even the waterfall seemed subdued, and its rush of sound was more liquid and less like music than on brighter days. A heaviness and quietude lay over everything. But the McBirneys loved the mountain in all its moods, and little by little they set themselves to fit in with its whims, so that by the time they reached their home they were quiet, too.

But they were happy—Oh, most distinctly, they were that. They loved every inch of the old place. The cabin of logs, divided in the center with an open air chamber, the little loft where Azalea slept, looking up the mountain side, the Pride of India tree beneath which lay the graves of little Molly McBirney and of Azalea’s poor mother, the tulip trees at the outlook, the little smithy, the stable, the barn, the smoke house, the corn crib, the chicken house and the bee hives, the pigeon coops and the swinging gourds where the martins nested, all were dear to them. Vines, flowers, and bushes grew all about them. The farm slanted down the hillside at a dangerous angle, but contrived to soak into its produce the sweet Southern sun, and it gave of its rich bounty in return for Thomas McBirney’s hard toil.

Human care and enthusiasm showed in every foot of it. Even the most casual passer-by could see at a glance that here was a home in which people lived who loved life and each other.

“Happy and good folk live here,” it seemed to say.

And there were, first and last, a good many to read its message, for it was on the highway and whoever came over Tennyson Mountain down to Lee must pass almost through the doorway.

This gray, pleasant Sunday, Mrs. McBirney and Azalea jumped from the wagon at the house door, and Jim and his father went on to the stable to look after the horses. The cow was munching contentedly in her stall, but the chickens seemed a little depressed and in need of their midday drink of hot water and their feeding of hot meal. The pigeons cooed chillily from their cote. As for the horses, they knew almost as much about unhitching as their betters, and if either Jim or Mr. McBirney had done anything they ought not to have done they would have turned their critical eyes upon them. The real pride of Jim’s heart, however, was the two ponies which he and Azalea rode to school. They had been the gift of Mr. Carson to them, and they were the brothers of Carin’s pony, Mustard, and bore the exciting names of Pepper and Paprika.

Jim lingered for a moment or two, loath to leave them. He loved the velvet noses of them the friendly eyes and the warm heaving sides. They muzzled him, and he put their noses in his neck and gave them to understand that their affection was returned. The cool, damp air billowing in at the door was delicious, and he almost hated to go in the house.

“What’s the use in living in houses?” he thought. He had known a young fellow who traveled over the mountains all the time with two ponies. One he rode, the other carried his pack which consisted of a hammock, a frying pan, some blankets and a square of canvas, out of which he could, at need, fashion a sort of tent. He never had slept under a roof since he was a baby. Jim thought of this boy as a very fortunate fellow. He chose not to remember the desperate ill health that had driven the lad into the life. However, he must go in the house, he must! Ma had got the fire going in the kitchen, judging from the smoke that rolled from the chimney. Well, he was glad he didn’t have to build it. He didn’t feel like doing anything just then—except, perhaps, sitting by the door and looking off at the valley. Usually when he wanted to do this, some one straightway thought of some chore for him. So he slid softly onto the bench, sitting where he could be seen neither from the door nor the window, and fell into a comfortable though somewhat hungry day dream.

Meantime, odors of frying chicken were wafted to him, along with the smell of slightly burned corn cake and very good coffee. The odors grew stronger and pleasanter and after a time Jim decided that he wasn’t doing right to stay outside while everyone was working in the house. It really was his duty to go in. So in he went. The fire was leaping, the table was set, his mother was bustling around in her calico dress, Azalea was putting the chairs to the table, and his father looked ready primed for a long Sunday grace.

It proved to be even longer than Jim had feared. Thomas McBirney was one of those who count it a fault if they neglect to mention every event of their lives to the Almighty. He thanked the Lord for their united family, for food and fire, for roof and friends, for the privilege of attending divine service, and for the love of God which warmed their hearts. Meantime his son’s eyes wandered restlessly from the heaped plate of chicken to the bowl of gravy and “fixin’s.” He wondered if he would have no more than a “drumstick” and why there should be such intimate relations between boys and drumsticks. The world over, fathers seemed to think they should go to their sons. No doubt Chinese fathers held just the same opinion.

