The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rainbow Valley, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

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Title: Rainbow Valley

Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery

Release Date: July 3, 2002 [eBook #5343]
[Most recently updated: May 5, 2021]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Bernard J. Farber, Carmen Baxter, Dona Rucci, Elizabeth
Morton, Rebekah Neely, Joe Johnson, Joan Chovan, Judith Fetterolf,
Mary Nuzzo, Sally Drake, Sally Starks, Steve Callis, Virginia
Mohlere-Dellinger, Mary Mark Ockerbloom, Ben Crowder and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAINBOW VALLEY ***




[Illustration]




Rainbow Valley

by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Author of “Anne of Green Gables,” “Anne of the
Island,”

“Anne’s House of Dreams,” “The Story Girl,”
“The Watchman,” etc.

“The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
—LONGFELLOW

TO THE MEMORY OF

GOLDWIN LAPP, ROBERT BROOKES AND MORLEY SHIER

WHO MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE THAT THE HAPPY VALLEYS OF THEIR HOME
LAND MIGHT BE KEPT SACRED FROM THE RAVAGE OF THE INVADER


Contents

I. HOME AGAIN
II. SHEER GOSSIP
III. THE INGLESIDE CHILDREN
IV. THE MANSE CHILDREN
V. THE ADVENT OF MARY VANCE
VI. MARY STAYS AT THE MANSE
VII. A FISHY EPISODE
VIII. MISS CORNELIA INTERVENES
IX. UNA INTERVENES
X. THE MANSE GIRLS CLEAN HOUSE
XI. A DREADFUL DISCOVERY
XII. AN EXPLANATION AND A DARE
XIII. THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
XIV.  MRS. ALEC DAVIS MAKES A CALL
XV. MORE GOSSIP
XVI. TIT FOR TAT
XVII. A DOUBLE VICTORY
XVIII. MARY BRINGS EVIL TIDINGS
XIX. POOR ADAM!
XX. FAITH MAKES A FRIEND
XXI. THE IMPOSSIBLE WORD
XXII. ST. GEORGE KNOWS ALL ABOUT IT
XXIII. THE GOOD-CONDUCT CLUB
XXIV. A CHARITABLE IMPULSE
XXV. ANOTHER SCANDAL AND ANOTHER “EXPLANATION”
XXVI. MISS CORNELIA GETS A NEW POINT OF VIEW
XXVII. A SACRED CONCERT
XXVIII. A FAST DAY
XXIX. A WEIRD TALE
XXX. THE GHOST ON THE DYKE
XXXI. CARL DOES PENANCE
XXXII. TWO STUBBORN PEOPLE
XXXIII. CARL IS—NOT—WHIPPED
XXXIV. UNA VISITS THE HILL
XXXV. “LET THE PIPER COME”




RAINBOW VALLEY




CHAPTER I.
HOME AGAIN


It was a clear, apple-green evening in May, and Four Winds Harbour was
mirroring back the clouds of the golden west between its softly dark
shores. The sea moaned eerily on the sand-bar, sorrowful even in
spring, but a sly, jovial wind came piping down the red harbour road
along which Miss Cornelia’s comfortable, matronly figure was making its
way towards the village of Glen St. Mary. Miss Cornelia was rightfully
Mrs. Marshall Elliott, and had been Mrs. Marshall Elliott for thirteen
years, but even yet more people referred to her as Miss Cornelia than
as Mrs. Elliott. The old name was dear to her old friends, only one of
them contemptuously dropped it. Susan Baker, the gray and grim and
faithful handmaiden of the Blythe family at Ingleside, never lost an
opportunity of calling her “Mrs. Marshall Elliott,” with the most
killing and pointed emphasis, as if to say “You wanted to be Mrs. and
Mrs. you shall be with a vengeance as far as I am concerned.”

Miss Cornelia was going up to Ingleside to see Dr. and Mrs. Blythe, who
were just home from Europe. They had been away for three months, having
left in February to attend a famous medical congress in London; and
certain things, which Miss Cornelia was anxious to discuss, had taken
place in the Glen during their absence. For one thing, there was a new
family in the manse. And such a family! Miss Cornelia shook her head
over them several times as she walked briskly along.

Susan Baker and the Anne Shirley of other days saw her coming, as they
sat on the big veranda at Ingleside, enjoying the charm of the cat’s
light, the sweetness of sleepy robins whistling among the twilit
maples, and the dance of a gusty group of daffodils blowing against the
old, mellow, red brick wall of the lawn.

Anne was sitting on the steps, her hands clasped over her knee,
looking, in the kind dusk, as girlish as a mother of many has any right
to be; and the beautiful gray-green eyes, gazing down the harbour road,
were as full of unquenchable sparkle and dream as ever. Behind her, in
the hammock, Rilla Blythe was curled up, a fat, roly-poly little
creature of six years, the youngest of the Ingleside children. She had
curly red hair and hazel eyes that were now buttoned up after the
funny, wrinkled fashion in which Rilla always went to sleep.

Shirley, “the little brown boy,” as he was known in the family “Who’s
Who,” was asleep in Susan’s arms. He was brown-haired, brown-eyed and
brown-skinned, with very rosy cheeks, and he was Susan’s especial love.
After his birth Anne had been very ill for a long time, and Susan
“mothered” the baby with a passionate tenderness which none of the
other children, dear as they were to her, had ever called out. Dr.
Blythe had said that but for her he would never have lived.

“I gave him life just as much as you did, Mrs. Dr. dear,” Susan was
wont to say. “He is just as much my baby as he is yours.” And, indeed,
it was always to Susan that Shirley ran, to be kissed for bumps, and
rocked to sleep, and protected from well-deserved spankings. Susan had
conscientiously spanked all the other Blythe children when she thought
they needed it for their souls’ good, but she would not spank Shirley
nor allow his mother to do it. Once, Dr. Blythe had spanked him and
Susan had been stormily indignant.

“That man would spank an angel, Mrs. Dr. dear, that he would,” she had
declared bitterly; and she would not make the poor doctor a pie for
weeks.

She had taken Shirley with her to her brother’s home during his
parents’ absence, while all the other children had gone to Avonlea, and
she had three blessed months of him all to herself. Nevertheless, Susan
was very glad to find herself back at Ingleside, with all her darlings
around her again. Ingleside was her world and in it she reigned
supreme. Even Anne seldom questioned her decisions, much to the disgust
of Mrs. Rachel Lynde of Green Gables, who gloomily told Anne, whenever
she visited Four Winds, that she was letting Susan get to be entirely
too much of a boss and would live to rue it.

“Here is Cornelia Bryant coming up the harbour road, Mrs. Dr. dear,”
said Susan. “She will be coming up to unload three months’ gossip on
us.”

“I hope so,” said Anne, hugging her knees. “I’m starving for Glen St.
Mary gossip, Susan. I hope Miss Cornelia can tell me everything that
has happened while we’ve been away—_everything_—who has got born, or
married, or drunk; who has died, or gone away, or come, or fought, or
lost a cow, or found a beau. It’s so delightful to be home again with
all the dear Glen folks, and I want to know all about them. Why, I
remember wondering, as I walked through Westminster Abbey which of her
two especial beaux Millicent Drew would finally marry. Do you know,
Susan, I have a dreadful suspicion that I love gossip.”

“Well, of course, Mrs. Dr. dear,” admitted Susan, “every proper woman
likes to hear the news. I am rather interested in Millicent Drew’s case
myself. I never had a beau, much less two, and I do not mind now, for
being an old maid does not hurt when you get used to it. Millicent’s
hair always looks to me as if she had swept it up with a broom. But the
men do not seem to mind that.”

“They see only her pretty, piquant, mocking, little face, Susan.”

“That may very well be, Mrs. Dr. dear. The Good Book says that favour
is deceitful and beauty is vain, but I should not have minded finding
that out for myself, if it had been so ordained. I have no doubt we
will all be beautiful when we are angels, but what good will it do us
then? Speaking of gossip, however, they do say that poor Mrs. Harrison
Miller over harbour tried to hang herself last week.”

“Oh, Susan!”

“Calm yourself, Mrs. Dr. dear. She did not succeed. But I really do not
blame her for trying, for her husband is a terrible man. But she was
very foolish to think of hanging herself and leaving the way clear for
him to marry some other woman. If I had been in her shoes, Mrs. Dr.
dear, I would have gone to work to worry him so that he would try to
hang himself instead of me. Not that I hold with people hanging
themselves under any circumstances, Mrs. Dr. dear.”

“What is the matter with Harrison Miller, anyway?” said Anne
impatiently. “He is always driving some one to extremes.”

“Well, some people call it religion and some call it cussedness,
begging your pardon, Mrs. Dr. dear, for using such a word. It seems
they cannot make out which it is in Harrison’s case. There are days
when he growls at everybody because he thinks he is fore-ordained to
eternal punishment. And then there are days when he says he does not
care and goes and gets drunk. My own opinion is that he is not sound in
his intellect, for none of that branch of the Millers were. His
grandfather went out of his mind. He thought he was surrounded by big
black spiders. They crawled over him and floated in the air about him.
I hope I shall never go insane, Mrs. Dr. dear, and I do not think I
will, because it is not a habit of the Bakers. But, if an all-wise
Providence should decree it, I hope it will not take the form of big
black spiders, for I loathe the animals. As for Mrs. Miller, I do not
know whether she really deserves pity or not. There are some who say
she just married Harrison to spite Richard Taylor, which seems to me a
very peculiar reason for getting married. But then, of course, _I_ am
no judge of things matrimonial, Mrs. Dr. dear. And there is Cornelia
Bryant at the gate, so I will put this blessed brown baby on his bed
and get my knitting.”




CHAPTER II.
SHEER GOSSIP


“Where are the other children?” asked Miss Cornelia, when the first
greetings—cordial on her side, rapturous on Anne’s, and dignified on
Susan’s—were over.

“Shirley is in bed and Jem and Walter and the twins are down in their
beloved Rainbow Valley,” said Anne. “They just came home this
afternoon, you know, and they could hardly wait until supper was over
before rushing down to the valley. They love it above every spot on
earth. Even the maple grove doesn’t rival it in their affections.”

“I am afraid they love it too well,” said Susan gloomily. “Little Jem
said once he would rather go to Rainbow Valley than to heaven when he
died, and that was not a proper remark.”

“I suppose they had a great time in Avonlea?” said Miss Cornelia.

“Enormous. Marilla does spoil them terribly. Jem, in particular, can do
no wrong in her eyes.”

“Miss Cuthbert must be an old lady now,” said Miss Cornelia, getting
out her knitting, so that she could hold her own with Susan. Miss
Cornelia held that the woman whose hands were employed always had the
advantage over the woman whose hands were not.

“Marilla is eighty-five,” said Anne with a sigh. “Her hair is
snow-white. But, strange to say, her eyesight is better than it was
when she was sixty.”

“Well, dearie, I’m real glad you’re all back. I’ve been dreadful
lonesome. But we haven’t been dull in the Glen, believe _me_. There
hasn’t been such an exciting spring in my time, as far as church
matters go. We’ve got settled with a minister at last, Anne dearie.”

“The Reverend John Knox Meredith, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan, resolved
not to let Miss Cornelia tell all the news.

“Is he nice?” asked Anne interestedly.

Miss Cornelia sighed and Susan groaned.

“Yes, he’s nice enough if that were all,” said the former. “He is
_very_ nice—and very learned—and very spiritual. But, oh Anne dearie,
he has no common sense!

“How was it you called him, then?”

“Well, there’s no doubt he is by far the best preacher we ever had in
Glen St. Mary church,” said Miss Cornelia, veering a tack or two. “I
suppose it is because he is so moony and absent-minded that he never
got a town call. His trial sermon was simply wonderful, believe _me_.
Every one went mad about it—and his looks.”

“He is _very_ comely, Mrs. Dr. dear, and when all is said and done, I
_do_ like to see a well-looking man in the pulpit,” broke in Susan,
thinking it was time she asserted herself again.

“Besides,” said Miss Cornelia, “we were anxious to get settled. And Mr.
Meredith was the first candidate we were all agreed on. Somebody had
some objection to all the others. There was some talk of calling Mr.
Folsom. He was a good preacher, too, but somehow people didn’t care for
his appearance. He was too dark and sleek.”

“He looked exactly like a great black tomcat, that he did, Mrs. Dr.
dear,” said Susan. “I never could abide such a man in the pulpit every
Sunday.”

“Then Mr. Rogers came and he was like a chip in porridge—neither harm
nor good,” resumed Miss Cornelia. “But if he had preached like Peter
and Paul it would have profited him nothing, for that was the day old
Caleb Ramsay’s sheep strayed into church and gave a loud ‘ba-a-a’ just
as he announced his text. Everybody laughed, and poor Rogers had no
chance after that. Some thought we ought to call Mr. Stewart, because
he was so well educated. He could read the New Testament in five
languages.”

“But I do not think he was any surer than other men of getting to
heaven because of that,” interjected Susan.

“Most of us didn’t like his delivery,” said Miss Cornelia, ignoring
Susan. “He talked in grunts, so to speak. And Mr. Arnett couldn’t
preach _at all_. And he picked about the worst candidating text there
is in the Bible—‘Curse ye Meroz.’”

“Whenever he got stuck for an idea, he would bang the Bible and shout
very bitterly, ‘Curse ye Meroz.’ Poor Meroz got thoroughly cursed that
day, whoever he was, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan.

“The minister who is candidating can’t be too careful what text he
chooses,” said Miss Cornelia solemnly. “I believe Mr. Pierson would
have got the call if he had picked a different text. But when he
announced ‘I will lift my eyes to the hills’ _he_ was done for. Every
one grinned, for every one knew that those two Hill girls from the
Harbour Head have been setting their caps for every single minister who
came to the Glen for the last fifteen years. And Mr. Newman had too
large a family.”

“He stayed with my brother-in-law, James Clow,” said Susan. “‘How many
children have you got?’ I asked him. ‘Nine boys and a sister for each
of them,’ he said. ‘Eighteen!’ said I. ‘Dear me, what a family!’ And
then he laughed and laughed. But I do not know why, Mrs. Dr. dear, and
I am certain that eighteen children would be too many for any manse.”

“He had only ten children, Susan,” explained Miss Cornelia, with
contemptuous patience. “And ten good children would not be much worse
for the manse and congregation than the four who are there now. Though
I wouldn’t say, Anne dearie, that they are so bad, either. I like
them—everybody likes them. It’s impossible to help liking them. They
would be real nice little souls if there was anyone to look after their
manners and teach them what is right and proper. For instance, at
school the teacher says they are model children. But at home they
simply run wild.”

“What about Mrs. Meredith?” asked Anne.

“There’s _no_ Mrs. Meredith. That is just the trouble. Mr. Meredith is
a widower. His wife died four years ago. If we had known that I don’t
suppose we would have called him, for a widower is even worse in a
congregation than a single man. But he was heard to speak of his
children and we all supposed there was a mother, too. And when they
came there was nobody but old Aunt Martha, as they call her. She’s a
cousin of Mr. Meredith’s mother, I believe, and he took her in to save
her from the poorhouse. She is seventy-five years old, half blind, and
very deaf and very cranky.”

“And a very poor cook, Mrs. Dr. dear.”

“The worst possible manager for a manse,” said Miss Cornelia bitterly.
“Mr. Meredith won’t get any other housekeeper because he says it would
hurt Aunt Martha’s feelings. Anne dearie, believe me, the state of that
manse is something terrible. Everything is thick with dust and nothing
is ever in its place. And we had painted and papered it all so nice
before they came.”

“There are four children, you say?” asked Anne, beginning to mother
them already in her heart.

“Yes. They run up just like the steps of a stair. Gerald’s the oldest.
He’s twelve and they call him Jerry. He’s a clever boy. Faith is
eleven. She is a regular tomboy but pretty as a picture, I must say.”

“She looks like an angel but she is a holy terror for mischief, Mrs.
Dr. dear,” said Susan solemnly. “I was at the manse one night last week
and Mrs. James Millison was there, too. She had brought them up a dozen
eggs and a little pail of milk—a _very_ little pail, Mrs. Dr. dear.
Faith took them and whisked down the cellar with them. Near the bottom
of the stairs she caught her toe and fell the rest of the way, milk and
eggs and all. You can imagine the result, Mrs. Dr. dear. But that child
came up laughing. ‘I don’t know whether I’m myself or a custard pie,’
she said. And Mrs. James Millison was very angry. She said she would
never take another thing to the manse if it was to be wasted and
destroyed in that fashion.”

“Maria Millison never hurt herself taking things to the manse,” sniffed
Miss Cornelia. “She just took them that night as an excuse for
curiosity. But poor Faith is always getting into scrapes. She is so
heedless and impulsive.”

“Just like me. I’m going to like your Faith,” said Anne decidedly.

“She is full of spunk—and I do like spunk, Mrs. Dr. dear,” admitted
Susan.

“There’s something taking about her,” conceded Miss Cornelia. “You
never see her but she’s laughing, and somehow it always makes you want
to laugh too. She can’t even keep a straight face in church. Una is
ten—she’s a sweet little thing—not pretty, but sweet. And Thomas
Carlyle is nine. They call him Carl, and he has a regular mania for
collecting toads and bugs and frogs and bringing them into the house.”

“I suppose he was responsible for the dead rat that was lying on a
chair in the parlour the afternoon Mrs. Grant called. It gave her a
turn,” said Susan, “and I do not wonder, for manse parlours are no
places for dead rats. To be sure it may have been the cat who left it,
there. _He_ is as full of the old Nick as he can be stuffed, Mrs. Dr.
dear. A manse cat should at least _look_ respectable, in my opinion,
whatever he really is. But I never saw such a rakish-looking beast. And
he walks along the ridgepole of the manse almost every evening at
sunset, Mrs. Dr. dear, and waves his tail, and that is not becoming.”

“The worst of it is, they are _never_ decently dressed,” sighed Miss
Cornelia. “And since the snow went they go to school barefooted. Now,
you know Anne dearie, that isn’t the right thing for manse
children—especially when the Methodist minister’s little girl always
wears such nice buttoned boots. And I _do_ wish they wouldn’t play in
the old Methodist graveyard.”

“It’s very tempting, when it’s right beside the manse,” said Anne.
“I’ve always thought graveyards must be delightful places to play in.”

“Oh, no, you did not, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said loyal Susan, determined to
protect Anne from herself. “You have too much good sense and decorum.”

“Why did they ever build that manse beside the graveyard in the first
place?” asked Anne. “Their lawn is so small there is no place for them
to play except in the graveyard.”

“It _was_ a mistake,” admitted Miss Cornelia. “But they got the lot
cheap. And no other manse children ever thought of playing there. Mr.
Meredith shouldn’t allow it. But he has always got his nose buried in a
book, when he is home. He reads and reads, or walks about in his study
in a day-dream. So far he hasn’t forgotten to be in church on Sundays,
but twice he has forgotten about the prayer-meeting and one of the
elders had to go over to the manse and remind him. And he forgot about
Fanny Cooper’s wedding. They rang him up on the ‘phone and then he
rushed right over, just as he was, carpet slippers and all. One
wouldn’t mind if the Methodists didn’t laugh so about it. But there’s
one comfort—they can’t criticize his sermons. He wakes up when he’s in
the pulpit, believe _me_. And the Methodist minister can’t preach at
all—so they tell me. _I_ have never heard him, thank goodness.”

Miss Cornelia’s scorn of men had abated somewhat since her marriage,
but her scorn of Methodists remained untinged of charity. Susan smiled
slyly.

“They do say, Mrs. Marshall Elliott, that the Methodists and
Presbyterians are talking of uniting,” she said.

“Well, all I hope is that I’ll be under the sod if that ever comes to
pass,” retorted Miss Cornelia. “I shall never have truck or trade with
Methodists, and Mr. Meredith will find that he’d better steer clear of
them, too. He is entirely too sociable with them, believe _me_. Why, he
went to the Jacob Drews’ silver-wedding supper and got into a nice
scrape as a result.”

“What was it?”

“Mrs. Drew asked him to carve the roast goose—for Jacob Drew never did
or could carve. Well, Mr. Meredith tackled it, and in the process he
knocked it clean off the platter into Mrs. Reese’s lap, who was sitting
next him. And he just said dreamily. ‘Mrs. Reese, will you kindly
return me that goose?’ Mrs. Reese ‘returned’ it, as meek as Moses, but
she must have been furious, for she had on her new silk dress. The
worst of it is, she was a Methodist.”

“But I think that is better than if she was a Presbyterian,”
interjected Susan. “If she had been a Presbyterian she would mostly
likely have left the church and we cannot afford to lose our members.
And Mrs. Reese is not liked in her own church, because she gives
herself such great airs, so that the Methodists would be rather pleased
that Mr. Meredith spoiled her dress.”

“The point is, he made himself ridiculous, and _I_, for one, do not
like to see my minister made ridiculous in the eyes of the Methodists,”
said Miss Cornelia stiffly. “If he had had a wife it would not have
happened.”

“I do not see if he had a dozen wives how they could have prevented
Mrs. Drew from using up her tough old gander for the wedding-feast,”
said Susan stubbornly.

“They say that was her husband’s doing,” said Miss Cornelia. “Jacob
Drew is a conceited, stingy, domineering creature.”

“And they do say he and his wife detest each other—which does not seem
to me the proper way for married folks to get along. But then, of
course, I have had no experience along that line,” said Susan, tossing
her head. “And _I_ am not one to blame everything on the men. Mrs. Drew
is mean enough herself. They say that the only thing she was ever known
to give away was a crock of butter made out of cream a rat had fell
into. She contributed it to a church social. Nobody found out about the
rat until afterwards.”

“Fortunately, all the people the Merediths have offended so far are
Methodists,” said Miss Cornelia. “That Jerry went to the Methodist
prayer-meeting one night about a fortnight ago and sat beside old
William Marsh who got up as usual and testified with fearful groans.
‘Do you feel any better now?’ whispered Jerry when William sat down.
Poor Jerry meant to be sympathetic, but Mr. Marsh thought he was
impertinent and is furious at him. Of course, Jerry had no business to
be in a Methodist prayer-meeting at all. But they go where they like.”

“I hope they will not offend Mrs. Alec Davis of the Harbour Head,” said
Susan. “She is a very touchy woman, I understand, but she is very well
off and pays the most of any one to the salary. I have heard that she
says the Merediths are the worst brought up children she ever saw.”

“Every word you say convinces me more and more that the Merediths
belong to the race that knows Joseph,” said Mistress Anne decidedly.

“When all is said and done, they _do_,” admitted Miss Cornelia. “And
that balances everything. Anyway, we’ve got them now and we must just
do the best we can by them and stick up for them to the Methodists.
Well, I suppose I must be getting down harbour. Marshall will soon be
home—he went over-harbour to-day—and wanting his super, man-like. I’m
sorry I haven’t seen the other children. And where’s the doctor?”

“Up at the Harbour Head. We’ve only been home three days and in that
time he has spent three hours in his own bed and eaten two meals in his
own house.”

“Well, everybody who has been sick for the last six weeks has been
waiting for him to come home—and I don’t blame them. When that
over-harbour doctor married the undertaker’s daughter at Lowbridge
people felt suspicious of him. It didn’t look well. You and the doctor
must come down soon and tell us all about your trip. I suppose you’ve
had a splendid time.”

“We had,” agreed Anne. “It was the fulfilment of years of dreams. The
old world is very lovely and very wonderful. But we have come back very
well satisfied with our own land. Canada is the finest country in the
world, Miss Cornelia.”

“Nobody ever doubted that,” said Miss Cornelia, complacently.

“And old P.E.I. is the loveliest province in it and Four Winds the
loveliest spot in P.E.I.,” laughed Anne, looking adoringly out over the
sunset splendour of glen and harbour and gulf. She waved her hand at
it. “I saw nothing more beautiful than that in Europe, Miss Cornelia.
Must you go? The children will be sorry to have missed you.”

“They must come and see me soon. Tell them the doughnut jar is always
full.”

“Oh, at supper they were planning a descent on you. They’ll go soon;
but they must settle down to school again now. And the twins are going
to take music lessons.”

“Not from the Methodist minister’s wife, I hope?” said Miss Cornelia
anxiously.

“No—from Rosemary West. I was up last evening to arrange it with her.
What a pretty girl she is!”

“Rosemary holds her own well. She isn’t as young as she once was.”

“I thought her very charming. I’ve never had any real acquaintance with
her, you know. Their house is so out of the way, and I’ve seldom ever
seen her except at church.”

“People always have liked Rosemary West, though they don’t understand
her,” said Miss Cornelia, quite unconscious of the high tribute she was
paying to Rosemary’s charm. “Ellen has always kept her down, so to
speak. She has tyrannized over her, and yet she has always indulged her
in a good many ways. Rosemary was engaged once, you know—to young
Martin Crawford. His ship was wrecked on the Magdalens and all the crew
were drowned. Rosemary was just a child—only seventeen. But she was
never the same afterwards. She and Ellen have stayed very close at home
since their mother’s death. They don’t often get to their own church at
Lowbridge and I understand Ellen doesn’t approve of going too often to
a Presbyterian church. To the Methodist she _never_ goes, I’ll say that
much for her. That family of Wests have always been strong
Episcopalians. Rosemary and Ellen are pretty well off. Rosemary doesn’t
really need to give music lessons. She does it because she likes to.
They are distantly related to Leslie, you know. Are the Fords coming to
the harbour this summer?”

“No. They are going on a trip to Japan and will probably be away for a
year. Owen’s new novel is to have a Japanese setting. This will be the
first summer that the dear old House of Dreams will be empty since we
left it.”

“I should think Owen Ford might find enough to write about in Canada
without dragging his wife and his innocent children off to a heathen
country like Japan,” grumbled Miss Cornelia. “_The Life Book_ was the
best book he’s ever written and he got the material for that right here
in Four Winds.”

“Captain Jim gave him the most of that, you know. And he collected it
all over the world. But Owen’s books are all delightful, I think.”

“Oh, they’re well enough as far as they go. I make it a point to read
every one he writes, though I’ve always held, Anne dearie, that reading
novels is a sinful waste of time. I shall write and tell him my opinion
of this Japanese business, believe _me_. Does he want Kenneth and
Persis to be converted into pagans?”

With which unanswerable conundrum Miss Cornelia took her departure.
Susan proceeded to put Rilla in bed and Anne sat on the veranda steps
under the early stars and dreamed her incorrigible dreams and learned
all over again for the hundredth happy time what a moonrise splendour
and sheen could be on Four Winds Harbour.