Imagine then, his surprise—his unbelieving surprise—when his father, having first served his mother and Azalea, took the “wish-bone,” beautifully burdened with tender white meat and laid it on Jim’s plate.

“For a good boy,” he said, as he heaped on the potatoes and gravy, and passed the corn bread. “Once in a while, Jim, we men folks have to set ourselves against these here women, eh? Them with their wishbones! Who said they was to eternally have the wishbones? No king that ever I hearn tell of. I say, let’s head a revolution and declare that they ken have only every other wishbone. That’s fair, ain’t it?”

A nice, warm feeling gathered in Jim’s heart. It was splendid to have a dad like that—a dad who could tell what was going on in a fellow’s mind. And his mother and Azalea seemed to be glad he had the wishbone, too. They were looking at him just the way a fellow likes to have his family look at him. My, what a nice day Sunday was! And wasn’t he glad he had helped haul those hickory logs! And wasn’t the room nice, with the settle there next the fire, and the old clock tickin’, tickin’ away, and striking now and then with a voice like Haystack Thompson’s when he led in prayer. And there was a white table cloth on for Sunday, and Ma was smiling almost the way she used before Molly died. And the cat was stretching herself, and outside, Peter, the hound, was sniffling to let them know he was there and hadn’t had his dinner yet.

“Goodness gracious,” sighed Jim, “ain’t it lucky we’re all alive!”

Chapter VII The Signal

Night came down sweetly over the mountain that quiet day. It wrapped the village in soft gray folds; the stars came out hazily and shone with a misty golden light; the wind merely whispered in the pines and the hemlocks, and the sound of the falling water was lonely and sad in the ears of Azalea.

Yet she had to be out in the night because—well, that’s a secret. At least it was a secret from Jim. Because he would have laughed. She was to signal the other two girls. It had been agreed upon.

“You see, I nearly die, Sundays,” Annie Laurie had said. “Our house—really I can’t describe our house on Sunday. I feel as if my heart were turning into old red sandstone.”

To have the strong-beating heart of Annie Laurie turn into structural rock was something the friends could not permit. Anyway it would be an excellent thing for Azalea in the mountain to know that her friends in the valley were doing well. She could tell if they were doing well, if the lantern was waved sideways; if anything was wrong it was to be swung up and down.

“But I reckon you-all had better not swing it up and down,” she had said, “for though I’ll know by that that something is wrong, of course I won’t know what it is. And the waiting to find out would be dreadful.”

“It will have to be a pretty dreadful ‘something’ to make us give the bad signal, won’t it, Annie Laurie?” Carin had remarked.

So it was with a light heart and a mysterious manner that Azalea, who was supposed to leave the kitchen-living room to go to her own little loft, stole out the back way, took the lantern from its nail, lighted it, and crept to the outlook. She had five minutes to wait before the time appointed, and these moments proved to be a “perfect caution” for slowness. She counted the seconds to make sure—and yet was not sure, for she managed to get in about two counts and a half to each second. However, at last she felt justified in bringing out her light from behind the tree bole where she had hidden it, and waving it back and forth in enthusiastic announcement that all was right. She couldn’t help thinking with a throb of the heart how very, very right it all was! How sweet the day had been; how filled with comfort for body and soul; how beautiful to be loved as she was loved in that little home! Of course she might have repined that she had not been made Carin’s adopted sister and surrounded with all manner of luxuries, but the love she felt for Mrs. McBirney was too deep, too sincere, to permit such a thought to have a place in her heart for very long.

Yes, her home was a log cabin, and her family simple mountain people. But she could not feel cheated. The taste of the Things That Were was sweet on her palate, and her hope for the future bubbled in her heart as the spring, whose whispering she could hear, bubbled from the ground.

So back and forth in the gray air went her lantern, saying:

“All is well! All is well!”

Azalea actually laughed aloud to think of Carin, all in her Sunday best, stealing out of that stately drawing-room and creeping up the stairs to the huge cupola and standing there on the roof in the wind and night, waving her lantern. What fun it was to know a girl like that—a girl who wasn’t afraid to do things, if she was rich and beautiful. There was some “go” in Carin, no doubt about it, though she did look so delicate and alabasterish. Azalea loved to invent words, and she invented “alabasterish” on the moment.