CHAPTER III.
THE INGLESIDE CHILDREN


In daytime the Blythe children liked very well to play in the rich,
soft greens and glooms of the big maple grove between Ingleside and the
Glen St. Mary pond; but for evening revels there was no place like the
little valley behind the maple grove. It was a fairy realm of romance
to them. Once, looking from the attic windows of Ingleside, through the
mist and aftermath of a summer thunderstorm, they had seen the beloved
spot arched by a glorious rainbow, one end of which seemed to dip
straight down to where a corner of the pond ran up into the lower end
of the valley.

“Let us call it Rainbow Valley,” said Walter delightedly, and Rainbow
Valley thenceforth it was.

Outside of Rainbow Valley the wind might be rollicking and boisterous.
Here it always went gently. Little, winding, fairy paths ran here and
there over spruce roots cushioned with moss. Wild cherry trees, that in
blossom time would be misty white, were scattered all over the valley,
mingling with the dark spruces. A little brook with amber waters ran
through it from the Glen village. The houses of the village were
comfortably far away; only at the upper end of the valley was a little
tumble-down, deserted cottage, referred to as “the old Bailey house.”
It had not been occupied for many years, but a grass-grown dyke
surrounded it and inside was an ancient garden where the Ingleside
children could find violets and daisies and June lilies still blooming
in season. For the rest, the garden was overgrown with caraway that
swayed and foamed in the moonshine of summer eves like seas of silver.

To the sought lay the pond and beyond it the ripened distance lost
itself in purple woods, save where, on a high hill, a solitary old gray
homestead looked down on glen and harbour. There was a certain wild
woodsiness and solitude about Rainbow Valley, in spite of its nearness
to the village, which endeared it to the children of Ingleside.

The valley was full of dear, friendly hollows and the largest of these
was their favourite stamping ground. Here they were assembled on this
particular evening. There was a grove of young spruces in this hollow,
with a tiny, grassy glade in its heart, opening on the bank of the
brook. By the brook grew a silver birch-tree, a young, incredibly
straight thing which Walter had named the “White Lady.” In this glade,
too, were the “Tree Lovers,” as Walter called a spruce and maple which
grew so closely together that their boughs were inextricably
intertwined. Jem had hung an old string of sleigh-bells, given him by
the Glen blacksmith, on the Tree Lovers, and every visitant breeze
called out sudden fairy tinkles from it.

“How nice it is to be back!” said Nan. “After all, none of the Avonlea
places are quite as nice as Rainbow Valley.”

But they were very fond of the Avonlea places for all that. A visit to
Green Gables was always considered a great treat. Aunt Marilla was very
good to them, and so was Mrs. Rachel Lynde, who was spending the
leisure of her old age in knitting cotton-warp quilts against the day
when Anne’s daughters should need a “setting-out.” There were jolly
playmates there, too—“Uncle” Davy’s children and “Aunt” Diana’s
children. They knew all the spots their mother had loved so well in her
girlhood at old Green Gables—the long Lover’s Lane, that was
pink-hedged in wild-rose time, the always neat yard, with its willows
and poplars, the Dryad’s Bubble, lucent and lovely as of yore, the Lake
of Shining Waters, and Willowmere. The twins had their mother’s old
porch-gable room, and Aunt Marilla used to come in at night, when she
thought they were asleep, to gloat over them. But they all knew she
loved Jem the best.

Jem was at present busily occupied in frying a mess of small trout
which he had just caught in the pond. His stove consisted of a circle
of red stones, with a fire kindled in it, and his culinary utensils
were an old tin can, hammered out flat, and a fork with only one tine
left. Nevertheless, ripping good meals had before now been thus
prepared.

Jem was the child of the House of Dreams. All the others had been born
at Ingleside. He had curly red hair, like his mother’s, and frank hazel
eyes, like his father’s; he had his mother’s fine nose and his father’s
steady, humorous mouth. And he was the only one of the family who had
ears nice enough to please Susan. But he had a standing feud with Susan
because she would not give up calling him Little Jem. It was
outrageous, thought thirteen-year-old Jem. Mother had more sense.

“I’m _not_ little any more, Mother,” he had cried indignantly, on his
eighth birthday. “I’m _awful_ big.”

Mother had sighed and laughed and sighed again; and she never called
him Little Jem again—in his hearing at least.

He was and always had been a sturdy, reliable little chap. He never
broke a promise. He was not a great talker. His teachers did not think
him brilliant, but he was a good, all-round student. He never took
things on faith; he always liked to investigate the truth of a
statement for himself. Once Susan had told him that if he touched his
tongue to a frosty latch all the skin would tear off it. Jem had
promptly done it, “just to see if it was so.” He found it was “so,” at
the cost of a very sore tongue for several days. But Jem did not grudge
suffering in the interests of science. By constant experiment and
observation he learned a great deal and his brothers and sisters
thought his extensive knowledge of their little world quite wonderful.
Jem always knew where the first and ripest berries grew, where the
first pale violets shyly wakened from their winter’s sleep, and how
many blue eggs were in a given robin’s nest in the maple grove. He
could tell fortunes from daisy petals and suck honey from red clovers,
and grub up all sorts of edible roots on the banks of the pond, while
Susan went in daily fear that they would all be poisoned. He knew where
the finest spruce-gum was to be found, in pale amber knots on the
lichened bark, he knew where the nuts grew thickest in the beechwoods
around the Harbour Head, and where the best trouting places up the
brooks were. He could mimic the call of any wild bird or beast in Four
Winds and he knew the haunt of every wild flower from spring to autumn.

Walter Blythe was sitting under the White Lady, with a volume of poems
lying beside him, but he was not reading. He was gazing now at the
emerald-misted willows by the pond, and now at a flock of clouds, like
little silver sheep, herded by the wind, that were drifting over
Rainbow Valley, with rapture in his wide splendid eyes. Walter’s eyes
were very wonderful. All the joy and sorrow and laughter and loyalty
and aspiration of many generations lying under the sod looked out of
their dark gray depths.

Walter was a “hop out of kin,” as far as looks went. He did not
resemble any known relative. He was quite the handsomest of the
Ingleside children, with straight black hair and finely modelled
features. But he had all his mother’s vivid imagination and passionate
love of beauty. Frost of winter, invitation of spring, dream of summer
and glamour of autumn, all meant much to Walter.

In school, where Jem was a chieftain, Walter was not thought highly of.
He was supposed to be “girly” and milk-soppish, because he never fought
and seldom joined in the school sports, preferring to herd by himself
in out of the way corners and read books—especially “po’try books.”
Walter loved the poets and pored over their pages from the time he
could first read. Their music was woven into his growing soul—the music
of the immortals. Walter cherished the ambition to be a poet himself
some day. The thing could be done. A certain Uncle Paul—so called out
of courtesy—who lived now in that mysterious realm called “the States,”
was Walter’s model. Uncle Paul had once been a little school boy in
Avonlea and now his poetry was read everywhere. But the Glen schoolboys
did not know of Walter’s dreams and would not have been greatly
impressed if they had. In spite of his lack of physical prowess,
however, he commanded a certain unwilling respect because of his power
of “talking book talk.” Nobody in Glen St. Mary school could talk like
him. He “sounded like a preacher,” one boy said; and for this reason he
was generally left alone and not persecuted, as most boys were who were
suspected of disliking or fearing fisticuffs.

The ten year old Ingleside twins violated twin tradition by not looking
in the least alike. Anne, who was always called Nan, was very pretty,
with velvety nut-brown eyes and silky nut-brown hair. She was a very
blithe and dainty little maiden—Blythe by name and blithe by nature,
one of her teachers had said. Her complexion was quite faultless, much
to her mother’s satisfaction.

“I’m so glad I have one daughter who can wear pink,” Mrs. Blythe was
wont to say jubilantly.

Diana Blythe, known as Di, was very like her mother, with gray-green
eyes that always shone with a peculiar lustre and brilliancy in the
dusk, and red hair. Perhaps this was why she was her father’s
favourite. She and Walter were especial chums; Di was the only one to
whom he would ever read the verses he wrote himself—the only one who
knew that he was secretly hard at work on an epic, strikingly
resembling “Marmion” in some things, if not in others. She kept all his
secrets, even from Nan, and told him all hers.

“Won’t you soon have those fish ready, Jem?” said Nan, sniffing with
her dainty nose. “The smell makes me awfully hungry.”

“They’re nearly ready,” said Jem, giving one a dexterous turn. “Get out
the bread and the plates, girls. Walter, wake up.”

“How the air shines to-night,” said Walter dreamily. Not that he
despised fried trout either, by any means; but with Walter food for the
soul always took first place. “The flower angel has been walking over
the world to-day, calling to the flowers. I can see his blue wings on
that hill by the woods.”

“Any angels’ wings I ever saw were white,” said Nan.

“The flower angel’s aren’t. They are a pale misty blue, just like the
haze in the valley. Oh, how I wish I could fly. It must be glorious.”

“One does fly in dreams sometimes,” said Di.

“I never dream that I’m flying exactly,” said Walter. “But I often
dream that I just rise up from the ground and float over the fences and
the trees. It’s delightful—and I always think, ‘This _isn’t_ a dream
like it’s always been before. _This_ is real’—and then I wake up after
all, and it’s heart-breaking.”

“Hurry up, Nan,” ordered Jem.

Nan had produced the banquet-board—a board literally as well as
figuratively—from which many a feast, seasoned as no viands were
elsewhere, had been eaten in Rainbow Valley. It was converted into a
table by propping it on two large, mossy stones. Newspapers served as
tablecloth, and broken plates and handleless cups from Susan’s discard
furnished the dishes. From a tin box secreted at the root of a spruce
tree Nan brought forth bread and salt. The brook gave Adam’s ale of
unsurpassed crystal. For the rest, there was a certain sauce,
compounded of fresh air and appetite of youth, which gave to everything
a divine flavour. To sit in Rainbow Valley, steeped in a twilight half
gold, half amethyst, rife with the odours of balsam-fir and woodsy
growing things in their springtime prime, with the pale stars of wild
strawberry blossoms all around you, and with the sough of the wind and
tinkle of bells in the shaking tree tops, and eat fried trout and dry
bread, was something which the mighty of earth might have envied them.

“Sit in,” invited Nan, as Jem placed his sizzling tin platter of trout
on the table. “It’s your turn to say grace, Jem.”

“I’ve done my part frying the trout,” protested Jem, who hated saying
grace. “Let Walter say it. He _likes_ saying grace. And cut it short,
too, Walt. I’m starving.”

But Walter said no grace, short or long, just then. An interruption
occurred.

“Who’s coming down from the manse hill?” said Di.




CHAPTER IV.
THE MANSE CHILDREN


Aunt Martha might be, and was, a very poor housekeeper; the Rev. John
Knox Meredith might be, and was, a very absent-minded, indulgent man.
But it could not be denied that there was something very homelike and
lovable about the Glen St. Mary manse in spite of its untidiness. Even
the critical housewives of the Glen felt it, and were unconsciously
mellowed in judgment because of it. Perhaps its charm was in part due
to accidental circumstances—the luxuriant vines clustering over its
gray, clap-boarded walls, the friendly acacias and balm-of-gileads that
crowded about it with the freedom of old acquaintance, and the
beautiful views of harbour and sand-dunes from its front windows. But
these things had been there in the reign of Mr. Meredith’s predecessor,
when the manse had been the primmest, neatest, and dreariest house in
the Glen. So much of the credit must be given to the personality of its
new inmates. There was an atmosphere of laughter and comradeship about
it; the doors were always open; and inner and outer worlds joined
hands. Love was the only law in Glen St. Mary manse.

The people of his congregation said that Mr. Meredith spoiled his
children. Very likely he did. It is certain that he could not bear to
scold them. “They have no mother,” he used to say to himself, with a
sigh, when some unusually glaring peccadillo forced itself upon his
notice. But he did not know the half of their goings-on. He belonged to
the sect of dreamers. The windows of his study looked out on the
graveyard but, as he paced up and down the room, reflecting deeply on
the immortality of the soul, he was quite unaware that Jerry and Carl
were playing leap-frog hilariously over the flat stones in that abode
of dead Methodists. Mr. Meredith had occasional acute realizations that
his children were not so well looked after, physically or morally, as
they had been before his wife died, and he had always a dim
sub-consciousness that house and meals were very different under Aunt
Martha’s management from what they had been under Cecilia’s. For the
rest, he lived in a world of books and abstractions; and, therefore,
although his clothes were seldom brushed, and although the Glen
housewives concluded, from the ivory-like pallor of his clear-cut
features and slender hands, that he never got enough to eat, he was not
an unhappy man.

If ever a graveyard could be called a cheerful place, the old Methodist
graveyard at Glen St. Mary might be so called. The new graveyard, at
the other side of the Methodist church, was a neat and proper and
doleful spot; but the old one had been left so long to Nature’s kindly
and gracious ministries that it had become very pleasant.

It was surrounded on three sides by a dyke of stones and sod, topped by
a gray and uncertain paling. Outside the dyke grew a row of tall fir
trees with thick, balsamic boughs. The dyke, which had been built by
the first settlers of the Glen, was old enough to be beautiful, with
mosses and green things growing out of its crevices, violets purpling
at its base in the early spring days, and asters and golden-rod making
an autumnal glory in its corners. Little ferns clustered companionably
between its stones, and here and there a big bracken grew.

On the eastern side there was neither fence nor dyke. The graveyard
there straggled off into a young fir plantation, ever pushing nearer to
the graves and deepening eastward into a thick wood. The air was always
full of the harp-like voices of the sea, and the music of gray old
trees, and in the spring mornings the choruses of birds in the elms
around the two churches sang of life and not of death. The Meredith
children loved the old graveyard.

Blue-eyed ivy, “garden-spruce,” and mint ran riot over the sunken
graves. Blueberry bushes grew lavishly in the sandy corner next to the
fir wood. The varying fashions of tombstones for three generations were
to be found there, from the flat, oblong, red sandstone slabs of old
settlers, down through the days of weeping willows and clasped hands,
to the latest monstrosities of tall “monuments” and draped urns. One of
the latter, the biggest and ugliest in the graveyard, was sacred to the
memory of a certain Alec Davis who had been born a Methodist but had
taken to himself a Presbyterian bride of the Douglas clan. She had made
him turn Presbyterian and kept him toeing the Presbyterian mark all his
life. But when he died she did not dare to doom him to a lonely grave
in the Presbyterian graveyard over-harbour. His people were all buried
in the Methodist cemetery; so Alec Davis went back to his own in death
and his widow consoled herself by erecting a monument which cost more
than any of the Methodists could afford. The Meredith children hated
it, without just knowing why, but they loved the old, flat, bench-like
stones with the tall grasses growing rankly about them. They made jolly
seats for one thing. They were all sitting on one now. Jerry, tired of
leap frog, was playing on a jew’s-harp. Carl was lovingly poring over a
strange beetle he had found; Una was trying to make a doll’s dress, and
Faith, leaning back on her slender brown wrists, was swinging her bare
feet in lively time to the jew’s-harp.

Jerry had his father’s black hair and large black eyes, but in him the
latter were flashing instead of dreamy. Faith, who came next to him,
wore her beauty like a rose, careless and glowing. She had golden-brown
eyes, golden-brown curls and crimson cheeks. She laughed too much to
please her father’s congregation and had shocked old Mrs. Taylor, the
disconsolate spouse of several departed husbands, by saucily
declaring—in the church-porch at that—“The world _isn’t_ a vale of
tears, Mrs. Taylor. It’s a world of laughter.”

Little dreamy Una was not given to laughter. Her braids of straight,
dead-black hair betrayed no lawless kinks, and her almond-shaped,
dark-blue eyes had something wistful and sorrowful in them. Her mouth
had a trick of falling open over her tiny white teeth, and a shy,
meditative smile occasionally crept over her small face. She was much
more sensitive to public opinion than Faith, and had an uneasy
consciousness that there was something askew in their way of living.
She longed to put it right, but did not know how. Now and then she
dusted the furniture—but it was so seldom she could find the duster
because it was never in the same place twice. And when the
clothes-brush was to be found she tried to brush her father’s best suit
on Saturdays, and once sewed on a missing button with coarse white
thread. When Mr. Meredith went to church next day every female eye saw
that button and the peace of the Ladies’ Aid was upset for weeks.

Carl had the clear, bright, dark-blue eyes, fearless and direct, of his
dead mother, and her brown hair with its glints of gold. He knew the
secrets of bugs and had a sort of freemasonry with bees and beetles.
Una never liked to sit near him because she never knew what uncanny
creature might be secreted about him. Jerry refused to sleep with him
because Carl had once taken a young garter snake to bed with him; so
Carl slept in his old cot, which was so short that he could never
stretch out, and had strange bed-fellows. Perhaps it was just as well
that Aunt Martha was half blind when she made that bed. Altogether they
were a jolly, lovable little crew, and Cecilia Meredith’s heart must
have ached bitterly when she faced the knowledge that she must leave
them.

“Where would you like to be buried if you were a Methodist?” asked
Faith cheerfully.

This opened up an interesting field of speculation.

“There isn’t much choice. The place is full,” said Jerry. “_I’d_ like
that corner near the road, I guess. I could hear the teams going past
and the people talking.”

“I’d like that little hollow under the weeping birch,” said Una. “That
birch is such a place for birds and they sing like mad in the
mornings.”

“I’d take the Porter lot where there’s so many children buried. _I_
like lots of company,” said Faith. “Carl, where’d you?”

“I’d rather not be buried at all,” said Carl, “but if I had to be I’d
like the ant-bed. Ants are _awf’ly_ int’resting.”

“How very good all the people who are buried here must have been,” said
Una, who had been reading the laudatory old epitaphs. “There doesn’t
seem to be a single bad person in the whole graveyard. Methodists must
be better than Presbyterians after all.”

“Maybe the Methodists bury their bad people just like they do cats,”
suggested Carl. “Maybe they don’t bother bringing them to the graveyard
at all.”

“Nonsense,” said Faith. “The people that are buried here weren’t any
better than other folks, Una. But when anyone is dead you mustn’t say
anything of him but good or he’ll come back and ha’nt you. Aunt Martha
told me that. I asked father if it was true and he just looked through
me and muttered, ‘True? True? What is truth? What _is_ truth, O jesting
Pilate?’ I concluded from that it must be true.”

“I wonder if Mr. Alec Davis would come back and ha’nt me if I threw a
stone at the urn on top of his tombstone,” said Jerry.

“Mrs. Davis would,” giggled Faith. “She just watches us in church like
a cat watching mice. Last Sunday I made a face at her nephew and he
made one back at me and you should have seen her glare. I’ll bet she
boxed _his_ ears when they got out. Mrs. Marshall Elliott told me we
mustn’t offend her on any account or I’d have made a face at her, too!”

“They say Jem Blythe stuck out his tongue at her once and she would
never have his father again, even when her husband was dying,” said
Jerry. “I wonder what the Blythe gang will be like.”

“I liked their looks,” said Faith. The manse children had been at the
station that afternoon when the Blythe small fry had arrived. “I liked
Jem’s looks _especially_.”

“They say in school that Walter’s a sissy,” said Jerry.

“I don’t believe it,” said Una, who had thought Walter very handsome.

“Well, he writes poetry, anyhow. He won the prize the teacher offered
last year for writing a poem, Bertie Shakespeare Drew told me. Bertie’s
mother thought _he_ should have got the prize because of his name, but
Bertie said he couldn’t write poetry to save his soul, name or no
name.”

“I suppose we’ll get acquainted with them as soon as they begin going
to school,” mused Faith. “I hope the girls are nice. I don’t like most
of the girls round here. Even the nice ones are poky. But the Blythe
twins look jolly. I thought twins always looked alike, but they don’t.
I think the red-haired one is the nicest.”

“I liked their mother’s looks,” said Una with a little sigh. Una envied
all children their mothers. She had been only six when her mother died,
but she had some very precious memories, treasured in her soul like
jewels, of twilight cuddlings and morning frolics, of loving eyes, a
tender voice, and the sweetest, gayest laugh.

“They say she isn’t like other people,” said Jerry.

“Mrs. Elliot says that is because she never really grew up,” said
Faith.

“She’s taller than Mrs. Elliott.”

“Yes, yes, but it is inside—Mrs. Elliot says Mrs. Blythe just stayed a
little girl inside.”

“What do I smell?” interrupted Carl, sniffing.

They all smelled it now. A most delectable odour came floating up on
the still evening air from the direction of the little woodsy dell
below the manse hill.

“That makes me hungry,” said Jerry.

“We had only bread and molasses for supper and cold ditto for dinner,”
said Una plaintively.

Aunt Martha’s habit was to boil a large slab of mutton early in the
week and serve it up every day, cold and greasy, as long as it lasted.
To this Faith, in a moment of inspiration, had give the name of
“ditto”, and by this it was invariably known at the manse.

“Let’s go and see where that smell is coming from,” said Jerry.

They all sprang up, frolicked over the lawn with the abandon of young
puppies, climbed a fence, and tore down the mossy slope, guided by the
savory lure that ever grew stronger. A few minutes later they arrived
breathlessly in the sanctum sanctorum of Rainbow Valley where the
Blythe children were just about to give thanks and eat.

They halted shyly. Una wished they had not been so precipitate: but Di
Blythe was equal to that and any occasion. She stepped forward, with a
comrade’s smile.

“I guess I know who you are,” she said. “You belong to the manse, don’t
you?”

Faith nodded, her face creased by dimples.

“We smelled your trout cooking and wondered what it was.”

“You must sit down and help us eat them,” said Di.

“Maybe you haven’t more than you want yourselves,” said Jerry, looking
hungrily at the tin platter.

“We’ve heaps—three apiece,” said Jem. “Sit down.”

No more ceremony was necessary. Down they all sat on mossy stones.
Merry was that feast and long. Nan and Di would probably have died of
horror had they known what Faith and Una knew perfectly well—that Carl
had two young mice in his jacket pocket. But they never knew it, so it
never hurt them. Where can folks get better acquainted than over a meal
table? When the last trout had vanished, the manse children and the
Ingleside children were sworn friends and allies. They had always known
each other and always would. The race of Joseph recognized its own.

They poured out the history of their little pasts. The manse children
heard of Avonlea and Green Gables, of Rainbow Valley traditions, and of
the little house by the harbour shore where Jem had been born. The
Ingleside children heard of Maywater, where the Merediths had lived
before coming to the Glen, of Una’s beloved, one-eyed doll and Faith’s
pet rooster.

Faith was inclined to resent the fact that people laughed at her for
petting a rooster. She liked the Blythes because they accepted it
without question.

“A handsome rooster like Adam is just as nice a pet as a dog or cat,
_I_ think,” she said. “If he was a canary nobody would wonder. And I
brought him up from a little, wee, yellow chicken. Mrs. Johnson at
Maywater gave him to me. A weasel had killed all his brothers and
sisters. I called him after her husband. I never liked dolls or cats.
Cats are too sneaky and dolls are _dead_.”

“Who lives in that house away up there?” asked Jerry.

“The Miss Wests—Rosemary and Ellen,” answered Nan. “Di and I are going
to take music lessons from Miss Rosemary this summer.”

Una gazed at the lucky twins with eyes whose longing was too gentle for
envy. Oh, if she could only have music lessons! It was one of the
dreams of her little hidden life. But nobody ever thought of such a
thing.

“Miss Rosemary is so sweet and she always dresses so pretty,” said Di.
“Her hair is just the colour of new molasses taffy,” she added
wistfully—for Di, like her mother before her, was not resigned to her
own ruddy tresses.

“I like Miss Ellen, too,” said Nan. “She always used to give me candies
when she came to church. But Di is afraid of her.”

“Her brows are so black and she has such a great deep voice,” said Di.
“Oh, how scared of her Kenneth Ford used to be when he was little!
Mother says the first Sunday Mrs. Ford brought him to church Miss Ellen
happened to be there, sitting right behind them. And the minute Kenneth
saw her he just screamed and screamed until Mrs. Ford had to carry him
out.”

“Who is Mrs. Ford?” asked Una wonderingly.

“Oh, the Fords don’t live here. They only come here in the summer. And
they’re not coming this summer. They live in that little house ‘way,
‘way down on the harbour shore where father and mother used to live. I
wish you could see Persis Ford. She is just like a picture.”

“I’ve heard of Mrs. Ford,” broke in Faith. “Bertie Shakespeare Drew
told me about her. She was married fourteen years to a dead man and
then he came to life.”

“Nonsense,” said Nan. “That isn’t the way it goes at all. Bertie
Shakespeare can never get anything straight. I know the whole story and
I’ll tell it to you some time, but not now, for it’s too long and it’s
time for us to go home. Mother doesn’t like us to be out late these
damp evenings.”

Nobody cared whether the manse children were out in the damp or not.
Aunt Martha was already in bed and the minister was still too deeply
lost in speculations concerning the immortality of the soul to remember
the mortality of the body. But they went home, too, with visions of
good times coming in their heads.

“I think Rainbow Valley is even nicer than the graveyard,” said Una.
“And I just love those dear Blythes. It’s _so_ nice when you can love
people because so often you _can’t_. Father said in his sermon last
Sunday that we should love everybody. But how can we? How could we love
Mrs. Alec Davis?”

“Oh, father only said that in the pulpit,” said Faith airily. “He has
more sense than to really think it outside.”

The Blythe children went up to Ingleside, except Jem, who slipped away
for a few moments on a solitary expedition to a remote corner of
Rainbow Valley. Mayflowers grew there and Jem never forgot to take his
mother a bouquet as long as they lasted.




CHAPTER V.
THE ADVENT OF MARY VANCE


“This is just the sort of day you feel as if things might happen,” said
Faith, responsive to the lure of crystal air and blue hills. She hugged
herself with delight and danced a hornpipe on old Hezekiah Pollock’s
bench tombstone, much to the horror of two ancient maidens who happened
to be driving past just as Faith hopped on one foot around the stone,
waving the other and her arms in the air.

“And that,” groaned one ancient maiden, “is our minister’s daughter.”

“What else could you expect of a widower’s family?” groaned the other
ancient maiden. And then they both shook their heads.

It was early on Saturday morning and the Merediths were out in the
dew-drenched world with a delightful consciousness of the holiday. They
had never had anything to do on a holiday. Even Nan and Di Blythe had
certain household tasks for Saturday mornings, but the daughters of the
manse were free to roam from blushing morn to dewy eve if so it pleased
them. It _did_ please Faith, but Una felt a secret, bitter humiliation
because they never learned to do anything. The other girls in her class
at school could cook and sew and knit; she only was a little ignoramus.

Jerry suggested that they go exploring; so they went lingeringly
through the fir grove, picking up Carl on the way, who was on his knees
in the dripping grass studying his darling ants. Beyond the grove they
came out in Mr. Taylor’s pasture field, sprinkled over with the white
ghosts of dandelions; in a remote corner was an old tumbledown barn,
where Mr. Taylor sometimes stored his surplus hay crop but which was
never used for any other purpose. Thither the Meredith children
trooped, and prowled about the ground floor for several minutes.