[Picture: Back and forth went her lantern, saying: “All is well! All is well!”]

But what did that mean? Annie Laurie’s lantern, full and strong and like a star, had shone through the light mist and was being waved frantically up and down. Mercy! how it waved.

“All is wrong! All is wrong!” it protested.

What could that mean? Carin, of course, would know in a few minutes. She would telephone. But Azalea had no telephone and she would not be allowed to ride to the valley at night.

“All is wrong—oh, very, very, wrong!” the lantern kept on saying.

What could she do to let Annie Laurie know that she understood? Poor Annie Laurie, who was brave about everything! It was a real trouble, Azalea felt sure. Had one of the aunts fallen and broken a bone? Could Mr. Pace be ill? Were the cattle poisoned? Azalea took her lantern and twisted it around and around until it must have looked to Annie Laurie like a snare of fireflies. Then Carin, understanding, did the same thing. After that it was dark on Carin’s roof; then Annie Laurie’s lantern disappeared too. They had gone to the telephone, Azalea inferred.

She stamped back through the dew, hot with impatience. “I shan’t sleep a wink to-night,” she declared.

She undressed in anguish of soul, sank on her knees and sent up a fervent prayer for her friend, and then throwing herself on what she expected and desired to be a sleepless bed, fell fast asleep.

Yet in her sleep she had many dreams, and in each of them Annie Laurie appeared, always in some horrid plight. Now wolves were chasing her; now she had fallen over the cataract; now the horses were running away with her; now she was speeding down the road again, away from the scorn of her schoolmates, and little drops of blood were falling on the road from her shattered heart.

But none of these things were anywhere near the truth, though nothing could be more terrible to Annie Laurie than what actually had happened.

It had come about after church. Dinner was over; the house had been tidied, and the two aunts and Mr. Pace and Annie Laurie sat in the sitting room before a fine fire. The aunts had taken out their pious books and were reading them. Mr. Pace was engaged in plodding sleepily through somebody’s account of the “Thirty Year’s War.” As for Annie, she was supposed to be writing to a friend, but as a matter of fact she was scribbling some verses which she meant to show to the girls the next day. Nibbling the end of one’s pen is more or less of a necessity when one is writing verses, and Annie Laurie, having got as far as that—and not much farther—was sampling the fine inky flavor of hers, and so chanced to look up and to let her glance fall on her father.

At first she was only conscious that his expression was not quite familiar to her. Then—well, then suddenly and terribly, she saw that he was indeed changed—that something frightful had happened to him. She sprang toward him, calling his name.

“Father—father!”

But no answer came.

The aunts came running, terror in their faces.

“Paralysis,” said Miss Adnah. “Zillah, call the doctor. Azalea, help me lay him down—yes, on the floor. Open the window. Go get his bed ready, Zillah, after you’ve got the doctor. We and the doctor between us must get him in bed.”

Annie Laurie did all she was told. She couldn’t realize what had happened. Something seemed to be whirling around and around in her brain, and all it said was:

“Isn’t Aunt Adnah wonderful? Isn’t Aunt Adnah wonderful?”

She was indeed a general in times of trouble. Why, once when she was young—but there isn’t time to tell Aunt Adnah’s story now.

There was time for nothing, it seemed. It had come like a lightning-flash. Even the doctor was unable to aid. Simeon Pace lay in his bed, looking at them with tortured eyes. It seemed to Annie Laurie that he was trying to make her understand something—with all his vanishing power he was trying to give her some important piece of information. She put her ear to his lips; she listened with the very ears of her soul; but the thing he wished her to know went into silence with him. A dread convulsion brought the end.

Annie Laurie, standing aghast, knew she was fatherless as well as motherless. Yet it couldn’t be! Why, only a little while before everything had been well. Had been well! That reminded her of the signal they were to send—the signal that was to remind each member of the Girl’s Triple Alliance that they had not forgotten each other. And they had agreed not to send the “bad” message unless something very terrible happened. They had laughed about it! And now the terrible thing really had happened. Or had it? Was it, perhaps, only a frightful dream? But no, it was true—and her heart ached so! If only the girls knew! Well, she would tell them. She sat near the clock, watching it. Perhaps when she let the girls know, her throat wouldn’t ache so with that new, strange, crushing pain. Perhaps her eyeballs would cease burning. How busy it seemed around the house! People were coming and going. They stopped to speak to her, and she found herself saying mechanically:

“Yes, I know. You are very kind. To-morrow I’ll understand better. Thank you—to-morrow.”

Out of sheer compassion they left her alone.

Seven o’clock. It was time for the signal. She found the lantern and made her way, unseen, to the roof. Azalea’s light shone at her from the gray air, far, far up the ridge. Carin’s light flashed from the roof of the mansion. All was well with them. They were laughing—Annie Laurie knew they were laughing. And she—she waved her lantern up and down and up and down with a kind of passion. She must make them know how deep was the sorrow that had befallen her. And they seemed to know. It was as if she could feel the streams of their sympathy rolling toward her. Yes, they understood. That queer fluttering of their lanterns assured her of it. Annie Laurie left her roof and descending into the attic, sank on an old settle there. She dragged a horse blanket over her and at last the storm of her anguish broke, and she wept and wept.

Chapter VIII The Mystery

Was it a long time—weary hours and hours—before Annie Laurie found her way down the stairs? She never could be sure. A man, whom she did not at first recognize, was leaving her father’s room. For a second she felt like rushing at him to tell him that he, a stranger, should not be in there—in that sacred chamber where her father lay dead and defenseless. Then she saw that it was Mr. Disbrow, the undertaker, and realized what his task had been. He had been making her father ready for his last resting place.

But surely the man was not ashamed of his task! He shot one glance at Annie Laurie, and then without speaking, hastened down the stairs and out of the front door. Was he sorry for her and at a loss to say how sorry, and so had run away? Annie Laurie could understand that. She would have felt much the same way herself. Yet it was, she decided, an odd way for a man to feel who was so often in the house of mourning as an undertaker naturally would be. However, it mattered little. She was glad he hadn’t spoken to her. And yet, when she thought of him as Sam’s father, it was curious that he hadn’t. Of course it might be that he knew nothing of the good friendship which existed between Sam and herself, and he might not approve of it anyway. The Disbrows were great for keeping to themselves. So were the Paces, but the Paces were busy folk; they liked their neighbors even if they didn’t see much of them. But one always had the feeling that the Disbrows shut themselves away from society because they had something against it—nobody quite knew what. Only Sam—Sam was different. He was made to live in the world and to enjoy it.

A vision of him, wide-shouldered, brown-haired—his hair would have curled a trifle if he had not continually discouraged it—brown-eyed, smiling, frank, energetic, arose before Annie Laurie. He had a ringing laugh, and the neighbors said he dared to laugh even in that silent shut-up house where his mother lay on her sofa, with mouse-like, cross-eyed Hannah watching beside her. It came over Annie Laurie that she had disliked them for things that were none of their fault. Mrs. Disbrow couldn’t help being ill; Hannah couldn’t help being cross-eyed; and it was beautiful of her to be always beside her mother.

Yet, as she paced the floor of her bedroom thinking about her father, with her tortured thoughts leaping this way and that as if they were struggling to escape from sorrow, a conviction came over her that sickness often was the fault of the person who suffered from it. She knew that an atmosphere of gloom hung over Sam’s house; that if he opened up the windows Hannah was told to close them; if he brought in flowers they had to be thrown out because they gave his mother a cold; if he built a fire in the fireplace for cheerfulness, it was considered unsafe, owing to a defect in the chimney. The stove was sufficient—and indeed more than sufficient, since the temperature of the room was at least eighty the winter through. Poor Sam! Annie Laurie knew that he had suggested that the chimney be mended so that they might sometimes sit by the open fire, letting the raging stove subside; he had urged Hannah to have an operation that would set her eyes straight, but the family had been too fearful of the results. So they sat in gloom and hideousness within their power to remedy. At least that was how it looked to Sam’s impatient, energetic nature, and Annie Laurie took the same view.

Miss Zillah came in after a time, with arms and words of comfort for her girl.