“What was that?” whispered Una suddenly.

They all listened. There was a faint but distinct rustle in the hayloft
above. The Merediths looked at each other.

“There’s something up there,” breathed Faith.

“I’m going up to see what it is,” said Jerry resolutely.

“Oh, don’t,” begged Una, catching his arm.

“I’m going.”

“We’ll all go, too, then,” said Faith.

The whole four climbed the shaky ladder, Jerry and Faith quite
dauntless, Una pale from fright, and Carl rather absent-mindedly
speculating on the possibility of finding a bat up in the loft. He
longed to see a bat in daylight.

When they stepped off the ladder they saw what had made the rustle and
the sight struck them dumb for a few moments.

In a little nest in the hay a girl was curled up, looking as if she had
just wakened from sleep. When she saw them she stood up, rather
shakily, as it seemed, and in the bright sunlight that streamed through
the cobwebbed window behind her, they saw that her thin, sunburned face
was very pale under its tan. She had two braids of lank, thick,
tow-coloured hair and very odd eyes—“white eyes,” the manse children
thought, as she stared at them half defiantly, half piteously. They
were really of so pale a blue that they did seem almost white,
especially when contrasted with the narrow black ring that circled the
iris. She was barefooted and bareheaded, and was clad in a faded,
ragged, old plaid dress, much too short and tight for her. As for
years, she might have been almost any age, judging from her wizened
little face, but her height seemed to be somewhere in the neighbourhood
of twelve.

“Who are you?” asked Jerry.

The girl looked about her as if seeking a way of escape. Then she
seemed to give in with a little shiver of despair.

“I’m Mary Vance,” she said.

“Where’d you come from?” pursued Jerry.

Mary, instead of replying, suddenly sat, or fell, down on the hay and
began to cry. Instantly Faith had flung herself down beside her and put
her arm around the thin, shaking shoulders.

“You stop bothering her,” she commanded Jerry. Then she hugged the
waif. “Don’t cry, dear. Just tell us what’s the matter. _We’re_
friends.”

“I’m so—so—hungry,” wailed Mary. “I—I hain’t had a thing to eat since
Thursday morning, ‘cept a little water from the brook out there.”

The manse children gazed at each other in horror. Faith sprang up.

“You come right up to the manse and get something to eat before you say
another word.”

Mary shrank.

“Oh—I can’t. What will your pa and ma say? Besides, they’d send me
back.”

“We’ve no mother, and father won’t bother about you. Neither will Aunt
Martha. Come, I say.” Faith stamped her foot impatiently. Was this
queer girl going to insist on starving to death almost at their very
door?

Mary yielded. She was so weak that she could hardly climb down the
ladder, but somehow they got her down and over the field and into the
manse kitchen. Aunt Martha, muddling through her Saturday cooking, took
no notice of her. Faith and Una flew to the pantry and ransacked it for
such eatables as it contained—some “ditto,” bread, butter, milk and a
doubtful pie. Mary Vance attacked the food ravenously and uncritically,
while the manse children stood around and watched her. Jerry noticed
that she had a pretty mouth and very nice, even, white teeth. Faith
decided, with secret horror, that Mary had not one stitch on her except
that ragged, faded dress. Una was full of pure pity, Carl of amused
wonder, and all of them of curiosity.

“Now come out to the graveyard and tell us about yourself,” ordered
Faith, when Mary’s appetite showed signs of failing her. Mary was now
nothing loath. Food had restored her natural vivacity and unloosed her
by no means reluctant tongue.

“You won’t tell your pa or anybody if I tell you?” she stipulated, when
she was enthroned on Mr. Pollock’s tombstone. Opposite her the manse
children lined up on another. Here was spice and mystery and adventure.
Something _had_ happened.

“No, we won’t.”

“Cross your hearts?”

“Cross our hearts.”

“Well, I’ve run away. I was living with Mrs. Wiley over-harbour. Do you
know Mrs. Wiley?”

“No.”

“Well, you don’t want to know her. She’s an awful woman. My, how I hate
her! She worked me to death and wouldn’t give me half enough to eat,
and she used to larrup me ‘most every day. Look a-here.”

Mary rolled up her ragged sleeves, and held up her scrawny arms and
thin hands, chapped almost to rawness. They were black with bruises.
The manse children shivered. Faith flushed crimson with indignation.
Una’s blue eyes filled with tears.

“She licked me Wednesday night with a stick,” said Mary, indifferently.
“It was ‘cause I let the cow kick over a pail of milk. How’d I know the
darn old cow was going to kick?”

A not unpleasant thrill ran over her listeners. They would never dream
of using such dubious words, but it was rather titivating to hear
someone else use them—and a girl, at that. Certainly this Mary Vance
was an interesting creature.

“I don’t blame you for running away,” said Faith.

“Oh, I didn’t run away ‘cause she licked me. A licking was all in the
day’s work with me. I was darn well used to it. Nope, I’d meant to run
away for a week ‘cause I’d found out that Mrs. Wiley was going to rent
her farm and go to Lowbridge to live and give me to a cousin of hers up
Charlottetown way. I wasn’t going to stand for _that_. She was a worse
sort than Mrs. Wiley even. Mrs. Wiley lent me to her for a month last
summer and I’d rather live with the devil himself.”

Sensation number two. But Una looked doubtful.

“So I made up my mind I’d beat it. I had seventy cents saved up that
Mrs. John Crawford give me in the spring for planting potatoes for her.
Mrs. Wiley didn’t know about it. She was away visiting her cousin when
I planted them. I thought I’d sneak up here to the Glen and buy a
ticket to Charlottetown and try to get work there. I’m a hustler, let
me tell you. There ain’t a lazy bone in _my_ body. So I lit out
Thursday morning ‘fore Mrs. Wiley was up and walked to the Glen—six
miles. And when I got to the station I found I’d lost my money. Dunno
how—dunno where. Anyhow, it was gone. I didn’t know what to do. If I
went back to old Lady Wiley she’d take the hide off me. So I went and
hid in that old barn.”

“And what will you do now?” asked Jerry.

“Dunno. I s’pose I’ll have to go back and take my medicine. Now that
I’ve got some grub in my stomach I guess I can stand it.”

But there was fear behind the bravado in Mary’s eyes. Una suddenly
slipped from the one tombstone to the other and put her arm about Mary.

“Don’t go back. Just stay here with us.”

“Oh, Mrs. Wiley’ll hunt me up,” said Mary. “It’s likely she’s on my
trail before this. I might stay here till she finds me, I s’pose, if
your folks don’t mind. I was a darn fool ever to think of skipping out.
She’d run a weasel to earth. But I was so misrebul.”

Mary’s voice quivered, but she was ashamed of showing her weakness.

“I hain’t had the life of a dog for these four years,” she explained
defiantly.

“You’ve been four years with Mrs. Wiley?”

“Yip. She took me out of the asylum over in Hopetown when I was eight.”

“That’s the same place Mrs. Blythe came from,” exclaimed Faith.

“I was two years in the asylum. I was put there when I was six. My ma
had hung herself and my pa had cut his throat.”

“Holy cats! Why?” said Jerry.

“Booze,” said Mary laconically.

“And you’ve no relations?”

“Not a darn one that I know of. Must have had some once, though. I was
called after half a dozen of them. My full name is Mary Martha Lucilla
Moore Ball Vance. Can you beat that? My grandfather was a rich man.
I’ll bet he was richer than _your_ grandfather. But pa drunk it all up
and ma, she did her part. _They_ used to beat me, too. Laws, I’ve been
licked so much I kind of like it.”

Mary tossed her head. She divined that the manse children were pitying
her for her many stripes and she did not want pity. She wanted to be
envied. She looked gaily about her. Her strange eyes, now that the
dullness of famine was removed from them, were brilliant. She would
show these youngsters what a personage she was.

“I’ve been sick an awful lot,” she said proudly. “There’s not many kids
could have come through what I have. I’ve had scarlet fever and measles
and ersipelas and mumps and whooping cough and pewmonia.”

“Were you ever fatally sick?” asked Una.

“I don’t know,” said Mary doubtfully.

“Of course she wasn’t,” scoffed Jerry. “If you’re fatally sick you
die.”

“Oh, well, I never died exactly,” said Mary, “but I come blamed near it
once. They thought I was dead and they were getting ready to lay me out
when I up and come to.”

“What is it like to be half dead?” asked Jerry curiously.

“Like nothing. I didn’t know it for days afterwards. It was when I had
the pewmonia. Mrs. Wiley wouldn’t have the doctor—said she wasn’t going
to no such expense for a home girl. Old Aunt Christina MacAllister
nursed me with poultices. She brung me round. But sometimes I wish I’d
just died the other half and done with it. I’d been better off.”

“If you went to heaven I s’pose you would,” said Faith, rather
doubtfully.

“Well, what other place is there to go to?” demanded Mary in a puzzled
voice.

“There’s hell, you know,” said Una, dropping her voice and hugging Mary
to lessen the awfulness of the suggestion.

“Hell? What’s that?”

“Why, it’s where the devil lives,” said Jerry. “You’ve heard of him—you
spoke about him.”

“Oh, yes, but I didn’t know he lived anywhere. I thought he just roamed
round. Mr. Wiley used to mention hell when he was alive. He was always
telling folks to go there. I thought it was some place over in New
Brunswick where he come from.”

“Hell is an awful place,” said Faith, with the dramatic enjoyment that
is born of telling dreadful things. “Bad people go there when they die
and burn in fire for ever and ever and ever.”

“Who told you that?” demanded Mary incredulously.

“It’s in the Bible. And Mr. Isaac Crothers at Maywater told us, too, in
Sunday School. He was an elder and a pillar in the church and knew all
about it. But you needn’t worry. If you’re good you’ll go to heaven and
if you’re bad I guess you’d rather go to hell.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Mary positively. “No matter how bad I was I wouldn’t
want to be burned and burned. _I_ know what it’s like. I picked up a
red hot poker once by accident. What must you do to be good?”

“You must go to church and Sunday School and read your Bible and pray
every night and give to missions,” said Una.

“It sounds like a large order,” said Mary. “Anything else?”

“You must ask God to forgive the sins you’ve committed.

“But I’ve never com—committed any,” said Mary. “What’s a sin any way?”

“Oh, Mary, you must have. Everybody does. Did you never tell a lie?”

“Heaps of ‘em,” said Mary.

“That’s a dreadful sin,” said Una solemnly.

“Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Mary, “that I’d be sent to hell for
telling a lie now and then? Why, I _had_ to. Mr. Wiley would have
broken every bone in my body one time if I hadn’t told him a lie. Lies
have saved me many a whack, I can tell you.”

Una sighed. Here were too many difficulties for her to solve. She
shuddered as she thought of being cruelly whipped. Very likely she
would have lied too. She squeezed Mary’s little calloused hand.

“Is that the only dress you’ve got?” asked Faith, whose joyous nature
refused to dwell on disagreeable subjects.

“I just put on this dress because it was no good,” cried Mary flushing.
“Mrs. Wiley’d bought my clothes and I wasn’t going to be beholden to
her for anything. And I’m honest. If I was going to run away I wasn’t
going to take what belong to _her_ that was worth anything. When I grow
up I’m going to have a blue sating dress. Your own clothes don’t look
so stylish. I thought ministers’ children were always dressed up.”

It was plain that Mary had a temper and was sensitive on some points.
But there was a queer, wild charm about her which captivated them all.
She was taken to Rainbow Valley that afternoon and introduced to the
Blythes as “a friend of ours from over-harbour who is visiting us.” The
Blythes accepted her unquestioningly, perhaps because she was fairly
respectable now. After dinner—through which Aunt Martha had mumbled and
Mr. Meredith had been in a state of semi-unconsciousness while brooding
his Sunday sermon—Faith had prevailed on Mary to put on one of her
dresses, as well as certain other articles of clothing. With her hair
neatly braided Mary passed muster tolerably well. She was an acceptable
playmate, for she knew several new and exciting games, and her
conversation lacked not spice. In fact, some of her expressions made
Nan and Di look at her rather askance. They were not quite sure what
their mother would have thought of her, but they knew quite well what
Susan would. However, she was a visitor at the manse, so she must be
all right.

When bedtime came there was the problem of where Mary should sleep.

“We can’t put her in the spare room, you know,” said Faith perplexedly
to Una.

“I haven’t got anything in my head,” cried Mary in an injured tone.

“Oh, I didn’t mean _that_,” protested Faith. “The spare room is all
torn up. The mice have gnawed a big hole in the feather tick and made a
nest in it. We never found it out till Aunt Martha put the Rev. Mr.
Fisher from Charlottetown there to sleep last week. _He_ soon found it
out. Then father had to give him his bed and sleep on the study lounge.
Aunt Martha hasn’t had time to fix the spare room bed up yet, so she
says; so _nobody_ can sleep there, no matter how clean their heads are.
And our room is so small, and the bed so small you can’t sleep with
us.”

“I can go back to the hay in the old barn for the night if you’ll lend
me a quilt,” said Mary philosophically. “It was kind of chilly last
night, but ‘cept for that I’ve had worse beds.”

“Oh, no, no, you mustn’t do that,” said Una. “I’ve thought of a plan,
Faith. You know that little trestle bed in the garret room, with the
old mattress on it, that the last minister left there? Let’s take up
the spare room bedclothes and make Mary a bed there. You won’t mind
sleeping in the garret, will you, Mary? It’s just above our room.”

“Any place’ll do me. Laws, I never had a decent place to sleep in my
life. I slept in the loft over the kitchen at Mrs. Wiley’s. The roof
leaked rain in the summer and the snow druv in in winter. My bed was a
straw tick on the floor. You won’t find me a mite huffy about where _I_
sleep.”

The manse garret was a long, low, shadowy place, with one gable end
partitioned off. Here a bed was made up for Mary of the dainty
hemstitched sheets and embroidered spread which Cecilia Meredith had
once so proudly made for her spare-room, and which still survived Aunt
Martha’s uncertain washings. The good nights were said and silence fell
over the manse. Una was just falling asleep when she heard a sound in
the room just above that made her sit up suddenly.

“Listen, Faith—Mary’s crying,” she whispered. Faith replied not, being
already asleep. Una slipped out of bed, and made her way in her little
white gown down the hall and up the garret stairs. The creaking floor
gave ample notice of her coming, and when she reached the corner room
all was moonlit silence and the trestle bed showed only a hump in the
middle.

“Mary,” whispered Una.

There was no response.

Una crept close to the bed and pulled at the spread. “Mary, I know you
are crying. I heard you. Are you lonesome?”

Mary suddenly appeared to view but said nothing.

“Let me in beside you. I’m cold,” said Una shivering in the chilly air,
for the little garret window was open and the keen breath of the north
shore at night blew in.

Mary moved over and Una snuggled down beside her.

“_Now_ you won’t be lonesome. We shouldn’t have left you here alone the
first night.”

“I wasn’t lonesome,” sniffed Mary.

“What were you crying for then?”

“Oh, I just got to thinking of things when I was here alone. I thought
of having to go back to Mrs. Wiley—and of being licked for running
away—and—and—and of going to hell for telling lies. It all worried me
something scandalous.”

“Oh, Mary,” said poor Una in distress. “I don’t believe God will send
you to hell for telling lies when you didn’t know it was wrong. He
_couldn’t_. Why, He’s kind and good. Of course, you mustn’t tell any
more now that you know it’s wrong.”

“If I can’t tell lies what’s to become of me?” said Mary with a sob.
“_You_ don’t understand. You don’t know anything about it. You’ve got a
home and a kind father—though it does seem to me that he isn’t more’n
about half there. But anyway he doesn’t lick you, and you get enough to
eat such as it is—though that old aunt of yours doesn’t know _anything_
about cooking. Why, this is the first day I ever remember of feeling
‘sif I’d enough to eat. I’ve been knocked about all of my life, ‘cept
for the two years I was at the asylum. They didn’t lick me there and it
wasn’t too bad, though the matron was cross. She always looked ready to
bite my head off a nail. But Mrs. Wiley is a holy terror, that’s what
_she_ is, and I’m just scared stiff when I think of going back to her.”

“Perhaps you won’t have to. Perhaps we’ll be able to think of a way
out. Let’s both ask God to keep you from having to go back to Mrs.
Wiley. You say your prayers, don’t you Mary?”

“Oh, yes, I always go over an old rhyme ‘fore I get into bed,” said
Mary indifferently. “I never thought of asking for anything in
particular though. Nobody in this world ever bothered themselves about
me so I didn’t s’pose God would. He _might_ take more trouble for you,
seeing you’re a minister’s daughter.”

“He’d take every bit as much trouble for you, Mary, I’m sure,” said
Una. “It doesn’t matter whose child you are. You just ask Him—and I
will, too.”

“All right,” agreed Mary. “It won’t do any harm if it doesn’t do much
good. If you knew Mrs. Wiley as well as I do you wouldn’t think God
would want to meddle with her. Anyhow, I won’t cry any more about it.
This is a big sight better’n last night down in that old barn, with the
mice running about. Look at the Four Winds light. Ain’t it pretty?”

“This is the only window we can see it from,” said Una. “I love to
watch it.”

“Do you? So do I. I could see it from the Wiley loft and it was the
only comfort I had. When I was all sore from being licked I’d watch it
and forget about the places that hurt. I’d think of the ships sailing
away and away from it and wish I was on one of them sailing far away
too—away from everything. On winter nights when it didn’t shine, I just
felt real lonesome. Say, Una, what makes all you folks so kind to me
when I’m just a stranger?”

“Because it’s right to be. The bible tells us to be kind to everybody.”

“Does it? Well, I guess most folks don’t mind it much then. I never
remember of any one being kind to me before—true’s you live I don’t.
Say, Una, ain’t them shadows on the walls pretty? They look just like a
flock of little dancing birds. And say, Una, I like all you folks and
them Blythe boys and Di, but I don’t like that Nan. She’s a proud one.”

“Oh, no, Mary, she isn’t a bit proud,” said Una eagerly. “Not a single
bit.”

“Don’t tell me. Any one that holds her head like that _is_ proud. I
don’t like her.”

“_We_ all like her very much.”

“Oh, I s’pose you like her better’n me?” said Mary jealously. “Do you?”

“Why, Mary—we’ve known her for weeks and we’ve only known you a few
hours,” stammered Una.

“So you do like her better then?” said Mary in a rage. “All right! Like
her all you want to. _I_ don’t care. _I_ can get along without you.”

She flung herself over against the wall of the garret with a slam.

“Oh, Mary,” said Una, pushing a tender arm over Mary’s uncompromising
back, “don’t talk like that. I _do_ like you ever so much. And you make
me feel so bad.”

No answer. Presently Una gave a sob. Instantly Mary squirmed around
again and engulfed Una in a bear’s hug.

“Hush up,” she ordered. “Don’t go crying over what I said. I was as
mean as the devil to talk that way. I orter to be skinned alive—and you
all so good to me. I should think you _would_ like any one better’n me.
I deserve every licking I ever got. Hush, now. If you cry any more I’ll
go and walk right down to the harbour in this night-dress and drown
myself.”

This terrible threat made Una choke back her sobs. Her tears were wiped
away by Mary with the lace frill of the spare-room pillow and forgiver
and forgiven cuddled down together again, harmony restored, to watch
the shadows of the vine leaves on the moonlit wall until they fell
asleep.

And in the study below Rev. John Meredith walked the floor with rapt
face and shining eyes, thinking out his message of the morrow, and knew
not that under his own roof there was a little forlorn soul, stumbling
in darkness and ignorance, beset by terror and compassed about with
difficulties too great for it to grapple in its unequal struggle with a
big indifferent world.




CHAPTER VI.
MARY STAYS AT THE MANSE


The manse children took Mary Vance to church with them the next day. At
first Mary objected to the idea.

“Didn’t you go to church over-harbour?” asked Una.

“You bet. Mrs. Wiley never troubled church much, but I went every
Sunday I could get off. I was mighty thankful to go to some place where
I could sit down for a spell. But I can’t go to church in this old
ragged dress.”

This difficulty was removed by Faith offering the loan of her second
best dress.

“It’s faded a little and two of the buttons are off, but I guess it’ll
do.”

“I’ll sew the buttons on in a jiffy,” said Mary.

“Not on Sunday,” said Una, shocked.

“Sure. The better the day the better the deed. You just gimme a needle
and thread and look the other way if you’re squeamish.”

Faith’s school boots, and an old black velvet cap that had once been
Cecilia Meredith’s, completed Mary’s costume, and to church she went.
Her behaviour was quite conventional, and though some wondered who the
shabby little girl with the manse children was she did not attract much
attention. She listened to the sermon with outward decorum and joined
lustily in the singing. She had, it appeared, a clear, strong voice and
a good ear.

“His blood can make the _violets_ clean,” carolled Mary blithely. Mrs.
Jimmy Milgrave, whose pew was just in front of the manse pew, turned
suddenly and looked the child over from top to toe. Mary, in a mere
superfluity of naughtiness, stuck out her tongue at Mrs. Milgrave, much
to Una’s horror.

“I couldn’t help it,” she declared after church. “What’d she want to
stare at me like that for? Such manners! I’m _glad_ stuck my tongue out
at her. I wish I’d stuck it farther out. Say, I saw Rob MacAllister
from over-harbour there. Wonder if he’ll tell Mrs. Wiley on me.”

No Mrs. Wiley appeared, however, and in a few day the children forgot
to look for her. Mary was apparently a fixture at the manse. But she
refused to go to school with the others.

“Nope. I’ve finished my education,” she said, when Faith urged her to
go. “I went to school four winters since I come to Mrs. Wiley’s and
I’ve had all I want of _that_. I’m sick and tired of being
everlastingly jawed at ‘cause I didn’t get my home-lessons done. _I’d_
no time to do home-lessons.”

“Our teacher won’t jaw you. He is awfully nice,” said Faith.

“Well, I ain’t going. I can read and write and cipher up to fractions.
That’s all I want. You fellows go and I’ll stay home. You needn’t be
scared I’ll steal anything. I swear I’m honest.”

Mary employed herself while the others were at school in cleaning up
the manse. In a few days it was a different place. Floors were swept,
furniture dusted, everything straightened out. She mended the
spare-room bed-tick, she sewed on missing buttons, she patched clothes
neatly, she even invaded the study with broom and dustpan and ordered
Mr. Meredith out while she put it to rights. But there was one
department with which Aunt Martha refused to let her interfere. Aunt
Martha might be deaf and half blind and very childish, but she was
resolved to keep the commissariat in her own hands, in spite of all
Mary’s wiles and stratagems.

“I can tell you if old Martha’d let _me_ cook you’d have some decent
meals,” she told the manse children indignantly. “There’d be no more
‘ditto’—and no more lumpy porridge and blue milk either. What _does_
she do with all the cream?”

“She gives it to the cat. He’s hers, you know,” said Faith.

“I’d like to _cat_ her,” exclaimed Mary bitterly. “I’ve no use for cats
anyhow. They belong to the old Nick. You can tell that by their eyes.
Well, if old Martha won’t, she won’t, I s’pose. But it gits on my
nerves to see good vittles spoiled.”

When school came out they always went to Rainbow Valley. Mary refused
to play in the graveyard. She declared she was afraid of ghosts.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” declared Jem Blythe.

“Oh, ain’t there?”

“Did you ever see any?”

“Hundreds of ‘em,” said Mary promptly.

“What are they like?” said Carl.

“Awful-looking. Dressed all in white with skellington hands and heads,”
said Mary.

“What did you do?” asked Una.

“Run like the devil,” said Mary. Then she caught Walter’s eyes and
blushed. Mary was a good deal in awe of Walter. She declared to the
manse girls that his eyes made her nervous.

“I think of all the lies I’ve ever told when I look into them,” she
said, “and I wish I hadn’t.”

Jem was Mary’s favourite. When he took her to the attic at Ingleside
and showed her the museum of curios that Captain Jim Boyd had
bequeathed to him she was immensely pleased and flattered. She also won
Carl’s heart entirely by her interest in his beetles and ants. It could
not be denied that Mary got on rather better with the boys than with
the girls. She quarrelled bitterly with Nan Blythe the second day.

“Your mother is a witch,” she told Nan scornfully. “Red-haired women
are always witches.” Then she and Faith fell out about the rooster.
Mary said its tail was too short. Faith angrily retorted that she
guessed God know what length to make a rooster’s tail. They did not
“speak” for a day over this. Mary treated Una’s hairless, one-eyed doll
with consideration; but when Una showed her other prized treasure—a
picture of an angel carrying a baby, presumably to heaven, Mary
declared that it looked too much like a ghost for her. Una crept away
to her room and cried over this, but Mary hunted her out, hugged her
repentantly and implored forgiveness. No one could keep up a quarrel
long with Mary—not even Nan, who was rather prone to hold grudges and
never quite forgave the insult to her mother. Mary was jolly. She could
and did tell the most thrilling ghost stories. Rainbow Valley seances
were undeniably more exciting after Mary came. She learned to play on
the jew’s-harp and soon eclipsed Jerry.

“Never struck anything yet I couldn’t do if I put my mind to it,” she
declared. Mary seldom lost a chance of tooting her own horn. She taught
them how to make “blow-bags” out of the thick leaves of the
“live-forever” that flourished in the old Bailey garden, she initiated
them into the toothsome qualities of the “sours” that grew in the
niches of the graveyard dyke, and she could make the most wonderful
shadow pictures on the walls with her long, flexible fingers. And when
they all went picking gum in Rainbow Valley Mary always got “the
biggest chew” and bragged about it. There were times when they hated
her and times when they loved her. But at all times they found her
interesting. So they submitted quite meekly to her bossing, and by the
end of a fortnight had come to feel that she must always have been with
them.

“It’s the queerest thing that Mrs. Wiley hain’t been after me,” said
Mary. “I can’t understand it.”

“Maybe she isn’t going to bother about you at all,” said Una. “Then you
can just go on staying here.”

“This house ain’t hardly big enough for me and old Martha,” said Mary
darkly. “It’s a very fine thing to have enough to eat—I’ve often
wondered what it would be like—but I’m p’ticler about my cooking. And
Mrs. Wiley’ll be here yet. _She’s_ got a rod in pickle for me all
right. I don’t think about it so much in daytime but say, girls, up
there in that garret at night I git to thinking and thinking of it,
till I just almost wish she’d come and have it over with. I dunno’s one
real good whipping would be much worse’n all the dozen I’ve lived
through in my mind ever since I run away. Were any of you ever licked?”

“No, of course not,” said Faith indignantly. “Father would never do
such a thing.”

“You don’t know you’re alive,” said Mary with a sigh half of envy, half
of superiority. “You don’t know what I’ve come through. And I s’pose
the Blythes were never licked either?”