“Carin called up about seven o’clock,” she said, after a time when Annie Laurie had wept out her grief on her good aunt’s shoulder. “She seemed to know you were in trouble, though I don’t understand how she could have found out.”

Annie Laurie told her of the signalling.

“Well, she wanted to come right over to you, but I told her to wait until to-morrow. Was I right?”

Annie Laurie nodded.

“Get undressed now, poor one,” soothed Aunt Zillah. “See, I’ll open your bed and warm it for you. Put on this flannel nightgown, that’s a dear. And I’ll bring you a glass of milk—unless you want something heartier.”

It was wonderful, being petted like this. She had led a chilly life, had Annie Laurie. She had known kindness, but not, it must be confessed, warm love. Yet now Aunt Zillah’s compassion and affection wrapped her about like a cloak. How did the old song run?

“Come under my plaidie, the night’s gaun to fa’; Come in frae the cauld blast, the drift and the snaw; Come under my plaidie and sit down beside me, There’s room in’t, dear lassie, believe me, for twa.”

Yes, she would get in under Aunt Zillah’s plaidie and she would let the dear old lady know that she was grateful to her for having asked her. So, when she had drunk the warm fresh milk and been tucked in her bed, she put her arms around Aunt Zillah’s wrinkled neck and gave her a long, long hug.

“We’ll never, never go back on each other, will we?” she whispered tremulously.

“Never, lass, never,” responded the old lady, the tears dripping from her eyes on Annie Laurie’s upturned face. So, sweetened by a sorrow, which was after all but a natural and right sorrow such as must come to all, Annie Laurie sank into the dead sleep of grief.

The next few days were blurred and strange. Friends came to the house. Flowers arrived in boxes. There were many telephone messages. The aunts were called up from the telegraph office. There was business to do at the cemetery; arrangements to make at the church. Through it all, Annie Laurie strove to do her part. There would be time enough for grieving afterward, she decided. The thing now was not to let too heavy a burden fall on her aunts, who were, as Annie Laurie seemed to discover for the first time, really getting to be old ladies.

But at last it all was over. The house was quiet and peaceful. And the help on the farm came to Miss Adnah for instructions.

It must have been three days after the funeral that Mr. Carson called one afternoon and asked to see Annie Laurie and her aunts. It was like him, in his thoughtfulness to include her, Annie Laurie thought. She did not know that Charles Carson, who liked almost everybody and who had the best will in the world toward all mankind, nevertheless, knowing as much of human nature as he did, thought it best to take her at once into council concerning matters that would affect her future life.

He was received in the stiff little parlor, the two sisters sitting opposite him in prim dignity, and Annie Laurie instinctively putting her chair near his.

“I am sure you will pardon me for speaking to you concerning your affairs,” he said in his hearty way. “I would not venture to do so uninvited, were it not a matter that in a way concerns me also.”

“Yes, sir,” said Miss Adnah and Miss Zillah in unison. Annie Laurie fixed her reddish-brown eyes upon him with devotion, and said nothing.

“The day before Mr. Pace died,” he went on, “I paid him twenty thousand dollars in cash.”

Annie Laurie stared; the sisters started.

“It seemed to me foolish enough to pass such a sum of money over in simple currency, but as you probably know, your brother”—he was now addressing himself to the elder ladies—“had a prejudice against banks. I wished to give him my check. He said he had no use for checks. He wanted money. It was a curious idiosyncrasy of his, but since he wished it that way I humored him. He put the roll of bills into his pocket—I paid the money to him at Mr. Heller’s bank—and drove away with it. That was Saturday afternoon. He died Sunday. I have come to inquire—with only neighborly motives, I beg you to believe—whether or not you have seen anything of that roll of bills.”

There was a slight pause. Then:

“I have seen nothing of it, sir,” said Miss Adnah.

“Nor I, sir,” added Miss Zillah.

“Oh, and there must have been more money,” broke in Annie Laurie, “much, much more! I know papa always had a lot, Mr. Carson, but I haven’t an idea where he kept it. None of us had. If we ever asked him for money he would go away for a time and presently come back with the bills he meant to give us. He had some place where he hid it, and I used to think he ought to tell some one of us where it was.”