“No-o-o, I guess not. But I _think_ they were sometimes spanked when
they were small.”

“A spanking doesn’t amount to anything,” said Mary contemptuously. “If
my folks had just spanked me I’d have thought they were petting me.
Well, it ain’t a fair world. I wouldn’t mind taking my share of
wallopings but I’ve had a darn sight too many.”

“It isn’t right to say that word, Mary,” said Una reproachfully. “You
promised me you wouldn’t say it.”

“G’way,” responded Mary. “If you knew some of the words I _could_ say
if I liked you wouldn’t make such a fuss over darn. And you know very
well I hain’t ever told any lies since I come here.”

“What about all those ghosts you said you saw?” asked Faith.

Mary blushed.

“That was diff’runt,” she said defiantly. “I knew you wouldn’t believe
them yarns and I didn’t intend you to. And I really did see something
queer one night when I was passing the over-harbour graveyard, true’s
you live. I dunno whether ‘twas a ghost or Sandy Crawford’s old white
nag, but it looked blamed queer and I tell you I scooted at the rate of
no man’s business.”




CHAPTER VII.
A FISHY EPISODE


Rilla Blythe walked proudly, and perhaps a little primly, through the
main “street” of the Glen and up the manse hill, carefully carrying a
small basketful of early strawberries, which Susan had coaxed into
lusciousness in one of the sunny nooks of Ingleside. Susan had charged
Rilla to give the basket to nobody except Aunt Martha or Mr. Meredith,
and Rilla, very proud of being entrusted with such an errand, was
resolved to carry out her instructions to the letter.

Susan had dressed her daintily in a white, starched, and embroidered
dress, with sash of blue and beaded slippers. Her long ruddy curls were
sleek and round, and Susan had let her put on her best hat, out of
compliment to the manse. It was a somewhat elaborate affair, wherein
Susan’s taste had had more to say than Anne’s, and Rilla’s small soul
gloried in its splendours of silk and lace and flowers. She was very
conscious of her hat, and I am afraid she strutted up the manse hill.
The strut, or the hat, or both, got on the nerves of Mary Vance, who
was swinging on the lawn gate. Mary’s temper was somewhat ruffled just
then, into the bargain. Aunt Martha had refused to let her peel the
potatoes and had ordered her out of the kitchen.

“Yah! You’ll bring the potatoes to the table with strips of skin
hanging to them and half boiled as usual! My, but it’ll be nice to go
to your funeral,” shrieked Mary. She went out of the kitchen, giving
the door such a bang that even Aunt Martha heard it, and Mr. Meredith
in his study felt the vibration and thought absently that there must
have been a slight earthquake shock. Then he went on with his sermon.

Mary slipped from the gate and confronted the spick-and-span damsel of
Ingleside.

“What you got there?” she demanded, trying to take the basket.

Rilla resisted. “It’th for Mithter Meredith,” she lisped.

“Give it to me. _I’ll_ give it to him,” said Mary.

“No. Thuthan thaid that I wathn’t to give it to anybody but Mithter
Mer’dith or Aunt Martha,” insisted Rilla.

Mary eyed her sourly.

“You think you’re something, don’t you, all dressed up like a doll!
Look at me. My dress is all rags and _I_ don’t care! I’d rather be
ragged than a doll baby. Go home and tell them to put you in a glass
case. Look at me—look at me—look at me!”

Mary executed a wild dance around the dismayed and bewildered Rilla,
flirting her ragged skirt and vociferating “Look at me—look at me”
until poor Rilla was dizzy. But as the latter tried to edge away
towards the gate Mary pounced on her again.

“You give me that basket,” she ordered with a grimace. Mary was past
mistress in the art of “making faces.” She could give her countenance a
most grotesque and unearthly appearance out of which her strange,
brilliant, white eyes gleamed with weird effect.

“I won’t,” gasped Rilla, frightened but staunch. “You let me go, Mary
Vanth.”

Mary let go for a minute and looked around her. Just inside the gate
was a small “flake,” on which a half a dozen large codfish were drying.
One of Mr. Meredith’s parishioners had presented him with them one day,
perhaps in lieu of the subscription he was supposed to pay to the
stipend and never did. Mr. Meredith had thanked him and then forgotten
all about the fish, which would have promptly spoiled had not the
indefatigable Mary prepared them for drying and rigged up the “flake”
herself on which to dry them.

Mary had a diabolical inspiration. She flew to the “flake” and seized
the largest fish there—a huge, flat thing, nearly as big as herself.
With a whoop she swooped down on the terrified Rilla, brandishing her
weird missile. Rilla’s courage gave way. To be lambasted with a dried
codfish was such an unheard-of thing that Rilla could not face it. With
a shriek she dropped her basket and fled. The beautiful berries, which
Susan had so tenderly selected for the minister, rolled in a rosy
torrent over the dusty road and were trodden on by the flying feet of
pursuer and pursued. The basket and contents were no longer in Mary’s
mind. She thought only of the delight of giving Rilla Blythe the scare
of her life. She would teach _her_ to come giving herself airs because
of her fine clothes.

Rilla flew down the hill and along the street. Terror lent wings to her
feet, and she just managed to keep ahead of Mary, who was somewhat
hampered by her own laughter, but who had breath enough to give
occasional blood-curdling whoops as she ran, flourishing her codfish in
the air. Through the Glen street they swept, while everybody ran to the
windows and gates to see them. Mary felt she was making a tremendous
sensation and enjoyed it. Rilla, blind with terror and spent of breath,
felt that she could run no longer. In another instant that terrible
girl would be on her with the codfish. At this point the poor mite
stumbled and fell into the mud-puddle at the end of the street just as
Miss Cornelia came out of Carter Flagg’s store.

Miss Cornelia took the whole situation in at a glance. So did Mary. The
latter stopped short in her mad career and before Miss Cornelia could
speak she had whirled around and was running up as fast as she had run
down. Miss Cornelia’s lips tightened ominously, but she knew it was no
use to think of chasing her. So she picked up poor, sobbing,
dishevelled Rilla instead and took her home. Rilla was heart-broken.
Her dress and slippers and hat were ruined and her six year old pride
had received terrible bruises.

Susan, white with indignation, heard Miss Cornelia’s story of Mary
Vance’s exploit.

“Oh, the hussy—oh, the littly hussy!” she said, as she carried Rilla
away for purification and comfort.

“This thing has gone far enough, Anne dearie,” said Miss Cornelia
resolutely. “Something must be done. _Who_ is this creature who is
staying at the manse and where does she come from?”

“I understood she was a little girl from over-harbour who was visiting
at the manse,” answered Anne, who saw the comical side of the codfish
chase and secretly thought Rilla was rather vain and needed a lesson or
two.

“I know all the over-harbour families who come to our church and that
imp doesn’t belong to any of them,” retorted Miss Cornelia. “She is
almost in rags and when she goes to church she wears Faith Meredith’s
old clothes. There’s some mystery here, and I’m going to investigate
it, since it seems nobody else will. I believe she was at the bottom of
their goings-on in Warren Mead’s spruce bush the other day. Did you
hear of their frightening his mother into a fit?”

“No. I knew Gilbert had been called to see her, but I did not hear what
the trouble was.”

“Well, you know she has a weak heart. And one day last week, when she
was all alone on the veranda, she heard the most awful shrieks of
‘murder’ and ‘help’ coming from the bush—positively frightful sounds,
Anne dearie. Her heart gave out at once. Warren heard them himself at
the barn, and went straight to the bush to investigate, and there he
found all the manse children sitting on a fallen tree and screaming
‘murder’ at the top of their lungs. They told him they were only in fun
and didn’t think anyone would hear them. They were just playing Indian
ambush. Warren went back to the house and found his poor mother
unconscious on the veranda.”

Susan, who had returned, sniffed contemptuously.

“I think she was very far from being unconscious, Mrs. Marshall
Elliott, and that you may tie to. I have been hearing of Amelia
Warren’s weak heart for forty years. She had it when she was twenty.
She enjoys making a fuss and having the doctor, and any excuse will
do.”

“I don’t think Gilbert thought her attack very serious,” said Anne.

“Oh, that may very well be,” said Miss Cornelia. “But the matter has
made an awful lot of talk and the Meads being Methodists makes it that
much worse. What is going to become of those children? Sometimes I
can’t sleep at nights for thinking about them, Anne dearie. I really do
question if they get enough to eat, even, for their father is so lost
in dreams that he doesn’t often remember he has a stomach, and that
lazy old woman doesn’t bother cooking what she ought. They are just
running wild and now that school is closing they’ll be worse than
ever.”

“They do have jolly times,” said Anne, laughing over the recollections
of some Rainbow Valley happenings that had come to her ears. “And they
are all brave and frank and loyal and truthful.”

“That’s a true word, Anne dearie, and when you come to think of all the
trouble in the church those two tattling, deceitful youngsters of the
last minister’s made, I’m inclined to overlook a good deal in the
Merediths.”

“When all is said and done, Mrs. Dr. dear, they are very nice
children,” said Susan. “They have got plenty of original sin in them
and that I will admit, but maybe it is just as well, for if they had
not they might spoil from over-sweetness. Only I do think it is not
proper for them to play in a graveyard and that I will maintain.”

“But they really play quite quietly there,” excused Anne. “They don’t
run and yell as they do elsewhere. Such howls as drift up here from
Rainbow Valley sometimes! Though I fancy my own small fry bear a
valiant part in them. They had a sham battle there last night and had
to ‘roar’ themselves, because they had no artillery to do it, so Jem
says. Jem is passing through the stage where all boys hanker to be
soldiers.”

“Well, thank goodness, he’ll never be a soldier,” said Miss Cornelia.
“I never approved of our boys going to that South African fracas. But
it’s over, and not likely anything of the kind will ever happen again.
I think the world is getting more sensible. As for the Merediths, I’ve
said many a time and I say it again, if Mr. Meredith had a wife all
would be well.”

“He called twice at the Kirks’ last week, so I am told,” said Susan.

“Well,” said Miss Cornelia thoughtfully, “as a rule, I don’t approve of
a minister marrying in his congregation. It generally spoils him. But
in this case it would do no harm, for every one likes Elizabeth Kirk
and nobody else is hankering for the job of stepmothering those
youngsters. Even the Hill girls balk at that. They haven’t been found
laying traps for Mr. Meredith. Elizabeth would make him a good wife if
he only thought so. But the trouble is, she really is homely and, Anne
dearie, Mr. Meredith, abstracted as he is, has an eye for a
good-looking woman, man-like. He isn’t _so_ other-worldly when it comes
to that, believe _me_.”

“Elizabeth Kirk is a very nice person, but they do say that people have
nearly frozen to death in her mother’s spare-room bed before now, Mrs.
Dr. dear,” said Susan darkly. “If I felt I had any right to express an
opinion concerning such a solemn matter as a minister’s marriage I
would say that I think Elizabeth’s cousin Sarah, over-harbour, would
make Mr. Meredith a better wife.”

“Why, Sarah Kirk is a Methodist,” said Miss Cornelia, much as if Susan
had suggested a Hottentot as a manse bride.

“She would likely turn Presbyterian if she married Mr. Meredith,”
retorted Susan.

Miss Cornelia shook her head. Evidently with her it was, once a
Methodist, always a Methodist.

“Sarah Kirk is entirely out of the question,” she said positively. “And
so is Emmeline Drew—though the Drews are all trying to make the match.
They are literally throwing poor Emmeline at his head, and he hasn’t
the least idea of it.”

“Emmeline Drew has no gumption, I must allow,” said Susan. “She is the
kind of woman, Mrs. Dr. dear, who would put a hot-water bottle in your
bed on a dog-night and then have her feelings hurt because you were not
grateful. And her mother was a very poor housekeeper. Did you ever hear
the story of her dishcloth? She lost her dishcloth one day. But the
next day she found it. Oh, yes, Mrs. Dr. dear, she found it, in the
goose at the dinner-table, mixed up with the stuffing. Do you think a
woman like that would do for a minister’s mother-in-law? I do not. But
no doubt I would be better employed in mending little Jem’s trousers
than in talking gossip about my neighbours. He tore them something
scandalous last night in Rainbow Valley.”

“Where is Walter?” asked Anne.

“He is up to no good, I fear, Mrs. Dr. dear. He is in the attic writing
something in an exercise book. And he has not done as well in
arithmetic this term as he should, so the teacher tells me. Too well I
know the reason why. He has been writing silly rhymes when he should
have been doing his sums. I am afraid that boy is going to be a poet,
Mrs. Dr. dear.”

“He is a poet now, Susan.”

“Well, you take it real calm, Mrs. Dr. dear. I suppose it is the best
way, when a person has the strength. I had an uncle who began by being
a poet and ended up by being a tramp. Our family were dreadfully
ashamed of him.”

“You don’t seem to think very highly of poets, Susan,” said Anne,
laughing.

“Who does, Mrs. Dr. dear?” asked Susan in genuine astonishment.

“What about Milton and Shakespeare? And the poets of the Bible?”

“They tell me Milton could not get along with his wife, and Shakespeare
was no more than respectable by times. As for the Bible, of course
things were different in those sacred days—although I never had a high
opinion of King David, say what you will. I never knew any good to come
of writing poetry, and I hope and pray that blessed boy will outgrow
the tendency. If he does not—we must see what emulsion of cod-liver oil
will do.”




CHAPTER VIII.
MISS CORNELIA INTERVENES


Miss Cornelia descended upon the manse the next day and
cross-questioned Mary, who, being a young person of considerable
discernment and astuteness, told her story simple and truthfully, with
an entire absence of complaint or bravado. Miss Cornelia was more
favourably impressed than she had expected to be, but deemed it her
duty to be severe.

“Do you think,” she said sternly, “that you showed your gratitude to
this family, who have been far too kind to you, by insulting and
chasing one of their little friends as you did yesterday?”

“Say, it was rotten mean of me,” admitted Mary easily. “I dunno what
possessed me. That old codfish seemed to come in so blamed handy. But I
was awful sorry—I cried last night after I went to bed about it, honest
I did. You ask Una if I didn’t. I wouldn’t tell her what for ‘cause I
was ashamed of it, and then she cried, too, because she was afraid
someone had hurt my feelings. Laws, _I_ ain’t got any feelings to hurt
worth speaking of. What worries me is why Mrs. Wiley hain’t been
hunting for me. It ain’t like her.”

Miss Cornelia herself thought it rather peculiar, but she merely
admonished Mary sharply not to take any further liberties with the
minister’s codfish, and went to report progress at Ingleside.

“If the child’s story is true the matter ought to be looked into,” she
said. “I know something about that Wiley woman, believe _me_. Marshall
used to be well acquainted with her when he lived over-harbour. I heard
him say something last summer about her and a home child she had—likely
this very Mary-creature. He said some one told him she was working the
child to death and not half feeding and clothing it. You know, Anne
dearie, it has always been my habit neither to make nor meddle with
those over-harbour folks. But I shall send Marshall over to-morrow to
find out the rights of this if he can. And _then_ I’ll speak to the
minister. Mind you, Anne dearie, the Merediths found this girl
literally starving in James Taylor’s old hay barn. She had been there
all night, cold and hungry and alone. And us sleeping warm in our beds
after good suppers.”

“The poor little thing,” said Anne, picturing one of her own dear
babies, cold and hungry and alone in such circumstances. “If she has
been ill-used, Miss Cornelia, she mustn’t be taken back to such a
place. _I_ was an orphan once in a very similar situation.”

“We’ll have to consult the Hopetown asylum folks,” said Miss Cornelia.
“Anyway, she can’t be left at the manse. Dear knows what those poor
children might learn from her. I understand that she has been known to
swear. But just think of her being there two whole weeks and Mr
Meredith never waking up to it! What business has a man like that to
have a family? Why, Anne dearie, he ought to be a monk.”

Two evenings later Miss Cornelia was back at Ingleside.

“It’s the most amazing thing!” she said. “Mrs. Wiley was found dead in
her bed the very morning after this Mary-creature ran away. She has had
a bad heart for years and the doctor had warned her it might happen at
any time. She had sent away her hired man and there was nobody in the
house. Some neighbours found her the next day. They missed the child,
it seems, but supposed Mrs. Wiley had sent her to her cousin near
Charlottetown as she had said she was going to do. The cousin didn’t
come to the funeral and so nobody ever knew that Mary wasn’t with her.
The people Marshall talked to told him some things about the way Mrs.
Wiley used this Mary that made his blood boil, so he declares. You
know, it puts Marshall in a regular fury to hear of a child being
ill-used. They said she whipped her mercilessly for every little fault
or mistake. Some folks talked of writing to the asylum authorities but
everybody’s business is nobody’s business and it was never done.”

“I am sorry that Wiley person is dead,” said Susan fiercely. “I should
like to go over-harbour and give her a piece of my mind. Starving and
beating a child, Mrs. Dr. dear! As you know, I hold with lawful
spanking, but I go no further. And what is to become of this poor child
now, Mrs. Marshall Elliott?”

“I suppose she must be sent back to Hopetown,” said Miss Cornelia. “I
think every one hereabouts who wants a home child has one. I’ll see Mr.
Meredith to-morrow and tell him my opinion of the whole affair.”

“And no doubt she will, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan, after Miss Cornelia
had gone. “She would stick at nothing, not even at shingling the church
spire if she took it into her head. But I cannot understand how even
Cornelia Bryant can talk to a minister as she does. You would think he
was just any common person.”

When Miss Cornelia had gone, Nan Blythe uncurled herself from the
hammock where she had been studying her lessons and slipped away to
Rainbow Valley. The others were already there. Jem and Jerry were
playing quoits with old horseshoes borrowed from the Glen blacksmith.
Carl was stalking ants on a sunny hillock. Walter, lying on his stomach
among the fern, was reading aloud to Mary and Di and Faith and Una from
a wonderful book of myths wherein were fascinating accounts of Prester
John and the Wandering Jew, divining rods and tailed men, of Schamir,
the worm that split rocks and opened the way to golden treasure, of
Fortunate Isles and swan-maidens. It was a great shock to Walter to
learn that William Tell and Gelert were myths also; and the story of
Bishop Hatto was to keep him awake all that night; but best of all he
loved the stories of the Pied Piper and the San Greal. He read them
thrillingly, while the bells on the Tree Lovers tinkled in the summer
wind and the coolness of the evening shadows crept across the valley.

“Say, ain’t them in’resting lies?” said Mary admiringly when Walter had
closed the book.

“They aren’t lies,” said Di indignantly.

“You don’t mean they’re true?” asked Mary incredulously.

“No—not exactly. They’re like those ghost-stories of yours. They
weren’t true—but you didn’t expect us to believe them, so they weren’t
lies.”

“That yarn about the divining rod is no lie, anyhow,” said Mary. “Old
Jake Crawford over-harbour can work it. They send for him from
everywhere when they want to dig a well. And I believe I know the
Wandering Jew.”

“Oh, Mary,” said Una, awe-struck.

“I do—true’s you’re alive. There was an old man at Mrs. Wiley’s one day
last fall. He looked old enough to be _anything_. She was asking him
about cedar posts, if he thought they’d last well. And he said, ‘Last
well? They’ll last a thousand years. I know, for I’ve tried them
twice.’ Now, if he was two thousand years old who was he but your
Wandering Jew?”

“I don’t believe the Wandering Jew would associate with a person like
Mrs. Wiley,” said Faith decidedly.

“I love the Pied Piper story,” said Di, “and so does mother. I always
feel so sorry for the poor little lame boy who couldn’t keep up with
the others and got shut out of the mountain. He must have been so
disappointed. I think all the rest of his life he’d be wondering what
wonderful thing he had missed and wishing he could have got in with the
others.”

“But how glad his mother must have been,” said Una softly. “I think she
had been sorry all her life that he was lame. Perhaps she even used to
cry about it. But she would never be sorry again—never. She would be
glad he was lame because that was why she hadn’t lost him.”

“Some day,” said Walter dreamily, looking afar into the sky, “the Pied
Piper will come over the hill up there and down Rainbow Valley, piping
merrily and sweetly. And I will follow him—follow him down to the
shore—down to the sea—away from you all. I don’t think I’ll want to
go—Jem will want to go—it will be such an adventure—but I won’t. Only
I’ll _have_ to—the music will call and call and call me until I _must_
follow.”

“We’ll all go,” cried Di, catching fire at the flame of Walter’s fancy,
and half-believing she could see the mocking, retreating figure of the
mystic piper in the far, dim end of the valley.

“No. You’ll sit here and wait,” said Walter, his great, splendid eyes
full of strange glamour. “You’ll wait for us to come back. And we may
not come—for we cannot come as long as the Piper plays. He may pipe us
round the world. And still you’ll sit here and wait—and _wait_.”

“Oh, dry up,” said Mary, shivering. “Don’t look like that, Walter
Blythe. You give me the creeps. Do you want to set me bawling? I could
just see that horrid old Piper going away on, and you boys following
him, and us girls sitting here waiting all alone. I dunno why it is—I
never was one of the blubbering kind—but as soon as you start your
spieling I always want to cry.”

Walter smiled in triumph. He liked to exercise this power of his over
his companions—to play on their feelings, waken their fears, thrill
their souls. It satisfied some dramatic instinct in him. But under his
triumph was a queer little chill of some mysterious dread. The Pied
Piper had seemed very real to him—as if the fluttering veil that hid
the future had for a moment been blown aside in the starlit dusk of
Rainbow Valley and some dim glimpse of coming years granted to him.

Carl, coming up to their group with a report of the doings in ant-land,
brought them all back to the realm of facts.

“Ants _are_ darned in’resting,” exclaimed Mary, glad to escape the
shadowy Piper’s thrall. “Carl and me watched that bed in the graveyard
all Saturday afternoon. I never thought there was so much in bugs. Say,
but they’re quarrelsome little cusses—some of ‘em like to start a fight
‘thout any reason, far’s we could see. And some of ‘em are cowards.
They got so scared they just doubled theirselves up into a ball and let
the other fellows bang ‘em. They wouldn’t put up a fight at all. Some
of ‘em are lazy and won’t work. We watched ‘em shirking. And there was
one ant died of grief ‘cause another ant got killed—wouldn’t
work—wouldn’t eat—just died—it did, honest to Go—oodness.”

A shocked silence prevailed. Every one knew that Mary had not started
out to say “goodness.” Faith and Di exchanged glances that would have
done credit to Miss Cornelia herself. Walter and Carl looked
uncomfortable and Una’s lip trembled.

Mary squirmed uncomfortably.

“That slipped out ‘fore I thought—it did, honest to—I mean, true’s you
live, and I swallowed half of it. You folks over here are mighty
squeamish seems to me. Wish you could have heard the Wileys when they
had a fight.”

“Ladies don’t say such things,” said Faith, very primly for her.

“It isn’t right,” whispered Una.

“I ain’t a lady,” said Mary. “What chance’ve I ever had of being a
lady? But I won’t say that again if I can help it. I promise you.”

“Besides,” said Una, “you can’t expect God to answer your prayers if
you take His name in vain, Mary.”

“I don’t expect Him to answer ‘em anyhow,” said Mary of little faith.
“I’ve been asking Him for a week to clear up this Wiley affair and He
hasn’t done a thing. I’m going to give up.”

At this juncture Nan arrived breathless.

“Oh, Mary, I’ve news for you. Mrs. Elliott has been over-harbour and
what do you think she found out? Mrs. Wiley is dead—she was found dead
in bed the morning after you ran away. So you’ll never have to go back
to her.”

“Dead!” said Mary stupefied. Then she shivered.

“Do you s’pose my praying had anything to do with that?” she cried
imploringly to Una. “If it had I’ll never pray again as long as I live.
Why, she may come back and ha’nt me.”

“No, no, Mary,” said Una comfortingly, “it hadn’t. Why, Mrs. Wiley died
long before you ever began to pray about it at all.”

“That’s so,” said Mary recovering from her panic. “But I tell you it
gave me a start. I wouldn’t like to think I’d prayed anybody to death.
I never thought of such a thing as her dying when I was praying. She
didn’t seem much like the dying kind. Did Mrs. Elliott say anything
about me?”

“She said you would likely have to go back to the asylum.”

“I thought as much,” said Mary drearily. “And then they’ll give me out
again—likely to some one just like Mrs. Wiley. Well, I s’pose I can
stand it. I’m tough.”

“I’m going to pray that you won’t have to go back,” whispered Una, as
she and Mary walked home to the manse.

“You can do as you like,” said Mary decidedly, “but I vow _I_ won’t.
I’m good and scared of this praying business. See what’s come of it. If
Mrs. Wiley _had_ died after I started praying it would have been my
doings.”

“Oh, no, it wouldn’t,” said Una. “I wish I could explain things
better—father could, I know, if you’d talk to him, Mary.”

“Catch me! I don’t know what to make of your father, that’s the long
and short of it. He goes by me and never sees me in broad daylight. I
ain’t proud—but I ain’t a door-mat, neither!”

“Oh, Mary, it’s just father’s way. Most of the time he never sees us,
either. He is thinking deeply, that is all. And I _am_ going to pray
that God will keep you in Four Winds—because I like you, Mary.”

“All right. Only don’t let me hear of any more people dying on account
of it,” said Mary. “I’d like to stay in Four Winds fine. I like it and
I like the harbour and the light house—and you and the Blythes. You’re
the only friends I ever had and I’d hate to leave you.”




CHAPTER IX.
UNA INTERVENES


Miss Cornelia had an interview with Mr. Meredith which proved something
of a shock to that abstracted gentleman. She pointed out to him, none
too respectfully, his dereliction of duty in allowing a waif like Mary
Vance to come into his family and associate with his children without
knowing or learning anything about her.

“I don’t say there is much harm done, of course,” she concluded. “This
Mary-creature isn’t what you might call bad, when all is said and done.
I’ve been questioning your children and the Blythes, and from what I
can make out there’s nothing much to be said against the child except
that she’s slangy and doesn’t use very refined language. But think what
might have happened if she’d been like some of those home children we
know of. You know yourself what that poor little creature the Jim
Flaggs’ had, taught and told the Flagg children.”

Mr. Meredith did know and was honestly shocked over his own
carelessness in the matter.

“But what is to be done, Mrs. Elliott?” he asked helplessly. “We can’t
turn the poor child out. She must be cared for.”

“Of course. We’d better write to the Hopetown authorities at once.
Meanwhile, I suppose she might as well stay here for a few more days
till we hear from them. But keep your eyes and ears open, Mr.
Meredith.”

Susan would have died of horror on the spot if she had heard Miss
Cornelia so admonishing a minister. But Miss Cornelia departed in a
warm glow of satisfaction over duty done, and that night Mr. Meredith
asked Mary to come into his study with him. Mary obeyed, looking
literally ghastly with fright. But she got the surprise of her poor,
battered little life. This man, of whom she had stood so terribly in
awe, was the kindest, gentlest soul she had ever met. Before she knew
what happened Mary found herself pouring all her troubles into his ear
and receiving in return such sympathy and tender understanding as it
had never occurred to her to imagine. Mary left the study with her face
and eyes so softened that Una hardly knew her.

“Your father’s all right, when he does wake up,” she said with a sniff
that just escaped being a sob. “It’s a pity he doesn’t wake up oftener.
He said I wasn’t to blame for Mrs. Wiley dying, but that I must try to
think of her good points and not of her bad ones. I dunno what good
points she had, unless it was keeping her house clean and making
first-class butter. I know I ‘most wore my arms out scrubbing her old
kitchen floor with the knots in it. But anything your father says goes
with me after this.”

Mary proved a rather dull companion in the following days, however. She
confided to Una that the more she thought of going back to the asylum
the more she hated it. Una racked her small brains for some way of
averting it, but it was Nan Blythe who came to the rescue with a
somewhat startling suggestion.

“Mrs. Elliott might take Mary herself. She has a great big house and
Mr. Elliott is always wanting her to have help. It would be just a
splendid place for Mary. Only she’d have to behave herself.”

“Oh, Nan, do you think Mrs. Elliott would take her?”

“It wouldn’t do any harm if you asked her,” said Nan. At first Una did
not think she could. She was so shy that to ask a favour of anybody was
agony to her. And she was very much in awe of the bustling, energetic
Mrs. Elliott. She liked her very much and always enjoyed a visit to her
house; but to go and ask her to adopt Mary Vance seemed such a height
of presumption that Una’s timid spirit quailed.

When the Hopetown authorities wrote to Mr. Meredith to send Mary to
them without delay Mary cried herself to sleep in the manse attic that
night and Una found a desperate courage. The next evening she slipped
away from the manse to the harbour road. Far down in Rainbow Valley she
heard joyous laughter but her way lay not there. She was terribly pale
and terribly in earnest—so much so that she took no notice of the
people she met—and old Mrs. Stanley Flagg was quite huffed and said Una
Meredith would be as absentminded as her father when she grew up.

Miss Cornelia lived half way between the Glen and Four Winds Point, in
a house whose original glaring green hue had mellowed down to an
agreeable greenish gray. Marshall Elliott had planted trees about it
and set out a rose garden and a spruce hedge. It was quite a different
place from what it had been in years agone. The manse children and the
Ingleside children liked to go there. It was a beautiful walk down the
old harbour road, and there was always a well-filled cooky jar at the
end.

The misty sea was lapping softly far down on the sands. Three big boats
were skimming down the harbour like great white sea-birds. A schooner
was coming up the channel. The world of Four Winds was steeped in
glowing colour, and subtle music, and strange glamour, and everybody
should have been happy in it. But when Una turned in at Miss Cornelia’s
gate her very legs had almost refused to carry her.

Miss Cornelia was alone on the veranda. Una had hoped Mr. Elliott would
be there. He was so big and hearty and twinkly that there would be
encouragement in his presence. She sat on the little stool Miss
Cornelia brought out and tried to eat the doughnut Miss Cornelia gave
her. It stuck in her throat, but she swallowed desperately lest Miss
Cornelia be offended. She could not talk; she was still pale; and her
big, dark-blue eyes looked so piteous that Miss Cornelia concluded the
child was in some trouble.

“What’s on your mind, dearie?” she asked. “There’s something, that’s
plain to be seen.”

Una swallowed the last twist of doughnut with a desperate gulp.

“Mrs. Elliott, won’t you take Mary Vance?” she said beseechingly.

Miss Cornelia stared blankly.

“Me! Take Mary Vance! Do you mean keep her?”

“Yes—keep her—adopt her,” said Una eagerly, gaining courage now that
the ice was broken. “Oh, Mrs. Elliott, _please_ do. She doesn’t want to
go back to the asylum—she cries every night about it. She’s so afraid
of being sent to another hard place. And she’s _so_ smart—there isn’t
anything she can’t do. I know you wouldn’t be sorry if you took her.”

“I never thought of such a thing,” said Miss Cornelia rather
helplessly.

“_Won’t_ you think of it?” implored Una.

“But, dearie, I don’t want help. I’m quite able to do all the work
here. And I never thought I’d like to have a home girl if I did need
help.”

The light went out of Una’s eyes. Her lips trembled. She sat down on
her stool again, a pathetic little figure of disappointment, and began
to cry.

“Don’t—dearie—don’t,” exclaimed Miss Cornelia in distress. She could
never bear to hurt a child. “I don’t say I _won’t_ take her—but the
idea is so new it has just kerflummuxed me. I must think it over.”

“Mary is _so_ smart,” said Una again.

“Humph! So I’ve heard. I’ve heard she swears, too. Is that true?”

“I’ve never heard her swear _exactly_,” faltered Una uncomfortably.
“But I’m afraid she _could_.”

“I believe you! Does she always tell the truth?”

“I think she does, except when she’s afraid of a whipping.”

“And yet you want me to take her!”

“_Some one_ has to take her,” sobbed Una. “_Some one_ has to look after
her, Mrs. Elliott.”

“That’s true. Perhaps it _is_ my duty to do it,” said Miss Cornelia
with a sigh. “Well, I’ll have to talk it over with Mr. Elliott. So
don’t say anything about it just yet. Take another doughnut, dearie.”

Una took it and ate it with a better appetite.

“I’m very fond of doughnuts,” she confessed “Aunt Martha never makes
any. But Miss Susan at Ingleside does, and sometimes she lets us have a
plateful in Rainbow Valley. Do you know what I do when I’m hungry for
doughnuts and can’t get any, Mrs. Elliott?”

“No, dearie. What?”

“I get out mother’s old cook book and read the doughnut recipe—and the
other recipes. They sound _so_ nice. I always do that when I’m
hungry—especially after we’ve had ditto for dinner. _Then_ I read the
fried chicken and the roast goose recipes. Mother could make all those
nice things.”

“Those manse children will starve to death yet if Mr. Meredith doesn’t
get married,” Miss Cornelia told her husband indignantly after Una had
gone. “And he won’t—and what’s to be done? And _shall_ we take this
Mary-creature, Marshall?”

“Yes, take her,” said Marshall laconically.

“Just like a man,” said his wife, despairingly. “‘Take her’—as if that
was all. There are a hundred things to be considered, believe _me_.”

“Take her—and we’ll consider them afterwards, Cornelia,” said her
husband.

In the end Miss Cornelia did take her and went up to announce her
decision to the Ingleside people first.

“Splendid!” said Anne delightedly. “I’ve been hoping you would do that
very thing, Miss Cornelia. I want that poor child to get a good home. I
was a homeless little orphan just like her once.”

“I don’t think this Mary-creature is or ever will be much like you,”
retorted Miss Cornelia gloomily. “She’s a cat of another colour. But
she’s also a human being with an immortal soul to save. I’ve got a
shorter catechism and a small tooth comb and I’m going to do my duty by
her, now that I’ve set my hand to the plough, believe me.”

Mary received the news with chastened satisfaction.

“It’s better luck than I expected,” she said.

“You’ll have to mind your p’s and q’s with Mrs. Elliott,” said Nan.

“Well, I can do that,” flashed Mary. “I know how to behave when I want
to just as well as you, Nan Blythe.”

“You mustn’t use bad words, you know, Mary,” said Una anxiously.

“I s’pose she’d die of horror if I did,” grinned Mary, her white eyes
shining with unholy glee over the idea. “But you needn’t worry, Una.
Butter won’t melt in my mouth after this. I’ll be all prunes and
prisms.”

“Nor tell lies,” added Faith.

“Not even to get off from a whipping?” pleaded Mary.

“Mrs. Elliott will _never_ whip you—_never_,” exclaimed Di.

“Won’t she?” said Mary skeptically. “If I ever find myself in a place
where I ain’t licked I’ll think it’s heaven all right. No fear of me
telling lies then. I ain’t fond of telling ‘em—I’d ruther not, if it
comes to that.”

The day before Mary’s departure from the manse they had a picnic in her
honour in Rainbow Valley, and that evening all the manse children gave
her something from their scanty store of treasured things for a
keepsake. Carl gave her his Noah’s ark and Jerry his second best
jew’s-harp. Faith gave her a little hairbrush with a mirror in the back
of it, which Mary had always considered very wonderful. Una hesitated
between an old beaded purse and a gay picture of Daniel in the lion’s
den, and finally offered Mary her choice. Mary really hankered after
the beaded purse, but she knew Una loved it, so she said,

“Give me Daniel. I’d rusher have it ‘cause I’m partial to lions. Only I
wish they’d et Daniel up. It would have been more exciting.”

At bedtime Mary coaxed Una to sleep with her.

“It’s for the last time,” she said, “and it’s raining tonight, and I
hate sleeping up there alone when it’s raining on account of that
graveyard. I don’t mind it on fine nights, but a night like this I
can’t see anything but the rain pouring down on them old white stones,
and the wind round the window sounds as if them dead people were trying
to get in and crying ‘cause they couldn’t.”

“I like rainy nights,” said Una, when they were cuddled down together
in the little attic room, “and so do the Blythe girls.”

“I don’t mind ‘em when I’m not handy to graveyards,” said Mary. “If I
was alone here I’d cry my eyes out I’d be so lonesome. I feel awful bad
to be leaving you all.”

“Mrs. Elliott will let you come up and play in Rainbow Valley quite
often I’m sure,” said Una. “And you _will_ be a good girl, won’t you,
Mary?”

“Oh, I’ll try,” sighed Mary. “But it won’t be as easy for me to be
good—inside, I mean, as well as outside—as it is for you. You hadn’t
such scalawags of relations as I had.”

“But your people must have had some good qualities as well as bad
ones,” argued Una. “You must live up to them and never mind their bad
ones.”

“I don’t believe they had any good qualities,” said Mary gloomily. “I
never heard of any. My grandfather had money, but they say he was a
rascal. No, I’ll just have to start out on my own hook and do the best
I can.”

“And God will help you, you know, Mary, if you ask Him.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Oh, Mary. You know we asked God to get a home for you and He did.”

“I don’t see what He had to do with it,” retorted Mary. “It was you put
it into Mrs. Elliott’s head.”

“But God put it into her _heart_ to take you. All my putting it into
her _head_ wouldn’t have done any good if He hadn’t.”

“Well, there may be something in that,” admitted Mary. “Mind you, I
haven’t got anything against God, Una. I’m willing to give Him a
chance. But, honest, I think He’s an awful lot like your father—just
absent-minded and never taking any notice of a body most of the time,
but sometimes waking up all of a suddent and being awful good and kind
and sensible.”

“Oh, Mary, no!” exclaimed horrified Una. “God isn’t a bit like father—I
mean He’s a thousand times better and kinder.”

“If He’s as good as your father He’ll do for me,” said Mary. “When your
father was talking to me I felt as if I never could be bad any more.”

“I wish you’d talk to father about Him,” sighed Una. “He can explain it
all so much better than I can.”

“Why, so I will, next time he wakes up,” promised Mary. “That night he
talked to me in the study he showed me real clear that my praying
didn’t kill Mrs. Wiley. My mind’s been easy since, but I’m real
cautious about praying. I guess the old rhyme is the safest. Say, Una,
it seems to me if one has to pray to anybody it’d be better to pray to
the devil than to God. God’s good, anyhow so you say, so He won’t do
you any harm, but from all I can make out the devil needs to be
pacified. I think the sensible way would be to say to _him_, ‘Good
devil, please don’t tempt me. Just leave me alone, please.’ Now, don’t
you?”

“Oh, no, no, Mary. I’m sure it couldn’t be right to pray to the devil.
And it wouldn’t do any good because he’s bad. It might aggravate him
and he’d be worse than ever.”

“Well, as to this God-matter,” said Mary stubbornly, “since you and I
can’t settle it, there ain’t no use in talking more about it until
we’ve a chanct to find out the rights of it. I’ll do the best I can
alone till then.”

“If mother was alive she could tell us everything,” said Una with a
sigh.

“I wisht she was alive,” said Mary. “I don’t know what’s going to
become of you youngsters when I’m gone. Anyhow, _do_ try and keep the
house a little tidy. The way people talks about it is scandalous. And
the first thing you know your father will be getting married again and
then your noses will be out of joint.”

Una was startled. The idea of her father marrying again had never
presented itself to her before. She did not like it and she lay silent
under the chill of it.

“Stepmothers are _awful_ creatures,” Mary went on. “I could make your
blood run cold if I was to tell you all I know about ‘em. The Wilson
kids across the road from Wiley’s had a stepmother. She was just as bad
to ‘em as Mrs. Wiley was to me. It’ll be awful if you get a
stepmother.”

“I’m sure we won’t,” said Una tremulously. “Father won’t marry anybody
else.”

“He’ll be hounded into it, I expect,” said Mary darkly. “All the old
maids in the settlement are after him. There’s no being up to them. And
the worst of stepmothers is, they always set your father against you.
He’d never care anything about you again. He’d always take her part and
her children’s part. You see, she’d make him believe you were all bad.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me this, Mary,” cried Una. “It makes me feel so
unhappy.”

“I only wanted to warn you,” said Mary, rather repentantly. “Of course,
your father’s so absent-minded he mightn’t happen to think of getting
married again. But it’s better to be prepared.”

Long after Mary slept serenely little Una lay awake, her eyes smarting
with tears. On, how dreadful it would be if her father should marry
somebody who would make him hate her and Jerry and Faith and Carl! She
couldn’t bear it—she couldn’t!

Mary had not instilled any poison of the kind Miss Cornelia had feared
into the manse children’s minds. Yet she had certainly contrived to do
a little mischief with the best of intentions. But she slept
dreamlessly, while Una lay awake and the rain fell and the wind wailed
around the old gray manse. And the Rev. John Meredith forgot to go to
bed at all because he was absorbed in reading a life of St. Augustine.
It was gray dawn when he finished it and went upstairs, wrestling with
the problems of two thousand years ago. The door of the girls’ room was
open and he saw Faith lying asleep, rosy and beautiful. He wondered
where Una was. Perhaps she had gone over to “stay all night” with the
Blythe girls. She did this occasionally, deeming it a great treat. John
Meredith sighed. He felt that Una’s whereabouts ought not to be a
mystery to him. Cecelia would have looked after her better than that.

If only Cecelia were still with him! How pretty and gay she had been!
How the old manse up at Maywater had echoed to her songs! And she had
gone away so suddenly, taking her laughter and music and leaving
silence—so suddenly that he had never quite got over his feeling of
amazement. How could _she_, the beautiful and vivid, have died?

The idea of a second marriage had never presented itself seriously to
John Meredith. He had loved his wife so deeply that he believed he
could never care for any woman again. He had a vague idea that before
very long Faith would be old enough to take her mother’s place. Until
then, he must do the best he could alone. He sighed and went to his
room, where the bed was still unmade. Aunt Martha had forgotten it, and
Mary had not dared to make it because Aunt Martha had forbidden her to
meddle with anything in the minister’s room. But Mr. Meredith did not
notice that it was unmade. His last thoughts were of St. Augustine.




CHAPTER X.
THE MANSE GIRLS CLEAN HOUSE


“Ugh,” said Faith, sitting up in bed with a shiver. “It’s raining. I do
hate a rainy Sunday. Sunday is dull enough even when it’s fine.”

“We oughtn’t to find Sunday dull,” said Una sleepily, trying to pull
her drowsy wits together with an uneasy conviction that they had
overslept.

“But we _do_, you know,” said Faith candidly. “Mary Vance says most
Sundays are so dull she could hang herself.”

“We ought to like Sunday better than Mary Vance,” said Una
remorsefully. “We’re the minister’s children.”

“I wish we were a blacksmith’s children,” protested Faith angrily,
hunting for her stockings. “_Then_ people wouldn’t expect us to be
better than other children. _Just_ look at the holes in my heels. Mary
darned them all up before she went away, but they’re as bad as ever
now. Una, get up. I can’t get the breakfast alone. Oh, dear. I wish
father and Jerry were home. You wouldn’t think we’d miss father much—we
don’t see much of him when he is home. And yet _everything_ seems gone.
I must run in and see how Aunt Martha is.”

“Is she any better?” asked Una, when Faith returned.

“No, she isn’t. She’s groaning with the misery still. Maybe we ought to
tell Dr. Blythe. But she says not—she never had a doctor in her life
and she isn’t going to begin now. She says doctors just live by
poisoning people. Do you suppose they do?”

“No, of course not,” said Una indignantly. “I’m sure Dr. Blythe
wouldn’t poison anybody.”

“Well, we’ll have to rub Aunt Martha’s back again after breakfast. We’d
better not make the flannels as hot as we did yesterday.”

Faith giggled over the remembrance. They had nearly scalded the skin
off poor Aunt Martha’s back. Una sighed. Mary Vance would have known
just what the precise temperature of flannels for a misery back should
be. Mary knew everything. They knew nothing. And how could they learn,
save by bitter experience for which, in this instance, unfortunate Aunt
Martha had paid?

The preceding Monday Mr. Meredith had left for Nova Scotia to spend his
short vacation, taking Jerry with him. On Wednesday Aunt Martha was
suddenly seized with a recurring and mysterious ailment which she
always called “the misery,” and which was tolerably certain to attack
her at the most inconvenient times. She could not rise from her bed,
any movement causing agony. A doctor she flatly refused to have. Faith
and Una cooked the meals and waited on her. The less said about the
meals the better—yet they were not much worse than Aunt Martha’s had
been. There were many women in the village who would have been glad to
come and help, but Aunt Martha refused to let her plight be known.

“You must worry on till I kin git around,” she groaned. “Thank
goodness, John isn’t here. There’s a plenty o’ cold biled meat and
bread and you kin try your hand at making porridge.”

The girls had tried their hand, but so far without much success. The
first day it had been too thin. The next day so thick that you could
cut it in slices. And both days it had been burned.

“I hate porridge,” said Faith viciously. “When I have a house of my own
I’m _never_ going to have a single bit of porridge in it.”

“What’ll your children do then?” asked Una. “Children have to have
porridge or they won’t grow. Everybody says so.”

“They’ll have to get along without it or stay runts,” retorted Faith
stubbornly. “Here, Una, you stir it while I set the table. If I leave
it for a minute the horrid stuff will burn. It’s half past nine. We’ll
be late for Sunday School.”

“I haven’t seen anyone going past yet,” said Una. “There won’t likely
be many out. Just see how it’s pouring. And when there’s no preaching
the folks won’t come from a distance to bring the children.”

“Go and call Carl,” said Faith.

Carl, it appeared, had a sore throat, induced by getting wet in the
Rainbow Valley marsh the previous evening while pursuing dragon-flies.
He had come home with dripping stockings and boots and had sat out the
evening in them. He could not eat any breakfast and Faith made him go
back to bed again. She and Una left the table as it was and went to
Sunday School. There was no one in the school room when they got there
and no one came. They waited until eleven and then went home.

“There doesn’t seem to be anybody at the Methodist Sunday School
either,” said Una.

“I’m _glad_,” said Faith. “I’d hate to think the Methodists were better
at going to Sunday School on rainy Sundays than the Presbyterians. But
there’s no preaching in their Church to-day, either, so likely their
Sunday School is in the afternoon.”

Una washed the dishes, doing them quite nicely, for so much had she
learned from Mary Vance. Faith swept the floor after a fashion and
peeled the potatoes for dinner, cutting her finger in the process.

“I wish we had something for dinner besides ditto,” sighed Una. “I’m so
tired of it. The Blythe children don’t know what ditto is. And we
_never_ have any pudding. Nan says Susan would faint if they had no
pudding on Sundays. Why aren’t we like other people, Faith?”

“I don’t want to be like other people,” laughed Faith, tying up her
bleeding finger. “I like being myself. It’s more interesting. Jessie
Drew is as good a housekeeper as her mother, but would you want to be
as stupid as she is?”

“But our house isn’t right. Mary Vance says so. She says people talk
about it being so untidy.”

Faith had an inspiration.

“We’ll clean it all up,” she cried. “We’ll go right to work to-morrow.
It’s a real good chance when Aunt Martha is laid up and can’t interfere
with us. We’ll have it all lovely and clean when father comes home,
just like it was when Mary went away. _any one_ can sweep and dust and
wash windows. People won’t be able to talk about us any more. Jem
Blythe says it’s only old cats that talk, but their talk hurts just as
much as anybody’s.”

“I hope it will be fine to-morrow,” said Una, fired with enthusiasm.
“Oh, Faith, it will be splendid to be all cleaned up and like other
people.”

“I hope Aunt Martha’s misery will last over to-morrow,” said Faith. “If
it doesn’t we won’t get a single thing done.”

Faith’s amiable wish was fulfilled. The next day found Aunt Martha
still unable to rise. Carl, too, was still sick and easily prevailed on
to stay in bed. Neither Faith nor Una had any idea how sick the boy
really was; a watchful mother would have had a doctor without delay;
but there was no mother, and poor little Carl, with his sore throat and
aching head and crimson cheeks, rolled himself up in his twisted
bedclothes and suffered alone, somewhat comforted by the companionship
of a small green lizard in the pocket of his ragged nighty.

The world was full of summer sunshine after the rain. It was a peerless
day for house-cleaning and Faith and Una went gaily to work.

“We’ll clean the dining-room and the parlour,” said Faith. “It wouldn’t
do to meddle with the study, and it doesn’t matter much about the
upstairs. The first thing is to take everything out.”

Accordingly, everything was taken out. The furniture was piled on the
veranda and lawn and the Methodist graveyard fence was gaily draped
with rugs. An orgy of sweeping followed, with an attempt at dusting on
Una’s part, while Faith washed the windows of the dining-room, breaking
one pane and cracking two in the process. Una surveyed the streaked
result dubiously.

“They don’t look right, somehow,” she said. “Mrs. Elliott’s and Susan’s
windows just shine and sparkle.”

“Never mind. They let the sunshine through just as well,” said Faith
cheerfully. “They _must_ be clean after all the soap and water I’ve
used, and that’s the main thing. Now, it’s past eleven, so I’ll wipe up
this mess on the floor and we’ll go outside. You dust the furniture and
I’ll shake the rugs. I’m going to do it in the graveyard. I don’t want
to send dust flying all over the lawn.”

Faith enjoyed the rug shaking. To stand on Hezekiah Pollock’s
tombstone, flapping and shaking rugs, was real fun. To be sure, Elder
Abraham Clow and his wife, driving past in their capacious
double-seated buggy, seemed to gaze at her in grim disapproval.

“Isn’t that a terrible sight?” said Elder Abraham solemnly.

“I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,”
said Mrs. Elder Abraham, more solemnly still.

Faith waved a door mat cheerily at the Clow party. It did not worry her
that the elder and his wife did not return her greeting. Everybody knew
that Elder Abraham had never been known to smile since he had been
appointed Superintendent of the Sunday School fourteen years
previously. But it hurt her that Minnie and Adella Clow did not wave
back. Faith liked Minnie and Adella. Next to the Blythes, they were her
best friends in school and she always helped Adella with her sums. This
was gratitude for you. Her friends cut her because she was shaking rugs
in an old graveyard where, as Mary Vance said, not a living soul had
been buried for years. Faith flounced around to the veranda, where she
found Una grieved in spirit because the Clow girls had not waved to
her, either.

“I suppose they’re mad over something,” said Faith. “Perhaps they’re
jealous because we play so much in Rainbow Valley with the Blythes.
Well, just wait till school opens and Adella wants me to show her how
to do her sums! We’ll get square then. Come on, let’s put the things
back in. I’m tired to death and I don’t believe the rooms will look
much better than before we started—though I shook out pecks of dust in
the graveyard. I _hate_ house-cleaning.”

It was two o’clock before the tired girls finished the two rooms. They
got a dreary bite in the kitchen and intended to wash the dishes at
once. But Faith happened to pick up a new story-book Di Blythe had lent
her and was lost to the world until sunset. Una took a cup of rank tea
up to Carl but found him asleep; so she curled herself up on Jerry’s
bed and went to sleep too. Meanwhile, a weird story flew through Glen
St. Mary and folks asked each other seriously what was to be done with
those manse youngsters.

“That is past laughing at, believe _me_,” said Miss Cornelia to her
husband, with a heavy sigh. “I couldn’t believe it at first. Miranda
Drew brought the story home from the Methodist Sunday School this
afternoon and I simply scoffed at it. But Mrs. Elder Abraham says she
and the Elder saw it with their own eyes.”

“Saw what?” asked Marshall.

“Faith and Una Meredith stayed home from Sunday School this morning and
_cleaned house_,” said Miss Cornelia, in accents of despair. “When
Elder Abraham went home from the church—he had stayed behind to
straighten out the library books—he saw them shaking rugs in the
Methodist graveyard. I can never look a Methodist in the face again.
Just think what a scandal it will make!”

A scandal it assuredly did make, growing more scandalous as it spread,
until the over-harbour people heard that the manse children had not
only cleaned house and put out a washing on Sunday, but had wound up
with an afternoon picnic in the graveyard while the Methodist Sunday
School was going on. The only household which remained in blissful
ignorance of the terrible thing was the manse itself; on what Faith and
Una fondly believed to be Tuesday it rained again; for the next three
days it rained; nobody came near the manse; the manse folk went
nowhere; they might have waded through the misty Rainbow Valley up to
Ingleside, but all the Blythe family, save Susan and the doctor, were
away on a visit to Avonlea.

“This is the last of our bread,” said Faith, “and the ditto is done. If
Aunt Martha doesn’t get better soon _what_ will we do?”

“We can buy some bread in the village and there’s the codfish Mary
dried,” said Una. “But we don’t know how to cook it.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” laughed Faith. “You just boil it.”

Boil it they did; but as it did not occur to them to soak it beforehand
it was too salty to eat. That night they were very hungry; but by the
following day their troubles were over. Sunshine returned to the world;
Carl was well and Aunt Martha’s misery left her as suddenly as it had
come; the butcher called at the manse and chased famine away. To crown
all, the Blythes returned home, and that evening they and the manse
children and Mary Vance kept sunset tryst once more in Rainbow Valley,
where the daisies were floating upon the grass like spirits of the dew
and the bells on the Tree Lovers rang like fairy chimes in the scented
twilight.




CHAPTER XI.
A DREADFUL DISCOVERY


“Well, you kids have gone and done it now,” was Mary’s greeting, as she
joined them in the Valley. Miss Cornelia was up at Ingleside, holding
agonized conclave with Anne and Susan, and Mary hoped that the session
might be a long one, for it was all of two weeks since she had been
allowed to revel with her chums in the dear valley of rainbows.

“Done what?” demanded everybody but Walter, who was day-dreaming as
usual.