“I should think so, indeed,” said Mr. Carson rather heatedly. “Then you haven’t any of you a notion where he kept his funds?”

“Not an earthly idea!” cried Annie Laurie.

“We haven’t the faintest notion, sir,” said Miss Adnah. “I will confess now that sister and I got up in the night—last night it was—and looked everywhere in his room. We even lifted the edges of the carpet and took the back off the steel engravings. We looked, of course, in the bureau, and the chest and the closet. We found nothing. It was our intention to begin to-night searching in the other rooms of the house.”

“But why in the night, ladies?”

Miss Adnah looked rather offended, as if Mr. Carson had gone a little too far in asking such questions. But Miss Zillah broke out with:

“Oh, you see, sir, it seemed so silly and absurd for us to have to do a thing like that. My opinion is that brother Simeon should have kept up with the times and used a bank like other men. I hate to have the neighbors know what trouble and embarrassment he has put us to.”

Miss Adnah looked at her sister in amazement. She, who was so gentle of judgment and of speech, was actually criticising a Pace—and her own dead brother at that! But Mr. Carson turned a look of appreciation on the flushed little face of the old lady.

“The Paces are not all cranks, anyway,” was his thought. “This Miss Zillah seems a very sensible sort of a woman—quite fit to be related to Annie Laurie.”

The reflection would have surprised Miss Adnah very much had she known of it, for she regarded herself as a person of singular good sense. Indeed, she secretly thought that she had, so far as the Paces were concerned, rather a monopoly of it. Zillah she regarded as something of a dreamer, too sentimental, or “soft,” as she put it, by half; and she felt very disapproving when she heard her pass uncomplimentary judgment upon one of the family. That was a privilege which Miss Adnah reserved for herself.

“You see, sir,” Miss Zillah went on, blurting out a family secret which Miss Adnah would have starved rather than let anyone know, “we haven’t a cent in the world. The small amount which my sister and I had in our purses has been used up during the last few days. We owe for all the expenses of our brother’s funeral. Really, I may say that we don’t know which way to turn.”

“My dear Miss Zillah,” responded Mr. Carson, “I will place a sum of money at your disposal immediately.”

Why, Miss Adnah wondered, did he turn to Zillah instead of to her? It seemed to her that it ought to be evident to anyone that she was now the head of the house.

“Moreover,” Mr. Carson went on, “I will deposit the sum in the bank and send you the bank book. I know this will be more in accord with your ideas.”

There was a little twinkle in his eye as he said this, but Miss Zillah did not catch it. She was really much flattered that he should think her a person capable of conducting things in a businesslike way, and she would not have shown by the flutter of an eyelash how frightened she really was at the suggestion.

“Then,” continued Mr. Carson, “our next business will be to find that money. I propose that you call in one or two trusty neighbors, not given to gossiping, and that they assist you in looking over the premises. The money must be here somewhere. It merely devolves on us to find it.”

Miss Adnah made a gesture of distress.

“I don’t believe, sir,” she said, “that you can have any notion of how intensely distressing it is to us to do such a thing. And I may say that we have no neighbors who wouldn’t gossip. If you have any such, please show them to me.”

Annie Laurie, who knew her Aunt Adnah’s tempestuous nature, saw that a storm was rising, and she cast about for a way of diverting it.

“Aunt Adnah,” she broke in, “let Azalea and Carin help us hunt. You know if it’s a secret they’ll never, never, tell it. We’ve pledged ourselves to keep each other’s secrets, you see. And no one can look as hard as we girls can. We’re like ferrets.”

“An excellent idea, Miss Pace,” said Mr. Carson, nodding at Aunt Adnah. “Let the members of the Triple Alliance have a hand at it. It will seem natural enough for Annie Laurie’s friends to be here with her in her trouble; the girls will tell nothing; and their keen young wits are the best ones imaginable to set at this task.”

Upon consultation it struck the sisters that this would be the case. Bad as it would be to have three “young-ones” ranging over their orderly house, tearing up this and that, they would at least take the thing only as a sort of game. They wouldn’t be ill-natured and sneering about it as their elders might be.