“It’s you manse young ones, I mean,” said Mary. “It was just awful of
you. _I_ wouldn’t have done such a thing for the world, and _I_ weren’t
brought up in a manse—weren’t brought up _anywhere_—just _come_ up.”

“What have _we_ done?” asked Faith blankly.

“Done! You’d _better_ ask! The talk is something terrible. I expect
it’s ruined your father in this congregation. He’ll never be able to
live it down, poor man! Everybody blames him for it, and that isn’t
fair. But nothing _is_ fair in this world. You ought to be ashamed of
yourselves.”

“What _have_ we done?” asked Una again, despairingly. Faith said
nothing, but her eyes flashed golden-brown scorn at Mary.

“Oh, don’t pretend innocence,” said Mary, witheringly. “Everybody knows
what you have done.”

“_I_ don’t,” interjected Jem Blythe indignantly. “Don’t let me catch
you making Una cry, Mary Vance. What are you talking about?”

“I s’pose you don’t know, since you’re just back from up west,” said
Mary, somewhat subdued. Jem could always manage her. “But everybody
else knows, you’d better believe.”

“Knows what?”

“That Faith and Una stayed home from Sunday School last Sunday and
_cleaned house_.”

“We didn’t,” cried Faith and Una, in passionate denial.

Mary looked haughtily at them.

“I didn’t suppose you’d deny it, after the way you’ve combed _me_ down
for lying,” she said. “What’s the good of saying you didn’t? Everybody
knows you _did_. Elder Clow and his wife saw you. Some people say it
will break up the church, but _I_ don’t go that far. You _are_ nice
ones.”

Nan Blythe stood up and put her arms around the dazed Faith and Una.

“They were nice enough to take you in and feed you and clothe you when
you were starving in Mr. Taylor’s barn, Mary Vance,” she said. “You are
_very_ grateful, I must say.”

“I _am_ grateful,” retorted Mary. “You’d know it if you’d heard me
standing up for Mr. Meredith through thick and thin. I’ve blistered my
tongue talking for him this week. I’ve said again and again that he
isn’t to blame if his young ones did clean house on Sunday. He was
away—and they knew better.”

“But we didn’t,” protested Una. “It was _Monday_ we cleaned house.
Wasn’t it, Faith?”

“Of course it was,” said Faith, with flashing eyes. “We went to Sunday
School in spite of the rain—and no one came—not even Elder Abraham, for
all his talk about fair-weather Christians.”

“It was Saturday it rained,” said Mary. “Sunday was as fine as silk. I
wasn’t at Sunday School because I had toothache, but every one else was
and they saw all your stuff out on the lawn. And Elder Abraham and Mrs.
Elder Abraham saw you shaking rugs in the graveyard.”

Una sat down among the daisies and began to cry.

“Look here,” said Jem resolutely, “this thing must be cleared up.
_Somebody_ has made a mistake. Sunday _was_ fine, Faith. How could you
have thought Saturday was Sunday?”

“Prayer-meeting was Thursday night,” cried Faith, “and Adam flew into
the soup-pot on Friday when Aunt Martha’s cat chased him, and spoiled
our dinner; and Saturday there was a snake in the cellar and Carl
caught it with a forked stick and carried it out, and Sunday it rained.
So there!”

“Prayer-meeting was Wednesday night,” said Mary. “Elder Baxter was to
lead and he couldn’t go Thursday night and it was changed to Wednesday.
You were just a day out, Faith Meredith, and you _did_ work on Sunday.”

Suddenly Faith burst into a peal of laughter.

“I suppose we did. What a joke!”

“It isn’t much of a joke for your father,” said Mary sourly.

“It’ll be all right when people find out it was just a mistake,” said
Faith carelessly. “We’ll explain.”

“You can explain till you’re black in the face,” said Mary, “but a lie
like that’ll travel faster’n further than you ever will. I’VE seen more
of the world than you and _I_ know. Besides, there are plenty of folks
won’t believe it was a mistake.”

“They will if I tell them,” said Faith.

“You can’t tell everybody,” said Mary. “No, I tell you you’ve disgraced
your father.”

Una’s evening was spoiled by this dire reflection, but Faith refused to
be made uncomfortable. Besides, she had a plan that would put
everything right. So she put the past with its mistake behind her and
gave herself over to enjoyment of the present. Jem went away to fish
and Walter came out of his reverie and proceeded to describe the woods
of heaven. Mary pricked up her ears and listened respectfully. Despite
her awe of Walter she revelled in his “book talk.” It always gave her a
delightful sensation. Walter had been reading his Coleridge that day,
and he pictured a heaven where

“There were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense bearing tree,
And there were forests ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.”

“I didn’t know there was any woods in heaven,” said Mary, with a long
breath. “I thought it was all streets—and streets—_and_ streets.”

“Of course there are woods,” said Nan. “Mother can’t live without trees
and I can’t, so what would be the use of going to heaven if there
weren’t any trees?”

“There are cities, too,” said the young dreamer, “splendid
cities—coloured just like the sunset, with sapphire towers and rainbow
domes. They are built of gold and diamonds—whole streets of diamonds,
flashing like the sun. In the squares there are crystal fountains
kissed by the light, and everywhere the asphodel blooms—the flower of
heaven.”

“Fancy!” said Mary. “I saw the main street in Charlottetown once and I
thought it was real grand, but I s’pose it’s nothing to heaven. Well,
it all sounds gorgeous the way you tell it, but won’t it be kind of
dull, too?”

“Oh, I guess we can have some fun when the angels’ backs are turned,”
said Faith comfortably.

“Heaven is _all_ fun,” declared Di.

“The Bible doesn’t say so,” cried Mary, who had read so much of the
Bible on Sunday afternoons under Miss Cornelia’s eye that she now
considered herself quite an authority on it.

“Mother says the Bible language is figurative,” said Nan.

“Does that mean that it isn’t true?” asked Mary hopefully.

“No—not exactly—but I think it means that heaven will be just like what
you’d like it to be.”

“I’d like it to be just like Rainbow Valley,” said Mary, “with all you
kids to gas and play with. _That’s_ good enough for me. Anyhow, we
can’t go to heaven till we’re dead and maybe not then, so what’s the
use of worrying? Here’s Jem with a string of trout and it’s my turn to
fry them.”

“We ought to know more about heaven than Walter does when we’re the
minister’s family,” said Una, as they walked home that night.

“We _know_ just as much, but Walter can _imagine_,” said Faith. “Mrs.
Elliott says he gets it from his mother.”

“I do wish we hadn’t made that mistake about Sunday,” sighed Una.

“Don’t worry over that. I’ve thought of a great plan to explain so that
everybody will know,” said Faith. “Just wait till to-morrow night.”




CHAPTER XII.
AN EXPLANATION AND A DARE


The Rev. Dr. Cooper preached in Glen St. Mary the next evening and the
Presbyterian Church was crowded with people from near and far. The
Reverend Doctor was reputed to be a very eloquent speaker; and, bearing
in mind the old dictum that a minister should take his best clothes to
the city and his best sermons to the country, he delivered a very
scholarly and impressive discourse. But when the folks went home that
night it was not of Dr. Cooper’s sermon they talked. They had
completely forgotten all about it.

Dr. Cooper had concluded with a fervent appeal, had wiped the
perspiration from his massive brow, had said “Let us pray” as he was
famed for saying it, and had duly prayed. There was a slight pause. In
Glen St. Mary church the old fashion of taking the collection after the
sermon instead of before still held—mainly because the Methodists had
adopted the new fashion first, and Miss Cornelia and Elder Clow would
not hear of following where Methodists had led. Charles Baxter and
Thomas Douglas, whose duty it was to pass the plates, were on the point
of rising to their feet. The organist had got out the music of her
anthem and the choir had cleared its throat. Suddenly Faith Meredith
rose in the manse pew, walked up to the pulpit platform, and faced the
amazed audience.

Miss Cornelia half rose in her seat and then sat down again. Her pew
was far back and it occurred to her that whatever Faith meant to do or
say would be half done or said before she could reach her. There was no
use making the exhibition worse than it had to be. With an anguished
glance at Mrs. Dr. Blythe, and another at Deacon Warren of the
Methodist Church, Miss Cornelia resigned herself to another scandal.

“If the child was only dressed decently itself,” she groaned in spirit.

Faith, having spilled ink on her good dress, had serenely put on an old
one of faded pink print. A caticornered rent in the skirt had been
darned with scarlet tracing cotton and the hem had been let down,
showing a bright strip of unfaded pink around the skirt. But Faith was
not thinking of her clothes at all. She was feeling suddenly nervous.
What had seemed easy in imagination was rather hard in reality.
Confronted by all those staring questioning eyes Faith’s courage almost
failed her. The lights were so bright, the silence so awesome. She
thought she could not speak after all. But she _must_—her father _must_
be cleared of suspicion. Only—the words would _not_ come.

Una’s little pearl-pure face gleamed up at her beseechingly from the
manse pew. The Blythe children were lost in amazement. Back under the
gallery Faith saw the sweet graciousness of Miss Rosemary West’s smile
and the amusement of Miss Ellen’s. But none of these helped her. It was
Bertie Shakespeare Drew who saved the situation. Bertie Shakespeare sat
in the front seat of the gallery and he made a derisive face at Faith.
Faith promptly made a dreadful one back at him, and, in her anger over
being grimaced at by Bertie Shakespeare, forgot her stage fright. She
found her voice and spoke out clearly and bravely.

“I want to explain something,” she said, “and I want to do it now
because everybody will hear it that heard the other. People are saying
that Una and I stayed home last Sunday and cleaned house instead of
going to Sunday School. Well, we did—but we didn’t mean to. We got
mixed up in the days of the week. It was all Elder Baxter’s
fault”—sensation in Baxter’s pew—“because he went and changed the
prayer-meeting to Wednesday night and then we thought Thursday was
Friday and so on till we thought Saturday was Sunday. Carl was laid up
sick and so was Aunt Martha, so they couldn’t put us right. We went to
Sunday School in all that rain on Saturday and nobody came. And then we
thought we’d clean house on Monday and stop old cats from talking about
how dirty the manse was”—general sensation all over the church—“and we
did. I shook the rugs in the Methodist graveyard because it was such a
convenient place and not because I meant to be disrespectful of the
dead. It isn’t the dead folks who have made the fuss over this—it’s the
living folks. And it isn’t right for any of you to blame my father for
this, because he was away and didn’t know, and anyhow we thought it was
Monday. He’s just the best father that ever lived in the world and we
love him with all our hearts.”

Faith’s bravado ebbed out in a sob. She ran down the steps and flashed
out of the side door of the church. There the friendly starlit, summer
night comforted her and the ache went out of her eyes and throat. She
felt very happy. The dreadful explanation was over and everybody knew
now that her father wasn’t to blame and that she and Una were not so
wicked as to have cleaned house knowingly on Sunday.

Inside the church people gazed blankly at each other, but Thomas
Douglas rose and walked up the aisle with a set face. _His_ duty was
clear; the collection must be taken if the skies fell. Taken it was;
the choir sang the anthem, with a dismal conviction that it fell
terribly flat, and Dr. Cooper gave out the concluding hymn and
pronounced the benediction with considerably less unction than usual.
The Reverend Doctor had a sense of humour and Faith’s performance
tickled him. Besides, John Meredith was well known in Presbyterian
circles.

Mr. Meredith returned home the next afternoon, but before his coming
Faith contrived to scandalize Glen St. Mary again. In the reaction from
Sunday evening’s intensity and strain she was especially full of what
Miss Cornelia would have called “devilment” on Monday. This led her to
dare Walter Blythe to ride through Main Street on a pig, while she rode
another one.

The pigs in question were two tall, lank animals, supposed to belong to
Bertie Shakespeare Drew’s father, which had been haunting the roadside
by the manse for a couple of weeks. Walter did not want to ride a pig
through Glen St. Mary, but whatever Faith Meredith dared him to do must
be done. They tore down the hill and through the village, Faith bent
double with laughter over her terrified courser, Walter crimson with
shame. They tore past the minister himself, just coming home from the
station; he, being a little less dreamy and abstracted than usual—owing
to having had a talk on the train with Miss Cornelia who always wakened
him up temporarily—noticed them, and thought he really must speak to
Faith about it and tell her that such conduct was not seemly. But he
had forgotten the trifling incident by the time he reached home. They
passed Mrs. Alec Davis, who shrieked in horror, and they passed Miss
Rosemary West who laughed and sighed. Finally, just before the pigs
swooped into Bertie Shakespeare Drew’s back yard, never to emerge
therefrom again, so great had been the shock to their nerves—Faith and
Walter jumped off, as Dr. and Mrs. Blythe drove swiftly by.

“So that is how you bring up your boys,” said Gilbert with mock
severity.

“Perhaps I do spoil them a little,” said Anne contritely, “but, oh,
Gilbert, when I think of my own childhood before I came to Green Gables
I haven’t the heart to be very strict. How hungry for love and fun I
was—an unloved little drudge with never a chance to play! They do have
such good times with the manse children.”

“What about the poor pigs?” asked Gilbert.

Anne tried to look sober and failed.

“Do you really think it hurt them?” she said. “I don’t think anything
could hurt those animals. They’ve been the plague of the neighbourhood
this summer and the Drews _won’t_ shut them up. But I’ll talk to
Walter—if I can keep from laughing when I do it.”

Miss Cornelia came up to Ingleside that evening to relieve her feelings
over Sunday night. To her surprise she found that Anne did not view
Faith’s performance in quite the same light as she did.

“I thought there was something brave and pathetic in her getting up
there before that churchful of people, to confess,” she said. “You
could see she was frightened to death—yet she was bound to clear her
father. I loved her for it.”

“Oh, of course, the poor child meant well,” sighed Miss Cornelia, “but
just the same it was a terrible thing to do, and is making more talk
than the house-cleaning on Sunday. _That_ had begun to die away, and
this has started it all up again. Rosemary West is like you—she said
last night as she left the church that it was a plucky thing for Faith
to do, but it made her feel sorry for the child, too. Miss Ellen
thought it all a good joke, and said she hadn’t had as much fun in
church for years. Of course _they_ don’t care—they are Episcopalians.
But we Presbyterians feel it. And there were so many hotel people there
that night and scores of Methodists. Mrs. Leander Crawford cried, she
felt so bad. And Mrs. Alec Davis said the little hussy ought to be
spanked.”

“Mrs. Leander Crawford is always crying in church,” said Susan
contemptuously. “She cries over every affecting thing the minister
says. But you do not often see her name on a subscription list, Mrs.
Dr. dear. Tears come cheaper. She tried to talk to me one day about
Aunt Martha being such a dirty housekeeper; and I wanted to say, ‘Every
one knows that _you_ have been seen mixing up cakes in the kitchen
wash-pan, Mrs. Leander Crawford!’ But I did not say it, Mrs. Dr. dear,
because I have too much respect for myself to condescend to argue with
the likes of her. But I could tell worse things than _that_ of Mrs.
Leander Crawford, if I was disposed to gossip. And as for Mrs. Alec
Davis, if she had said that to me, Mrs. Dr. dear, do you know what I
would have said? I would have said, ‘I have no doubt you would like to
spank Faith, Mrs. Davis, but you will never have the chance to spank a
minister’s daughter either in this world or in that which is to come.’”

“If poor Faith had only been decently dressed,” lamented Miss Cornelia
again, “it wouldn’t have been quite that bad. But that dress looked
dreadful, as she stood there upon the platform.”

“It was clean, though, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan. “They _are_ clean
children. They may be very heedless and reckless, Mrs. Dr. dear, and I
am not saying they are not, but they _never_ forget to wash behind
their ears.”

“The idea of Faith forgetting what day was Sunday,” persisted Miss
Cornelia. “She will grow up just as careless and impractical as her
father, believe _me_. I suppose Carl would have known better if he
hadn’t been sick. I don’t know what was wrong with him, but I think it
very likely he had been eating those blueberries that grew in the
graveyard. No wonder they made him sick. If I was a Methodist I’d try
to keep my graveyard cleaned up at least.”

“I am of the opinion that Carl only ate the sours that grow on the
dyke,” said Susan hopefully. “I do not think _any_ minister’s son would
eat blueberries that grew on the graves of dead people. You know it
would not be so bad, Mrs. Dr. dear, to eat things that grew on the
dyke.”

“The worst of last night’s performance was the face Faith made made at
somebody in the congregation before she started in,” said Miss
Cornelia. “Elder Clow declares she made it at him. And _did_ you hear
that she was seen riding on a pig to-day?”

“I saw her. Walter was with her. I gave him a little—a _very_
little—scolding about it. He did not say much, but he gave me the
impression that it had been his idea and that Faith was not to blame.”

“I do not not believe _that_, Mrs. Dr. dear,” cried Susan, up in arms.
“That is just Walter’s way—to take the blame on himself. But you know
as well as I do, Mrs. Dr. dear, that that blessed child would never
have thought of riding on a pig, even if he does write poetry.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt the notion was hatched in Faith Meredith’s
brain,” said Miss Cornelia. “And I don’t say that I’m sorry that Amos
Drew’s old pigs did get their come-uppance for once. But the minister’s
daughter!”

“_And_ the doctor’s son!” said Anne, mimicking Miss Cornelia’s tone.
Then she laughed. “Dear Miss Cornelia, they’re only little children.
And you _know_ they’ve never yet done anything bad—they’re just
heedless and impulsive—as I was myself once. They’ll grow sedate and
sober—as I’ve done.”

Miss Cornelia laughed, too.

“There are times, Anne dearie, when I know by your eyes that _your_
soberness is put on like a garment and you’re really aching to do
something wild and young again. Well, I feel encouraged. Somehow, a
talk with you always does have that effect on me. Now, when I go to see
Barbara Samson, it’s just the opposite. She makes me feel that
everything’s wrong and always will be. But of course living all your
life with a man like Joe Samson wouldn’t be exactly cheering.”

“It is a very strange thing to think that she married Joe Samson after
all her chances,” remarked Susan. “She was much sought after when she
was a girl. She used to boast to me that she had twenty-one beaus and
Mr. Pethick.”

“What was Mr. Pethick?”

“Well, he was a sort of hanger-on, Mrs. Dr. dear, but you could not
exactly call him a beau. He did not really have any intentions.
Twenty-one beaus—and me that never had one! But Barbara went through
the woods and picked up the crooked stick after all. And yet they say
her husband can make better baking powder biscuits than she can, and
she always gets him to make them when company comes to tea.”

“Which reminds _me_ that I have company coming to tea to-morrow and I
must go home and set my bread,” said Miss Cornelia. “Mary said she
could set it and no doubt she could. But while I live and move and have
my being _I_ set my own bread, believe me.”

“How is Mary getting on?” asked Anne.

“I’ve no fault to find with Mary,” said Miss Cornelia rather gloomily.
“She’s getting some flesh on her bones and she’s clean and
respectful—though there’s more in her than _I_ can fathom. She’s a sly
puss. If you dug for a thousand years you couldn’t get to the bottom of
that child’s mind, believe _me!_ As for work, I never saw anything like
her. She _eats_ it up. Mrs. Wiley may have been cruel to her, but folks
needn’t say she made Mary work. Mary’s a born worker. Sometimes I
wonder which will wear out first—her legs or her tongue. I don’t have
enough to do to keep me out of mischief these days. I’ll be real glad
when school opens, for then I’ll have something to do again. Mary
doesn’t want to go to school, but I put my foot down and said that go
she must. I shall _not_ have the Methodists saying that I kept her out
of school while I lolled in idleness.”




CHAPTER XIII.
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL


There was a little unfailing spring, always icy cold and crystal pure,
in a certain birch-screened hollow of Rainbow Valley in the lower
corner near the marsh. Not a great many people knew of its existence.
The manse and Ingleside children knew, of course, as they knew
everything else about the magic valley. Occasionally they went there to
get a drink, and it figured in many of their plays as a fountain of old
romance. Anne knew of it and loved it because it somehow reminded her
of the beloved Dryad’s Bubble at Green Gables. Rosemary West knew of
it; it was her fountain of romance, too. Eighteen years ago she had sat
behind it one spring twilight and heard young Martin Crawford stammer
out a confession of fervent, boyish love. She had whispered her own
secret in return, and they had kissed and promised by the wild wood
spring. They had never stood together by it again—Martin had sailed on
his fatal voyage soon after; but to Rosemary West it was always a
sacred spot, hallowed by that immortal hour of youth and love. Whenever
she passed near it she turned aside to hold a secret tryst with an old
dream—a dream from which the pain had long gone, leaving only its
unforgettable sweetness.

The spring was a hidden thing. You might have passed within ten feet of
it and never have suspected its existence. Two generations past a huge
old pine had fallen almost across it. Nothing was left of the tree but
its crumbling trunk out of which the ferns grew thickly, making a green
roof and a lacy screen for the water. A maple-tree grew beside it with
a curiously gnarled and twisted trunk, creeping along the ground for a
little way before shooting up into the air, and so forming a quaint
seat; and September had flung a scarf of pale smoke-blue asters around
the hollow.

John Meredith, taking the cross-lots road through Rainbow Valley on his
way home from some pastoral visitations around the Harbour head one
evening, turned aside to drink of the little spring. Walter Blythe had
shown it to him one afternoon only a few days before, and they had had
a long talk together on the maple seat. John Meredith, under all his
shyness and aloofness, had the heart of a boy. He had been called Jack
in his youth, though nobody in Glen St. Mary would ever have believed
it. Walter and he had taken to each other and had talked unreservedly.
Mr. Meredith found his way into some sealed and sacred chambers of the
lad’s soul wherein not even Di had ever looked. They were to be chums
from that friendly hour and Walter knew that he would never be
frightened of the minister again.

“I never believed before that it was possible to get really acquainted
with a minister,” he told his mother that night.

John Meredith drank from his slender white hand, whose grip of steel
always surprised people who were unacquainted with it, and then sat
down on the maple seat. He was in no hurry to go home; this was a
beautiful spot and he was mentally weary after a round of rather
uninspiring conversations with many good and stupid people. The moon
was rising. Rainbow Valley was wind-haunted and star-sentinelled only
where he was, but afar from the upper end came the gay notes of
children’s laughter and voices.

The ethereal beauty of the asters in the moonlight, the glimmer of the
little spring, the soft croon of the brook, the wavering grace of the
brackens all wove a white magic round John Meredith. He forgot
congregational worries and spiritual problems; the years slipped away
from him; he was a young divinity student again and the roses of June
were blooming red and fragrant on the dark, queenly head of his
Cecilia. He sat there and dreamed like any boy. And it was at this
propitious moment that Rosemary West stepped aside from the by-path and
stood beside him in that dangerous, spell-weaving place. John Meredith
stood up as she came in and saw her—_really_ saw her—for the first
time.

He had met her in his church once or twice and shaken hands with her
abstractedly as he did with anyone he happened to encounter on his way
down the aisle. He had never met her elsewhere, for the Wests were
Episcopalians, with church affinities in Lowbridge, and no occasion for
calling upon them had ever arisen. Before to-night, if anyone had asked
John Meredith what Rosemary West looked like he would not have had the
slightest notion. But he was never to forget her, as she appeared to
him in the glamour of kind moonlight by the spring.

She was certainly not in the least like Cecilia, who had always been
his ideal of womanly beauty. Cecilia had been small and dark and
vivacious—Rosemary West was tall and fair and placid, yet John Meredith
thought he had never seen so beautiful a woman.

She was bareheaded and her golden hair—hair of a warm gold, “molasses
taffy” colour as Di Blythe had said—was pinned in sleek, close coils
over her head; she had large, tranquil, blue eyes that always seemed
full of friendliness, a high white forehead and a finely shaped face.

Rosemary West was always called a “sweet woman.” She was so sweet that
even her high-bred, stately air had never gained for her the reputation
of being “stuck-up,” which it would inevitably have done in the case of
anyone else in Glen St. Mary. Life had taught her to be brave, to be
patient, to love, to forgive. She had watched the ship on which her
lover went sailing out of Four Winds Harbour into the sunset. But,
though she watched long, she had never seen it coming sailing back.
That vigil had taken girlhood from her eyes, yet she kept her youth to
a marvellous degree. Perhaps this was because she always seemed to
preserve that attitude of delighted surprise towards life which most of
us leave behind in childhood—an attitude which not only made Rosemary
herself seem young, but flung a pleasing illusion of youth over the
consciousness of every one who talked to her.

John Meredith was startled by her loveliness and Rosemary was startled
by his presence. She had never thought she would find anyone by that
remote spring, least of all the recluse of Glen St. Mary manse. She
almost dropped the heavy armful of books she was carrying home from the
Glen lending library, and then, to cover her confusion, she told one of
those small fibs which even the best of women do tell at times.

“I—I came for a drink,” she said, stammering a little, in answer to Mr.
Meredith’s grave “good evening, Miss West.” She felt that she was an
unpardonable goose and she longed to shake herself. But John Meredith
was not a vain man and he knew she would likely have been as much
startled had she met old Elder Clow in that unexpected fashion. Her
confusion put him at ease and he forgot to be shy; besides, even the
shyest of men can sometimes be quite audacious in moonlight.

“Let me get you a cup,” he said smiling. There was a cup near by, if he
had only known it, a cracked, handleless blue cup secreted under the
maple by the Rainbow Valley children; but he did not know it, so he
stepped out to one of the birch-trees and stripped a bit of its white
skin away. Deftly he fashioned this into a three-cornered cup, filled
it from the spring, and handed it to Rosemary.

Rosemary took it and drank every drop to punish herself for her fib,
for she was not in the least thirsty, and to drink a fairly large
cupful of water when you are not thirsty is somewhat of an ordeal. Yet
the memory of that draught was to be very pleasant to Rosemary. In
after years it seemed to her that there was something sacramental about
it. Perhaps this was because of what the minister did when she handed
him back the cup. He stooped again and filled it and drank of it
himself. It was only by accident that he put his lips just where
Rosemary had put hers, and Rosemary knew it. Nevertheless, it had a
curious significance for her. They two had drunk of the same cup. She
remembered idly that an old aunt of hers used to say that when two
people did this their after-lives would be linked in some fashion,
whether for good or ill.

John Meredith held the cup uncertainly. He did not know what to do with
it. The logical thing would have been to toss it away, but somehow he
was disinclined to do this. Rosemary held out her hand for it.

“Will you let me have it?” she said. “You made it so knackily. I never
saw anyone make a birch cup so since my little brother used to make
them long ago—before he died.”

“I learned how to make them when _I_ was a boy, camping out one summer.
An old hunter taught me,” said Mr. Meredith. “Let me carry your books,
Miss West.”

Rosemary was startled into another fib and said oh, they were not
heavy. But the minister took them from her with quite a masterful air
and they walked away together. It was the first time Rosemary had stood
by the valley spring without thinking of Martin Crawford. The mystic
tryst had been broken.

The little by-path wound around the marsh and then struck up the long
wooded hill on the top of which Rosemary lived. Beyond, through the
trees, they could see the moonlight shining across the level summer
fields. But the little path was shadowy and narrow. Trees crowded over
it, and trees are never quite as friendly to human beings after
nightfall as they are in daylight. They wrap themselves away from us.
They whisper and plot furtively. If they reach out a hand to us it has
a hostile, tentative touch. People walking amid trees after night
always draw closer together instinctively and involuntarily, making an
alliance, physical and mental, against certain alien powers around
them. Rosemary’s dress brushed against John Meredith as they walked.
Not even an absent-minded minister, who was after all a young man
still, though he firmly believed he had outlived romance, could be
insensible to the charm of the night and the path and the companion.

It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine
we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and
showing us yet another chapter. These two people each thought their
hearts belonged irrevocably to the past; but they both found their walk
up that hill very pleasant. Rosemary thought the Glen minister was by
no means as shy and tongue-tied as he had been represented. He seemed
to find no difficulty in talking easily and freely. Glen housewives
would have been amazed had they heard him. But then so many Glen
housewives talked only gossip and the price of eggs, and John Meredith
was not interested in either. He talked to Rosemary of books and music
and wide-world doings and something of his own history, and found that
she could understand and respond. Rosemary, it appeared, possessed a
book which Mr. Meredith had not read and wished to read. She offered to
lend it to him and when they reached the old homestead on the hill he
went in to get it.

The house itself was an old-fashioned gray one, hung with vines,
through which the light in the sitting-room winked in friendly fashion.
It looked down the Glen, over the harbour, silvered in the moonlight,
to the sand-dunes and the moaning ocean. They walked in through a
garden that always seemed to smell of roses, even when no roses were in
bloom. There was a sisterhood of lilies at the gate and a ribbon of
asters on either side of the broad walk, and a lacery of fir trees on
the hill’s edge beyond the house.

“You have the whole world at your doorstep here,” said John Meredith,
with a long breath. “What a view—what an outlook! At times I feel
stifled down there in the Glen. You can breathe up here.”

“It is calm to-night,” said Rosemary laughing. “If there were a wind it
would blow your breath away. We get ‘a’ the airts the wind can blow’ up
here. This place should be called Four Winds instead of the Harbour.”

“I like wind,” he said. “A day when there is no wind seems to me
_dead_. A windy day wakes me up.” He gave a conscious laugh. “On a calm
day I fall into day dreams. No doubt you know my reputation, Miss West.
If I cut you dead the next time we meet don’t put it down to bad
manners. Please understand that it is only abstraction and forgive
me—and speak to me.”

They found Ellen West in the sitting room when they went in. She laid
her glasses down on the book she had been reading and looked at them in
amazement tinctured with something else. But she shook hands amiably
with Mr. Meredith and he sat down and talked to her, while Rosemary
hunted out his book.

Ellen West was ten years older than Rosemary, and so different from her
that it was hard to believe they were sisters. She was dark and
massive, with black hair, thick, black eyebrows and eyes of the clear,
slaty blue of the gulf water in a north wind. She had a rather stern,
forbidding look, but she was in reality very jolly, with a hearty,
gurgling laugh and a deep, mellow, pleasant voice with a suggestion of
masculinity about it. She had once remarked to Rosemary that she would
really like to have a talk with that Presbyterian minister at the Glen,
to see if he could find a word to say to a woman when he was cornered.
She had her chance now and she tackled him on world politics. Miss
Ellen, who was a great reader, had been devouring a book on the Kaiser
of Germany, and she demanded Mr. Meredith’s opinion of him.

“A dangerous man,” was his answer.

“I believe you!” Miss Ellen nodded. “Mark my words, Mr. Meredith, that
man is going to fight somebody yet. He’s _aching_ to. He is going to
set the world on fire.”

“If you mean that he will wantonly precipitate a great war I hardly
think so,” said Mr. Meredith. “The day has gone by for that sort of
thing.”

“Bless you, it hasn’t,” rumbled Ellen. “The day never goes by for men
and nations to make asses of themselves and take to the fists. The
millenniun isn’t _that_ near, Mr. Meredith, and _you_ don’t think it is
any more than I do. As for this Kaiser, mark my words, he is going to
make a heap of trouble”—and Miss Ellen prodded her book emphatically
with her long finger. “Yes, if he isn’t nipped in the bud he’s going to
make trouble. _We’ll_ live to see it—you and I will live to see it, Mr.
Meredith. And who is going to nip him? England should, but she won’t.
_Who_ is going to nip him? Tell me that, Mr. Meredith.”

Mr. Meredith couldn’t tell her, but they plunged into a discussion of
German militarism that lasted long after Rosemary had found the book.
Rosemary said nothing, but sat in a little rocker behind Ellen and
stroked an important black cat meditatively. John Meredith hunted big
game in Europe with Ellen, but he looked oftener at Rosemary than at
Ellen, and Ellen noticed it. After Rosemary had gone to the door with
him and come back Ellen rose and looked at her accusingly.

“Rosemary West, that man has a notion of courting you.”

Rosemary quivered. Ellen’s speech was like a blow to her. It rubbed all
the bloom off the pleasant evening. But she would not let Ellen see how
it hurt her.

“Nonsense,” she said, and laughed, a little too carelessly. “You see a
beau for me in every bush, Ellen. Why he told me all about his wife
to-night—how much she was to him—how empty her death had left the
world.”

“Well, that may be _his_ way of courting,” retorted Ellen. “Men have
all kinds of ways, I understand. But don’t forget your promise,
Rosemary.”

“There is no need of my either forgetting or remembering it,” said
Rosemary, a little wearily. “_You_ forget that I’m an old maid, Ellen.
It is only your sisterly delusion that I am still young and blooming
and dangerous. Mr. Meredith merely wants to be a friend—if he wants
that much itself. He’ll forget us both long before he gets back to the
manse.”

“I’ve no objection to your being friends with him,” conceded Ellen,
“but it musn’t go beyond friendship, remember. I’m always suspicious of
widowers. They are not given to romantic ideas about friendship.
They’re apt to mean business. As for this Presbyterian man, what do
they call him shy for? He’s not a bit shy, though he may be
absent-minded—so absent-minded that he forgot to say goodnight to _me_
when you started to go to the door with him. He’s got brains, too.
There’s so few men round here that can talk sense to a body. I’ve
enjoyed the evening. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of him. But no
philandering, Rosemary, mind you—no philandering.”

Rosemary was quite used to being warned by Ellen from philandering if
she so much as talked five minutes to any marriageable man under eighty
or over eighteen. She had always laughed at the warning with unfeigned
amusement. This time it did not amuse her—it irritated her a little.
Who wanted to philander?

“Don’t be such a goose, Ellen,” she said with unaccustomed shortness as
she took her lamp. She went upstairs without saying goodnight.

Ellen shook her head dubiously and looked at the black cat.

“What is she so cross about, St. George?” she asked. “When you howl
you’re hit, I’ve always heard, George. But she promised, Saint—she
promised, and we Wests always keep our word. So it won’t matter if he
does want to philander, George. She promised. I won’t worry.”

Upstairs, in her room, Rosemary sat for a long while looking out of the
window across the moonlit garden to the distant, shining harbour. She
felt vaguely upset and unsettled. She was suddenly tired of outworn
dreams. And in the garden the petals of the last red rose were
scattered by a sudden little wind. Summer was over—it was autumn.




CHAPTER XIV.
MRS. ALEC DAVIS MAKES A CALL


John Meredith walked slowly home. At first he thought a little about
Rosemary, but by the time he reached Rainbow Valley he had forgotten
all about her and was meditating on a point regarding German theology
which Ellen had raised. He passed through Rainbow Valley and knew it
not. The charm of Rainbow Valley had no potency against German
theology. When he reached the manse he went to his study and took down
a bulky volume in order to see which had been right, he or Ellen. He
remained immersed in its mazes until dawn, struck a new trail of
speculation and pursued it like a sleuth hound for the next week,
utterly lost to the world, his parish and his family. He read day and
night; he forgot to go to his meals when Una was not there to drag him
to them; he never thought about Rosemary or Ellen again. Old Mrs.
Marshall, over-harbour, was very ill and sent for him, but the message
lay unheeded on his desk and gathered dust. Mrs. Marshall recovered but
never forgave him. A young couple came to the manse to be married and
Mr. Meredith, with unbrushed hair, in carpet slippers and faded
dressing gown, married them. To be sure, he began by reading the
funeral service to them and got along as far as “ashes to ashes and
dust to dust” before he vaguely suspected that something was wrong.

“Dear me,” he said absently, “that is strange—very strange.”

The bride, who was very nervous, began to cry. The bridegroom, who was
not in the least nervous, giggled.

“Please, sir, I think you’re burying us instead of marrying us,” he
said.

“Excuse me,” said Mr. Meredith, as it it did not matter much. He turned
up the marriage service and got through with it, but the bride never
felt quite properly married for the rest of her life.

He forgot his prayer-meeting again—but that did not matter, for it was
a wet night and nobody came. He might even have forgotten his Sunday
service if it had not been for Mrs. Alec Davis. Aunt Martha came in on
Saturday afternoon and told him that Mrs. Davis was in the parlour and
wanted to see him. Mr. Meredith sighed. Mrs. Davis was the only woman
in Glen St. Mary church whom he positively detested. Unfortunately, she
was also the richest, and his board of managers had warned Mr. Meredith
against offending her. Mr. Meredith seldom thought of such a worldly
matter as his stipend; but the managers were more practical. Also, they
were astute. Without mentioning money, they contrived to instil into
Mr. Meredith’s mind a conviction that he should not offend Mrs. Davis.
Otherwise, he would likely have forgotten all about her as soon as Aunt
Martha had gone out. As it was, he turned down his Ewald with a feeling
of annoyance and went across the hall to the parlour.

Mrs. Davis was sitting on the sofa, looking about her with an air of
scornful disapproval.

What a scandalous room! There were no curtains on the window. Mrs.
Davis did not know that Faith and Una had taken them down the day
before to use as court trains in one of their plays and had forgotten
to put them up again, but she could not have accused those windows more
fiercely if she had known. The blinds were cracked and torn. The
pictures on the walls were crooked; the rugs were awry; the vases were
full of faded flowers; the dust lay in heaps—literally in heaps.

“What are we coming to?” Mrs. Davis asked herself, and then primmed up
her unbeautiful mouth.

Jerry and Carl had been whooping and sliding down the banisters as she
came through the hall. They did not see her and continued whooping and
sliding, and Mrs. Davis was convinced they did it on purpose. Faith’s
pet rooster ambled through the hall, stood in the parlour doorway and
looked at her. Not liking her looks, he did not venture in. Mrs. Davis
gave a scornful sniff. A pretty manse, indeed, where roosters paraded
the halls and stared people out of countenance.

“Shoo, there,” commanded Mrs. Davis, poking her flounced,
changeable-silk parasol at him.

Adam shooed. He was a wise rooster and Mrs. Davis had wrung the necks
of so many roosters with her own fair hands in the course of her fifty
years that an air of the executioner seemed to hang around her. Adam
scuttled through the hall as the minister came in.

Mr. Meredith still wore slippers and dressing gown, and his dark hair
still fell in uncared-for locks over his high brow. But he looked the
gentleman he was; and Mrs. Alec Davis, in her silk dress and beplumed
bonnet, and kid gloves and gold chain looked the vulgar, coarse-souled
woman she was. Each felt the antagonisn of the other’s personality. Mr.
Meredith shrank, but Mrs. Davis girded up her loins for the fray. She
had come to the manse to propose a certain thing to the minister and
she meant to lose no time in proposing it. She was going to do him a
favour—a great favour—and the sooner he was made aware of it the
better. She had been thinking about it all summer and had come to a
decision at last. This was all that mattered, Mrs. Davis thought. When
she decided a thing it _was_ decided. Nobody else had any say in the
matter. That had always been her attitude. When she had made her mind
up to marry Alec Davis she had married him and that was the end to it.
Alec had never known how it happened, but what odds? So in this
case—Mrs. Davis had arranged everything to her own satisfaction. Now it
only remained to inform Mr. Meredith.

“Will you please shut that door?” said Mrs. Davis, unprimming her mouth
slightly to say it, but speaking with asperity. “I have something
important to say, and I can’t say it with that racket in the hall.”

Mr. Meredith shut the door meekly. Then he sat down before Mrs. Davis.
He was not wholly aware of her yet. His mind was still wrestling with
Ewald’s arguments. Mrs. Davis sensed this detachment and it annoyed
her.

“I have come to tell you, Mr. Meredith,” she said aggressively, “that I
have decided to adopt Una.”

“To—adopt—Una!” Mr. Meredith gazed at her blankly, not understanding in
the least.

“Yes. I’ve been thinking it over for some time. I have often thought of
adopting a child, since my husband’s death. But it seemed so hard to
get a suitable one. It is very few children I would want to take into
_my_ home. I wouldn’t think of taking a home child—some outcast of the
slums in all probability. And there is hardly ever any other child to
be got. One of the fishermen down at the harbour died last fall and
left six youngsters. They tried to get me to take one, but I soon gave
them to understand that I had no idea of adopting trash like that.
Their grandfather stole a horse. Besides, they were all boys and I
wanted a girl—a quiet, obedient girl that I could train up to be a
lady. Una will suit me exactly. She would be a nice little thing if she
was properly looked after—so different from Faith. I would never dream
of adopting Faith. But I’ll take Una and I’ll give her a good home, and
up-bringing, Mr. Meredith, and if she behaves herself I’ll leave her
all my money when I die. Not one of my own relatives shall have a cent
of it in any case, I’m determined on that. It was the idea of
aggravating them that set me to thinking of adopting a child as much as
anything in the first place. Una shall be well dressed and educated and
trained, Mr. Meredith, and I shall give her music and painting lessons
and treat her as if she was my own.”

Mr. Meredith was wide enough awake by this time. There was a faint
flush in his pale cheek and a dangerous light in his fine dark eyes.
Was this woman, whose vulgarity and consciousness of money oozed out of
her at every pore, actually asking him to give her Una—his dear little
wistful Una with Cecilia’s own dark-blue eyes—the child whom the dying
mother had clasped to her heart after the other children had been led
weeping from the room. Cecilia had clung to her baby until the gates of
death had shut between them. She had looked over the little dark head
to her husband.

“Take good care of her, John,” she had entreated. “She is so small—and
sensitive. The others can fight their way—but the world will hurt
_her_. Oh, John, I don’t know what you and she are going to do. You
both need me so much. But keep her close to you—keep her close to you.”

These had been almost her last words except a few unforgettable ones
for him alone. And it was this child whom Mrs. Davis had coolly
announced her intention of taking from him. He sat up straight and
looked at Mrs. Davis. In spite of the worn dressing gown and the frayed
slippers there was something about him that made Mrs. Davis feel a
little of the old reverence for “the cloth” in which she had been
brought up. After all, there _was_ a certain divinity hedging a
minister, even a poor, unworldly, abstracted one.

“I thank you for your kind intentions, Mrs. Davis,” said Mr. Meredith
with a gentle, final, quite awful courtesy, “but I cannot give you my
child.”

Mrs. Davis looked blank. She had never dreamed of his refusing.

“Why, Mr. Meredith,” she said in astonishment. “You must be cr—you
can’t mean it. You must think it over—think of all the advantages I can
give her.”

“There is no need to think it over, Mrs. Davis. It is entirely out of
the question. All the worldly advantages it is in your power to bestow
on her could not compensate for the loss of a father’s love and care. I
thank you again—but it is not to be thought of.”

Disappointment angered Mrs. Davis beyond the power of old habit to
control. Her broad red face turned purple and her voice trembled.

“I thought you’d be only too glad to let me have her,” she sneered.

“Why did you think that?” asked Mr. Meredith quietly.

“Because nobody ever supposed you cared anything about any of your
children,” retorted Mrs. Davis contemptuously. “You neglect them
scandalously. It is the talk of the place. They aren’t fed and dressed
properly, and they’re not trained at all. They have no more manners
than a pack of wild Indians. You never think of doing your duty as a
father. You let a stray child come here among them for a fortnight and
never took any notice of her—a child that swore like a trooper I’m
told. _You_ wouldn’t have cared if they’d caught small-pox from her.
And Faith made an exhibition of herself getting up in preaching and
making that speech! And she rid a pig down the street—under your very
eyes I understand. The way they act is past belief and you never lift a
finger to stop them or try to teach them anything. And now when I offer
one of them a good home and good prospects you refuse it and insult me.
A pretty father you, to talk of loving and caring for your children!”

“That will do, woman!” said Mr. Meredith. He stood up and looked at
Mrs. Davis with eyes that made her quail. “That will do,” he repeated.
“I desire to hear no more, Mrs. Davis. You have said too much. It may
be that I have been remiss in some respects in my duty as a parent, but
it is not for you to remind me of it in such terms as you have used.
Let us say good afternoon.”

Mrs. Davis did not say anything half so amiable as good afternoon, but
she took her departure. As she swept past the minister a large, plump
toad, which Carl had secreted under the lounge, hopped out almost under
her feet. Mrs. Davis gave a shriek and in trying to avoid treading on
the awful thing, lost her balance and her parasol. She did not exactly
fall, but she staggered and reeled across the room in a very
undignified fashion and brought up against the door with a thud that
jarred her from head to foot. Mr. Meredith, who had not seen the toad,
wondered if she had been attacked with some kind of apoplectic or
paralytic seizure, and ran in alarm to her assistance. But Mrs. Davis,
recovering her feet, waved him back furiously.

“Don’t you dare to touch me,” she almost shouted. “This is some more of
your children’s doings, I suppose. This is no fit place for a decent
woman. Give me my umbrella and let me go. I’ll never darken the doors
of your manse or your church again.”

Mr. Meredith picked up the gorgeous parasol meekly enough and gave it
to her. Mrs. Davis seized it and marched out. Jerry and Carl had given
up banister sliding and were sitting on the edge of the veranda with
Faith. Unfortunately, all three were singing at the tops of their
healthy young voices “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night.”
Mrs. Davis believed the song was meant for her and her only. She
stopped and shook her parasol at them.

“Your father is a fool,” she said, “and you are three young varmints
that ought to be whipped within an inch of your lives.”

“He isn’t,” cried Faith. “We’re not,” cried the boys. But Mrs. Davis
was gone.

“Goodness, isn’t she mad!” said Jerry. “And what is a ‘varmint’
anyhow?”

John Meredith paced up and down the parlour for a few minutes; then he
went back to his study and sat down. But he did not return to his
German theology. He was too grievously disturbed for that. Mrs. Davis
had wakened him up with a vengeance. _Was_ he such a remiss, careless
father as she had accused him of being? _Had_ he so scandalously
neglected the bodily and spiritual welfare of the four little
motherless creatures dependent on him? _Were_ his people talking of it
as harshly as Mrs. Davis had declared? It must be so, since Mrs. Davis
had come to ask for Una in the full and confident belief that he would
hand the child over to her as unconcernedly and gladly as one might
hand over a strayed, unwelcome kitten. And, if so, what then?

John Meredith groaned and resumed his pacing up and down the dusty,
disordered room. What could he do? He loved his children as deeply as
any father could and he knew, past the power of Mrs. Davis or any of
her ilk, to disturb his conviction, that they loved him devotedly. But
_was_ he fit to have charge of them? He knew—none better—his weaknesses
and limitations. What was needed was a good woman’s presence and
influence and common sense. But how could that be arranged? Even were
he able to get such a housekeeper it would cut Aunt Martha to the
quick. She believed she could still do all that was meet and necessary.
He could not so hurt and insult the poor old woman who had been so kind
to him and his. How devoted she had been to Cecilia! And Cecilia had
asked him to be very considerate of Aunt Martha. To be sure, he
suddenly remembered that Aunt Martha had once hinted that he ought to
marry again. He felt she would not resent a wife as she would a
housekeeper. But that was out of the question. He did not wish to
marry—he did not and could not care for anyone. Then what could he do?
It suddenly occurred to him that he would go over to Ingleside and talk
over his difficulties with Mrs. Blythe. Mrs. Blythe was one of the few
women he never felt shy or tongue-tied with. She was always so
sympathetic and refreshing. It might be that she could suggest some
solution of his problems. And even if she could not Mr. Meredith felt
that he needed a little decent human companionship after his dose of
Mrs. Davis—something to take the taste of her out of his soul.

He dressed hurriedly and ate his supper less abstractedly than usual.
It occurred to him that it was a poor meal. He looked at his children;
they were rosy and healthy looking enough—except Una, and she had never
been very strong even when her mother was alive. They were all laughing
and talking—certainly they seemed happy. Carl was especially happy
because he had two most beautiful spiders crawling around his supper
plate. Their voices were pleasant, their manners did not seem bad, they
were considerate of and gentle to one another. Yet Mrs. Davis had said
their behaviour was the talk of the congregation.

As Mr. Meredith went through his gate Dr. Blythe and Mrs. Blythe drove
past on the road that led to Lowbridge. The minister’s face fell. Mrs.
Blythe was going away—there was no use in going to Ingleside. And he
craved a little companionship more than ever. As he gazed rather
hopelessly over the landscape the sunset light struck on a window of
the old West homestead on the hill. It flared out rosily like a beacon
of good hope. He suddenly remembered Rosemary and Ellen West. He
thought that he would relish some of Ellen’s pungent conversation. He
thought it would be pleasant to see Rosemary’s slow, sweet smile and
calm, heavenly blue eyes again. What did that old poem of Sir Philip
Sidney’s say?—“continual comfort in a face”—that just suited her. And
he needed comfort. Why not go and call? He remembered that Ellen had
asked him to drop in sometimes and there was Rosemary’s book to take
back—he ought to take it back before he forgot. He had an uneasy
suspicion that there were a great many books in his library which he
had borrowed at sundry times and in divers places and had forgotten to
take back. It was surely his duty to guard against that in this case.
He went back into his study, got the book, and plunged downward into
Rainbow Valley.




CHAPTER XV.
MORE GOSSIP


On the evening after Mrs. Myra Murray of the over-harbour section had
been buried Miss Cornelia and Mary Vance came up to Ingleside. There
were several things concerning which Miss Cornelia wished to unburden
her soul. The funeral had to be all talked over, of course. Susan and
Miss Cornelia thrashed this out between them; Anne took no part or
delight in such goulish conversations. She sat a little apart and
watched the autumnal flame of dahlias in the garden, and the dreaming,
glamorous harbour of the September sunset. Mary Vance sat beside her,
knitting meekly. Mary’s heart was down in the Rainbow Valley, whence
came sweet, distance-softened sounds of children’s laughter, but her
fingers were under Miss Cornelia’s eye. She had to knit so many rounds
of her stocking before she might go to the valley. Mary knit and held
her tongue, but used her ears.

“I never saw a nicer looking corpse,” said Miss Cornelia judicially.
“Myra Murray was always a pretty woman—she was a Corey from Lowbridge
and the Coreys were noted for their good looks.”

“I said to the corpse as I passed it, ‘poor woman. I hope you are as
happy as you look.’” sighed Susan. “She had not changed much. That
dress she wore was the black satin she got for her daughter’s wedding
fourteen years ago. Her Aunt told her then to keep it for her funeral,
but Myra laughed and said, ‘I may wear it to my funeral, Aunty, but I
will have a good time out of it first.’ And I may say she did. Myra
Murray was not a woman to attend her own funeral before she died. Many
a time afterwards when I saw her enjoying herself out in company I
thought to myself, ‘You are a handsome woman, Myra Murray, and that
dress becomes you, but it will likely be your shroud at last.’ And you
see my words have come true, Mrs. Marshall Elliott.”

Susan sighed again heavily. She was enjoying herself hugely. A funeral
was really a delightful subject of conversation.

“I always liked to meet Myra,” said Miss Cornelia. “She was always so
gay and cheerful—she made you feel better just by her handshake. Myra
always made the best of things.”

“That is true,” asserted Susan. “Her sister-in-law told me that when
the doctor told her at last that he could do nothing for her and she
would never rise from that bed again, Myra said quite cheerfully,
‘Well, if that is so, I’m thankful the preserving is all done, and I
will not have to face the fall house-cleaning. I always liked
house-cleaning in spring,’ she says, ‘but I always hated it in the
fall. I will get clear of it this year, thank goodness.’ There are
people who would call that levity, Mrs. Marshall Elliott, and I think
her sister-in-law was a little ashamed of it. She said perhaps her
sickness had made Myra a little light-headed. But I said, ‘No, Mrs.
Murray, do not worry over it. It was just Myra’s way of looking at the
bright side.’”

“Her sister Luella was just the opposite,” said Miss Cornelia. “There
was no bright side for Luella—there was just black and shades of gray.
For years she used always to be declaring she was going to die in a
week or so. ‘I won’t be here to burden you long,’ she would tell her
family with a groan. And if any of them ventured to talk about their
little future plans she’d groan also and say, ‘Ah, _I_ won’t be here
then.’ When I went to see her I always agreed with her and it made her
so mad that she was always quite a lot better for several days
afterwards. She has better health now but no more cheerfulness. Myra
was so different. She was always doing or saying something to make some
one feel good. Perhaps the men they married had something to do with
it. Luella’s man was a Tartar, believe _me_, while Jim Murray was
decent, as men go. He looked heart-broken to-day. It isn’t often I feel
sorry for a man at his wife’s funeral, but I did feel for Jim Murray.”

“No wonder he looked sad. He will not get a wife like Myra again in a
hurry,” said Susan. “Maybe he will not try, since his children are all
grown up and Mirabel is able to keep house. But there is no predicting
what a widower may or may not do and I, for one, will not try.”

“We’ll miss Myra terrible in church,” said Miss Cornelia. “She was such
a worker. Nothing ever stumped _her_. If she couldn’t get over a
difficulty she’d get around it, and if she couldn’t get around it she’d
pretend it wasn’t there—and generally it wasn’t. ‘I’ll keep a stiff
upper lip to my journey’s end,’ said she to me once. Well, she has
ended her journey.”

“Do you think so?” asked Anne suddenly, coming back from dreamland. “I
can’t picture _her_ journey as being ended. Can _you_ think of her
sitting down and folding her hands—that eager, asking spirit of hers,
with its fine adventurous outlook? No, I think in death she just opened
a gate and went through—on—on—to new, shining adventures.”

“Maybe—maybe,” assented Miss Cornelia. “Do you know, Anne dearie, I
never was much taken with this everlasting rest doctrine myself—though
I hope it isn’t heresy to say so. I want to bustle round in heaven the
same as here. And I hope there’ll be a celestial substitute for pies
and doughnuts—something that has to be MADE. Of course, one does get
awful tired at times—and the older you are the tireder you get. But the
very tiredest could get rested in something short of eternity, you’d
think—except, perhaps, a lazy man.”