So it was agreed that they would accept Mr. Carson’s offer of a generous loan of money, and that on Saturday the three girls were to start in under the direction of the Misses Pace, and make a search of both house and yard.

“Their eyes certainly are sharper than ours, Adnah,” Miss Zillah said.

“Yes,” snapped Miss Adnah, worn and weary with the difficulties of life, “they’re sharp enough. Oh, Zillah, Zillah, why should we Paces be humiliated like this?”

“No humiliation about it, sister,” Miss Zillah replied. “Take things a little easier, Adnah; let some one help us out. We’re very much shaken—very much shaken, indeed. We’re getting old, and we’ve had a great sorrow. If folks want to help, why let ’em.”

There was no doubt about it, they were shaken. The excitement and courage that had borne them up at first, failed them as the week went on. Miss Adnah, who had felt herself so able to attend to the business of the farm, not only found it beyond her power to give an order, but she found it impossible to fix her mind on the bookkeeping, which was a necessary part of the business. Annie Laurie had been obliged to consult with the help after her school hours, and to straighten out the accounts as best she could during the evening. They felt the need of a strong, quiet man of affairs—a good, reliable overseer—but the men who were helping them were not of that sort, and they knew of no one in the country who seemed to meet their need.

Saturday morning by nine o’clock, according to Annie Laurie’s invitation, Azalea and Carin arrived on their ponies. These being given to the stable men, the two girls, in no little awe at entering a house of sorrow, came in to pay their respects to Miss Zillah and her sister. The two sat shivering before the fire, tearful and nervous, and even Miss Adnah was now willing to give over the search for their lost fortune into the hands of these respectful and sympathetic girls.

“At first, my dear girls,” said Aunt Zillah brokenly, “it seemed as if we couldn’t let anyone in to help us and it’s hard enough now, but we’d rather it would be you than anyone.”

“Oh, Miss Zillah,” cried Azalea in her impulsive way, “we understand just how you feel. But Annie Laurie’s fortune just must be found, mustn’t it? Why, it’s a quest, you know. A sacred quest—like you read about.”

That glow which was Azalea’s greatest charm, lit up her dark face and Miss Zillah felt that here was a girl who was one of them. She need fear nothing from her. As for that sweet-faced Carson girl, with her golden hair and her lovely voice, how could anyone do anything but trust her? Yes, it was all as it should be. They were old women and must give their cares into the hands of others.

So the three girls began their never-to-be-forgotten search for Annie Laurie’s lost fortune.

Although the aunts had gone over the dead man’s room, they thought best to begin there. So thorough was their search that they even ripped open the lining of his coats; they looked in his shoes; they investigated his hat linings. Nothing was found.

Then they searched the hallways, the pantries and cupboards. They looked throughout the parlor, through the living room, through the kitchen. They had one of the men in to pull up the window sills. They took the bricks from the hearth. Nightfall found them wearily searching the dusty debris in the old attic.

Sunday was a day of rest for all of these people, but it was very, very hard for them to sit in idleness while their imaginations were rioting through the Pace property, searching out every corner and cubbyhole for the lost money. Naturally enough, Monday found the girls in no condition to settle down to their studies, and as Mrs. Carson said, it was so much more important that the money should be found than that they should learn a lesson or two, that they were excused from school and permitted to resume their search.

The yard was their point of attack this morning. They looked over every inch of it, but nowhere did they see anything save the hard, frozen surface. No hollow tree offered a place for hiding. The solid substructure of the house forbade them to hope for anything there. Next they went to the barns, the stables and outhouses, but here the prospect was discouraging indeed.

“Besides,” said Annie Laurie, “when papa wanted to get money for any purpose he always went to his own room and locked the door. It seemed as if he must have kept it with him.”

“But how can that be,” argued Carin, dropping white and worn into her chair—they were in Annie Laurie’s room,—“when nothing has been found anywhere about his clothes? Why, the only pocketbook he appeared to have was that little one for silver. Didn’t you ever see him with a large leather pocketbook, Annie?”

“Never,” said Annie Laurie. “Never.”

“But now, when papa paid him that twenty thousand dollars,” Carin insisted. “Do you suppose he brought that home in his hand the way a child would a penny, or rolled it up in his pocket where it could fall out any minute? It doesn’t seem reasonable; honestly it doesn’t.”

And then, suddenly, Azalea had a vision. She saw a man come into a dark room—a room lighted only by a flickering fire. She saw him lay aside his coat, unscrew his tin arm, take something from the mantel shelf, place it within, then replace the arm and the coat. She remembered how he had asked her if she ever dreamed, and how she had said she never told her dreams, and he had said that was right. And she had remembered the look that had gone from him to her and back again—a look which was a promise on her part not to tell what she had seen and a message from him of confidence in her. She sat rigid, going over the scene again before she spoke. When she did the girls hardly recognized her voice.

“I know!” she said—not very loud.

“You know?” The others cried it together.

“He kept his money in his tin arm.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw him put some there once.”

“When?”

“Where?”

“The night Annie Laurie and I fell asleep on the sofa.”

“Tell me more, ’Zalie.”

“Yes, yes, I will. I’ll tell you everything. Oh, Annie Laurie, was the tin arm buried with him?”

“No—no, I’m sure it wasn’t. It was hanging on a nail in his bedroom the day after he was buried, but the aunts couldn’t bear to see it there and they carried it to the attic.”

“Then the money couldn’t have been in it after all.”

“Oh, it might still be there. Let’s go see.”

Up to the attic they went, trembling with eagerness. There, sure enough, from a beam hung the tin arm. Annie Laurie could not quite bring herself to touch it. It seemed almost like a part of her father. But Azalea took it down, convinced that she was right. She looked into it; carried it to one of the windows and looked again. She ran her fingers into the hand of it. She turned her disappointed face toward her friends. There was nothing there.

“All the same,” she said with earnestness, “it _was_ there.”

“But then some one has taken it out.”

“That’s it,” said Carin. “Some one has taken it out.”

“Not the aunts!” cried Annie Laurie, fiercely.

“Oh, mercy no,” agreed Azalea, “not the aunts.”

“But who else handled the arm?” asked Carin.

Annie Laurie stood thinking. Then a deep flush spread over her face.

“I—I don’t—who else could have?” she stammered. She couldn’t bear to place anyone under suspicion.

But Azalea was more impulsive.

“Why Mr. Disbrow, the undertaker, of course,” she said. “He must have taken it off. He must have—” she stopped and the three stared at each other.

And then Annie Laurie remembered how he had crowded by her in the hall, not speaking, and looking the other way.

Chapter IX The Disbrows

The three girls made up their minds to tell no one of their suspicions concerning the disappearance of Simeon Pace’s money. But Azalea could not but talk it over with Pa McBirney, and Thomas McBirney could not resist cogitating about the matter with Haystack Thompson, and he, in turn, was impelled to go with it to his trusted pastor, Absalom Summers. And Absalom whispered it to his Barbara, and Barbara—but perhaps she told no one. In looking the matter over afterward, she was almost sure that she had told no one. At least she hadn’t told of it right out. And Carin spoke of it only to her father; and he mentioned it merely to the banker Heller, and he only spoke of it to his fellow officers in the bank, and they told no one but their intimate friends.

As for Annie Laurie, she refrained with a mighty effort from confiding her suspicions to her aunts, and she warned her friends not to tell them. Had they mulled that matter over and over during the long, lonely winter evenings, the poor girl would have felt as if she were losing her reason as well as her fortune. Indeed, the winter had settled down heavily over the Pace household. The dairy met with reverses. Two of the best cows died. The accounts would not balance. And worst of all, the helpers were hard to manage and would not take orders willingly from Miss Adnah. The strong will and hand of Simeon Pace were sorely missed.

And along with all this distress was the sense that Annie Laurie and her aunts had of burning injustice. Somewhere in the world was money in abundance, belonging to them. Just how much it was they could not even guess. Of Mr. Carson’s purchase money of twenty thousand dollars they felt sure. He had Simeon Pace’s receipt to show for that. But there was other money beyond question—the savings of years. The old aunts, waking in the night, would arise and fumble in the places in which they had looked so often; and Annie Laurie, strong and sensible as she was, found that it required all of her will to keep from following their example.

This girl, so straightforward, so energetic and hopeful by nature, found it almost intole