“When I meet Myra Murray again,” said Anne, “I want to see her coming
towards me, brisk and laughing, just as she always did here.”

“Oh, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan, in a shocked tone, “you surely do not
think that Myra will be laughing in the world to come?”

“Why not, Susan? Do you think we will be crying there?”

“No, no, Mrs. Dr. dear, do not misunderstand me. I do not think we
shall be either crying or laughing.”

“What then?”

“Well,” said Susan, driven to it, “it is my opinion, Mrs. Dr. dear,
that we shall just look solemn and holy.”

“And do you really think, Susan,” said Anne, looking solemn enough,
“that either Myra Murray or I could look solemn and holy all the
time—_all_ the time, Susan?”

“Well,” admitted Susan reluctantly, “I might go so far as to say that
you both would have to smile now and again, but I can never admit that
there will be laughing in heaven. The idea seems really irreverent,
Mrs. Dr. dear.”

“Well, to come back to earth,” said Miss Cornelia, “who can we get to
take Myra’s class in Sunday School? Julia Clow has been teaching it
since Myra took ill, but she’s going to town for the winter and we’ll
have to get somebody else.”

“I heard that Mrs. Laurie Jamieson wanted it,” said Anne. “The
Jamiesons have come to church very regularly since they moved to the
Glen from Lowbridge.”

“New brooms!” said Miss Cornelia dubiously. “Wait till they’ve gone
regularly for a year.”

“You cannot depend on Mrs. Jamieson a bit, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan
solemnly. “She died once and when they were measuring her for her
coffin, after laying her out just beautiful, did she not go and come
back to life! Now, Mrs. Dr. dear, you know you _cannot_ depend on a
woman like that.”

“She might turn Methodist at any moment,” said Miss Cornelia. “They
tell me they went to the Methodist Church at Lowbridge quite as often
as to the Presbyterian. I haven’t caught them at it here yet, but I
would not approve of taking Mrs. Jamieson into the Sunday School. Yet
we must not offend them. We are losing too many people, by death or bad
temper. Mrs. Alec Davis has left the church, no one knows why. She told
the managers that she would never pay another cent to Mr. Meredith’s
salary. Of course, most people say that the children offended her, but
somehow I don’t think so. I tried to pump Faith, but all I could get
out of her was that Mrs. Davis had come, seemingly in high good humour,
to see her father, and had left in an awful rage, calling them all
‘varmints!’”

“Varmints, indeed!” said Susan furiously. “Does Mrs. Alec Davis forget
that her uncle on her mother’s side was suspected of poisoning his
wife? Not that it was ever proved, Mrs. Dr. dear, and it does not do to
believe all you hear. But if _I_ had an uncle whose wife died without
any satisfactory reason, _I_ would not go about the country calling
innocent children varmints.”

“The point is,” said Miss Cornelia, “that Mrs. Davis paid a large
subscription, and how its loss is going to be made up is a problem. And
if she turns the other Douglases against Mr. Meredith, as she will
certainly try to do, he will just have to go.”

“I do not think Mrs. Alec Davis is very well liked by the rest of the
clan,” said Susan. “It is not likely she will be able to influence
them.”

“But those Douglases all hang together so. If you touch one, you touch
all. We can’t do without them, so much is certain. They pay half the
salary. They are not mean, whatever else may be said of them. Norman
Douglas used to give a hundred a year long ago before he left.”

“What did he leave for?” asked Anne.

“He declared a member of the session cheated him in a cow deal. He
hasn’t come to church for twenty years. His wife used to come regular
while she was alive, poor thing, but he never would let her pay
anything, except one red cent every Sunday. She felt dreadfully
humiliated. I don’t know that he was any too good a husband to her,
though she was never heard to complain. But she always had a cowed
look. Norman Douglas didn’t get the woman he wanted thirty years ago
and the Douglases never liked to put up with second best.”

“Who was the woman he did want.”

“Ellen West. They weren’t engaged exactly, I believe, but they went
about together for two years. And then they just broke off—nobody ever
knew why. Just some silly quarrel, I suppose. And Norman went and
married Hester Reese before his temper had time to cool—married her
just to spite Ellen, I haven’t a doubt. So like a man! Hester was a
nice little thing, but she never had much spirit and he broke what
little she had. She was too meek for Norman. He needed a woman who
could stand up to him. Ellen would have kept him in fine order and he
would have liked her all the better for it. He despised Hester, that is
the truth, just because she always gave in to him. I used to hear him
say many a time, long ago when he was a young fellow ‘Give me a spunky
woman—spunk for me every time.’ And then he went and married a girl who
couldn’t say boo to a goose—man-like. That family of Reeses were just
vegetables. They went through the motions of living, but they didn’t
_live_.”

“Russell Reese used his first wife’s wedding-ring to marry his second,”
said Susan reminiscently. “That was _too_ economical in my opinion,
Mrs. Dr. dear. And his brother John has his own tombstone put up in the
over-harbour graveyard, with everything on it but the date of death,
and he goes and looks at it every Sunday. Most folks would not consider
that much fun, but it is plain he does. People do have such different
ideas of enjoyment. As for Norman Douglas, he is a perfect heathen.
When the last minister asked him why he never went to church he said
‘Too many ugly women there, parson—too many ugly women!’ I should like
to go to such a man, Mrs. Dr. dear, and say to him solemnly, ‘There is
a hell!’”

“Oh, Norman doesn’t believe there is such a place,” said Miss Cornelia.
“I hope he’ll find out his mistake when he comes to die. There, Mary,
you’ve knit your three inches and you can go and play with the children
for half an hour.”

Mary needed no second bidding. She flew to Rainbow Valley with a heart
as light as her heels, and in the course of conversation told Faith
Meredith all about Mrs. Alec Davis.

“And Mrs. Elliott says that she’ll turn all the Douglases against your
father and then he’ll have to leave the Glen because his salary won’t
be paid,” concluded Mary. “_I_ don’t know what is to be done, honest to
goodness. If only old Norman Douglas would come back to church and pay,
it wouldn’t be so bad. But he won’t—and the Douglases will leave—and
you all will have to go.”

Faith carried a heavy heart to bed with her that night. The thought of
leaving the Glen was unbearable. Nowhere else in the world were there
such chums as the Blythes. Her little heart had been wrung when they
had left Maywater—she had shed many bitter tears when she parted with
Maywater chums and the old manse there where her mother had lived and
died. She could not contemplate calmly the thought of such another and
harder wrench. She _couldn’t_ leave Glen St. Mary and dear Rainbow
Valley and that delicious graveyard.

“It’s awful to be minister’s family,” groaned Faith into her pillow.
“Just as soon as you get fond of a place you are torn up by the roots.
I’ll never, never, _never_ marry a minister, no matter how nice he is.”

Faith sat up in bed and looked out of the little vine-hung window. The
night was very still, the silence broken only by Una’s soft breathing.
Faith felt terribly alone in the world. She could see Glen St. Mary
lying under the starry blue meadows of the autumn night. Over the
valley a light shone from the girls’ room at Ingleside, and another
from Walter’s room. Faith wondered if poor Walter had toothache again.
Then she sighed, with a little passing sigh of envy of Nan and Di. They
had a mother and a settled home—_they_ were not at the mercy of people
who got angry without any reason and called you a varmint. Away beyond
the Glen, amid fields that were very quiet with sleep, another light
was burning. Faith knew it shone in the house where Norman Douglas
lived. He was reputed to sit up all hours of the night reading. Mary
had said if he could only be induced to return to the church all would
be well. And why not? Faith looked at a big, low star hanging over the
tall, pointed spruce at the gate of the Methodist Church and had an
inspiration. She knew what ought to be done and she, Faith Meredith,
would do it. She would make everything right. With a sigh of
satisfaction, she turned from the lonely, dark world and cuddled down
beside Una.




CHAPTER XVI.
TIT FOR TAT


With Faith, to decide was to act. She lost no time in carrying out the
idea. As soon as she came home from school the next day she left the
manse and made her way down the Glen. Walter Blythe joined her as she
passed the post office.

“I’m going to Mrs. Elliott’s on an errand for mother,” he said. “Where
are you going, Faith?”

“I am going somewhere on church business,” said Faith loftily. She did
not volunteer any further information and Walter felt rather snubbed.
They walked on in silence for a little while. It was a warm, windy
evening with a sweet, resinous air. Beyond the sand dunes were gray
seas, soft and beautiful. The Glen brook bore down a freight of gold
and crimson leaves, like fairy shallops. In Mr. James Reese’s buckwheat
stubble-land, with its beautiful tones of red and brown, a crow
parliament was being held, whereat solemn deliberations regarding the
welfare of crowland were in progress. Faith cruelly broke up the august
assembly by climbing up on the fence and hurling a broken rail at it.
Instantly the air was filled with flapping black wings and indignant
caws.

“Why did you do that?” said Walter reproachfully. “They were having
such a good time.”

“Oh, I hate crows,” said Faith airily. “The are so black and sly I feel
sure they’re hypocrites. They steal little birds’ eggs out of their
nests, you know. I saw one do it on our lawn last spring. Walter, what
makes you so pale to-day? Did you have the toothache again last night?”

Walter shivered.

“Yes—a raging one. I couldn’t sleep a wink—so I just paced up and down
the floor and imagined I was an early Christian martyr being tortured
at the command of Nero. That helped ever so much for a while—and then I
got so bad I couldn’t imagine anything.”

“Did you cry?” asked Faith anxiously.

“No—but I lay down on the floor and groaned,” admitted Walter. “Then
the girls came in and Nan put cayenne pepper in it—and that made it
worse—Di made me hold a swallow of cold water in my mouth—and I
couldn’t stand it, so they called Susan. Susan said it served me right
for sitting up in the cold garret yesterday writing poetry trash. But
she started up the kitchen fire and got me a hot-water bottle and it
stopped the toothache. As soon as I felt better I told Susan my poetry
wasn’t trash and she wasn’t any judge. And she said no, thank goodness
she was not and she did not know anything about poetry except that it
was mostly a lot of lies. Now you know, Faith, that isn’t so. That is
one reason why I like writing poetry—you can say so many things in it
that are true in poetry but wouldn’t be true in prose. I told Susan so,
but she said to stop my jawing and go to sleep before the water got
cold, or she’d leave me to see if rhyming would cure toothache, and she
hoped it would be a lesson to me.”

“Why don’t you go to the dentist at Lowbridge and get the tooth out?”

Walter shivered again.

“They want me to—but I can’t. It would hurt so.”

“Are you afraid of a little pain?” asked Faith contemptuously.

Walter flushed.

“It would be a _big_ pain. I hate being hurt. Father said he wouldn’t
insist on my going—he’d wait until I’d made up my own mind to go.”

“It wouldn’t hurt as long as the toothache,” argued Faith, “You’ve had
five spells of toothache. If you’d just go and have it out there’d be
no more bad nights. _I_ had a tooth out once. I yelled for a moment,
but it was all over then—only the bleeding.”

“The bleeding is worst of all—it’s so ugly,” cried Walter. “It just
made me sick when Jem cut his foot last summer. Susan said I looked
more like fainting than Jem did. But I couldn’t bear to see Jem hurt,
either. Somebody is always getting hurt, Faith—and it’s awful. I just
can’t _bear_ to see things hurt. It makes me just want to run—and
run—and run—till I can’t hear or see them.”

“There’s no use making a fuss over anyone getting hurt,” said Faith,
tossing her curls. “Of course, if you’ve hurt yourself very bad, you
have to yell—and blood _is_ messy—and I don’t like seeing other people
hurt, either. But I don’t want to run—I want to go to work and help
them. Your father _has_ to hurt people lots of times to cure them. What
would they do if _he_ ran away?”

“I didn’t say I _would_ run. I said I _wanted_ to run. That’s a
different thing. I want to help people, too. But oh, I wish there
weren’t any ugly, dreadful things in the world. I wish everything was
glad and beautiful.”

“Well, don’t let’s think of what isn’t,” said Faith. “After all,
there’s lots of fun in being alive. You wouldn’t have toothache if you
were dead, but still, wouldn’t you lots rather be alive than dead? I
would, a hundred times. Oh, here’s Dan Reese. He’s been down to the
harbour for fish.”

“I hate Dan Reese,” said Walter.

“So do I. All us girls do. I’m just going to walk past and never take
the least notice of him. You watch me!”

Faith accordingly stalked past Dan with her chin out and an expression
of scorn that bit into his soul. He turned and shouted after her.

“Pig-girl! Pig-girl!! Pig-girl!!!” in a crescendo of insult.

Faith walked on, seemingly oblivious. But her lip trembled slightly
with a sense of outrage. She knew she was no match for Dan Reese when
it came to an exchange of epithets. She wished Jem Blythe had been with
her instead of Walter. If Dan Reese had dared to call her a pig-girl in
Jem’s hearing, Jem would have wiped up the dust with him. But it never
occurred to Faith to expect Walter to do it, or blame him for not doing
it. Walter, she knew, never fought other boys. Neither did Charlie Clow
of the north road. The strange part was that, while she despised
Charlie for a coward, it never occurred to her to disdain Walter. It
was simply that he seemed to her an inhabitant of a world of his own,
where different traditions prevailed. Faith would as soon have expected
a starry-eyed young angel to pummel dirty, freckled Dan Reese for her
as Walter Blythe. She would not have blamed the angel and she did not
blame Walter Blythe. But she wished that sturdy Jem or Jerry had been
there and Dan’s insult continued to rankle in her soul.

Walter was pale no longer. He had flushed crimson and his beautiful
eyes were clouded with shame and anger. He knew that he ought to have
avenged Faith. Jem would have sailed right in and made Dan eat his
words with bitter sauce. Ritchie Warren would have overwhelmed Dan with
worse “names” than Dan had called Faith. But Walter could not—simply
could not—“call names.” He knew he would get the worst of it. He could
never conceive or utter the vulgar, ribald insults of which Dan Reese
had unlimited command. And as for the trial by fist, Walter couldn’t
fight. He hated the idea. It was rough and painful—and, worst of all,
it was ugly. He never could understand Jem’s exultation in an
occasional conflict. But he wished he _could_ fight Dan Reese. He was
horribly ashamed because Faith Meredith had been insulted in his
presence and he had not tried to punish her insulter. He felt sure she
must despise him. She had not even spoken to him since Dan had called
her pig-girl. He was glad when they came to the parting of the ways.

Faith, too, was relieved, though for a different reason. She wanted to
be alone because she suddenly felt rather nervous about her errand.
Impulse had cooled, especially since Dan had bruised her self-respect.
She must go through with it, but she no longer had enthusiasm to
sustain her. She was going to see Norman Douglas and ask him to come
back to church, and she began to be afraid of him. What had seemed so
easy and simple up at the Glen seemed very different down here. She had
heard a good deal about Norman Douglas, and she knew that even the
biggest boys in school were afraid of him. Suppose he called her
something nasty—she had heard he was given to that. Faith could not
endure being called names—they subdued her far more quickly than a
physical blow. But she would go on—Faith Meredith always went on. If
she did not her father might have to leave the Glen.

At the end of the long lane Faith came to the house—a big,
old-fashioned one with a row of soldierly Lombardies marching past it.
On the back veranda Norman Douglas himself was sitting, reading a
newspaper. His big dog was beside him. Behind, in the kitchen, where
his housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson, was getting supper, there was a clatter
of dishes—an angry clatter, for Norman Douglas had just had a quarrel
with Mrs. Wilson, and both were in a very bad temper over it.
Consequently, when Faith stepped on the veranda and Norman Douglas
lowered his newspaper she found herself looking into the choleric eyes
of an irritated man.

Norman Douglas was rather a fine-looking personage in his way. He had a
sweep of long red beard over his broad chest and a mane of red hair,
ungrizzled by the years, on his massive head. His high, white forehead
was unwrinkled and his blue eyes could flash still with all the fire of
his tempestuous youth. He could be very amiable when he liked, and he
could be very terrible. Poor Faith, so anxiously bent on retrieving the
situation in regard to the church, had caught him in one of his
terrible moods.

He did not know who she was and he gazed at her with disfavour. Norman
Douglas liked girls of spirit and flame and laughter. At this moment
Faith was very pale. She was of the type to which colour means
everything. Lacking her crimson cheeks she seemed meek and even
insignificant. She looked apologetic and afraid, and the bully in
Norman Douglas’s heart stirred.

“Who the dickens are you? And what do you want here?” he demanded in
his great resounding voice, with a fierce scowl.

For once in her life Faith had nothing to say. She had never supposed
Norman Douglas was like _this_. She was paralyzed with terror of him.
He saw it and it made him worse.

“What’s the matter with you?” he boomed. “You look as if you wanted to
say something and was scared to say it. What’s troubling you? Confound
it, speak up, can’t you?”

No. Faith could not speak up. No words would come. But her lips began
to tremble.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t cry,” shouted Norman. “I can’t stand
snivelling. If you’ve anything to say, say it and have done. Great
Kitty, is the girl possessed of a dumb spirit? Don’t look at me like
that—I’m human—I haven’t got a tail! Who are you—who are you, I say?”

Norman’s voice could have been heard at the harbour. Operations in the
kitchen were suspended. Mrs. Wilson was listening open-eared and eyed.
Norman put his huge brown hands on his knees and leaned forward,
staring into Faith’s pallid, shrinking face. He seemed to loom over her
like some evil giant out of a fairy tale. She felt as if he would eat
her up next thing, body and bones.

“I—am—Faith—Meredith,” she said, in little more than a whisper.

“Meredith, hey? One of the parson’s youngsters, hey? I’ve heard of
you—I’ve heard of you! Riding on pigs and breaking the Sabbath! A nice
lot! What do you want here, hey? What do you want of the old pagan,
hey? _I_ don’t ask favours of parsons—and I don’t give any. What do you
want, I say?”

Faith wished herself a thousand miles away. She stammered out her
thought in its naked simplicity.

“I came—to ask you—to go to church—and pay—to the salary.”

Norman glared at her. Then he burst forth again.

“You impudent hussy—you! Who put you up to it, jade? Who put you up to
it?”

“Nobody,” said poor Faith.

“That’s a lie. Don’t lie to me! Who sent you here? It wasn’t your
father—he hasn’t the smeddum of a flea—but he wouldn’t send you to do
what he dassn’t do himself. I suppose it was some of them confounded
old maids at the Glen, was it—was it, hey?”

“No—I—I just came myself.”

“Do you take me for a fool?” shouted Norman.

“No—I thought you were a gentleman,” said Faith faintly, and certainly
without any thought of being sarcastic.

Norman bounced up.

“Mind your own business. I don’t want to hear another word from you. If
you wasn’t such a kid I’d teach you to interfere in what doesn’t
concern you. When I want parsons or pill-dosers I’ll send for them.
Till I do I’ll have no truck with them. Do you understand? Now, get
out, cheese-face.”

Faith got out. She stumbled blindly down the steps, out of the yard
gate and into the lane. Half way up the lane her daze of fear passed
away and a reaction of tingling anger possessed her. By the time she
reached the end of the lane she was in such a furious temper as she had
never experienced before. Norman Douglas’ insults burned in her soul,
kindling a scorching flame. Go home! Not she! She would go straight
back and tell that old ogre just what she thought of him—she would show
him—oh, wouldn’t she! Cheese-face, indeed!

Unhesitatingly she turned and walked back. The veranda was deserted and
the kitchen door shut. Faith opened the door without knocking, and went
in. Norman Douglas had just sat down at the supper table, but he still
held his newspaper. Faith walked inflexibly across the room, caught the
paper from his hand, flung it on the floor and stamped on it. Then she
faced him, with her flashing eyes and scarlet cheeks. She was such a
handsome young fury that Norman Douglas hardly recognized her.

“What’s brought you back?” he growled, but more in bewilderment than
rage.

Unquailingly she glared back into the angry eyes against which so few
people could hold their own.

“I have come back to tell you exactly what I think of you,” said Faith
in clear, ringing tones. “I am not afraid of you. You are a rude,
unjust, tyrannical, disagreeable old man. Susan says you are sure to go
to hell, and I was sorry for you, but I am not now. Your wife never had
a new hat for ten years—no wonder she died. I am going to make faces at
you whenever I see you after this. Every time I am behind you you will
know what is happening. Father has a picture of the devil in a book in
his study, and I mean to go home and write your name under it. You are
an old vampire and I hope you’ll have the Scotch fiddle!”

Faith did not know what a vampire meant any more than she knew what the
Scotch fiddle was. She had heard Susan use the expressions and gathered
from her tone that both were dire things. But Norman Douglas knew what
the latter meant at least. He had listened in absolute silence to
Faith’s tirade. When she paused for breath, with a stamp of her foot,
he suddenly burst into loud laughter. With a mighty slap of hand on
knee he exclaimed,

“I vow you’ve got spunk, after all—I like spunk. Come, sit down—sit
down!”

“I will not.” Faith’s eyes flashed more passionately. She thought she
was being made fun of—treated contemptuously. She would have enjoyed
another explosion of rage, but this cut deep. “I will not sit down in
your house. I am going home. But I am glad I came back here and told
you exactly what my opinion of you is.”

“So am I—so am I,” chuckled Norman. “I like you—you’re fine—you’re
great. Such roses—such vim! Did I call her cheese-face? Why, she never
smelt a cheese. Sit down. If you’d looked like that at the first, girl!
So you’ll write my name under the devil’s picture, will you? But he’s
black, girl, he’s black—and I’m red. It won’t do—it won’t do! And you
hope I’ll have the Scotch fiddle, do you? Lord love you, girl, I had
_it_ when I was a boy. Don’t wish it on me again. Sit down—sit in.
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness.”

“No, thank you,” said Faith haughtily.

“Oh, yes, you will. Come, come now, I apologize, girl—I apologize. I
made a fool of myself and I’m sorry. Man can’t say fairer. Forget and
forgive. Shake hands, girl—shake hands. She won’t—no, she won’t! But
she must! Look-a-here, girl, if you’ll shake hands and break bread with
me I’ll pay what I used to to the salary and I’ll go to church the
first Sunday in every month and I’ll make Kitty Alec hold her jaw. I’m
the only one in the clan can do it. Is it a bargain, girl?”

It seemed a bargain. Faith found herself shaking hands with the ogre
and then sitting at his board. Her temper was over—Faith’s tempers
never lasted very long—but its excitement still sparkled in her eyes
and crimsoned her cheeks. Norman Douglas looked at her admiringly.

“Go, get some of your best preserves, Wilson,” he ordered, “and stop
sulking, woman, stop sulking. What if we did have a quarrel, woman? A
good squall clears the air and briskens things up. But no drizzling and
fogging afterwards—no drizzling and fogging, woman. I can’t stand that.
Temper in a woman but no tears for me. Here, girl, is some messed up
meat and potatoes for you. Begin on that. Wilson has some fancy name
for it, but I call lit macanaccady. Anything I can’t analyze in the
eating line I call macanaccady and anything wet that puzzles me I call
shallamagouslem. Wilson’s tea is shallamagouslem. I swear she makes it
out of burdocks. Don’t take any of the ungodly black liquid—here’s some
milk for you. What did you say your name was?”

“Faith.”

“No name that—no name that! I can’t stomach such a name. Got any
other?”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t like the name, don’t like it. There’s no smeddum to it. Besides,
it makes me think of my Aunt Jinny. She called her three girls Faith,
Hope, and Charity. Faith didn’t believe in anything—Hope was a born
pessimist—and Charity was a miser. You ought to be called Red Rose—you
look like one when you’re mad. _I’ll_ call you Red Rose. And you’ve
roped me into promising to go to church? But only once a month,
remember—only once a month. Come now, girl, will you let me off? I used
to pay a hundred to the salary every year and go to church. If I
promise to pay two hundred a year will you let me off going to church?
Come now!”

“No, no, sir,” said Faith, dimpling roguishly. “I want you to go to
church, too.”

“Well, a bargain is a bargain. I reckon I can stand it twelve times a
year. What a sensation it’ll make the first Sunday I go! And old Susan
Baker says I’m going to hell, hey? Do you believe I’ll go there—come,
now, do you?”

“I hope not, sir,” stammered Faith in some confusion.

“_Why_ do you hope not? Come, now, _why_ do you hope not? Give us a
reason, girl—give us a reason.”

“It—it must be a very—uncomfortable place, sir.”

“Uncomfortable? All depends on your taste in comfortable, girl. I’d
soon get tired of angels. Fancy old Susan in a halo, now!”

Faith did fancy it, and it tickled her so much that she had to laugh.
Norman eyed her approvingly.

“See the fun of it, hey? Oh, I like you—you’re great. About this church
business, now—can your father preach?”

“He is a splendid preacher,” said loyal Faith.

“He is, hey? I’ll see—I’ll watch out for flaws. He’d better be careful
what he says before _me_. I’ll catch him—I’ll trip him up—I’ll keep
tabs on his arguments. I’m bound to have some fun out of this church
going business. Does he ever preach hell?”

“No—o—o—I don’t think so.”

“Too bad. I like sermons on that subject. You tell him that if he wants
to keep me in good humour to preach a good rip-roaring sermon on hell
once every six months—and the more brimstone the better. I like ‘em
smoking. And think of all the pleasure he’d give the old maids, too.
They’d all keep looking at old Norman Douglas and thinking, ‘That’s for
you, you old reprobate. That’s what’s in store for _you!_’ I’ll give an
extra ten dollars every time you get your father to preach on hell.
Here’s Wilson and the jam. Like that, hey? _It_ isn’t macanaccady.
Taste!”

Faith obediently swallowed the big spoonful Norman held out to her.
Luckily it _was_ good.

“Best plum jam in the world,” said Norman, filling a large saucer and
plumping it down before her. “Glad you like it. I’ll give you a couple
of jars to take home with you. There’s nothing mean about me—never was.
The devil can’t catch me at _that_ corner, anyhow. It wasn’t my fault
that Hester didn’t have a new hat for ten years. It was her own—she
pinched on hats to save money to give yellow fellows over in China. _I_
never gave a cent to missions in my life—never will. Never you try to
bamboozle me into that! A hundred a year to the salary and church once
a month—but no spoiling good heathens to make poor Christians! Why,
girl, they wouldn’t be fit for heaven or hell—clean spoiled for either
place—clean spoiled. Hey, Wilson, haven’t you got a smile on yet? Beats
all how you women can sulk! _I_ never sulked in my life—it’s just one
big flash and crash with me and then—pouf—the squall’s over and the sun
is out and you could eat out of my hand.”

Norman insisted on driving Faith home after supper and he filled the
buggy up with apples, cabbages, potatoes and pumpkins and jars of jam.

“There’s a nice little tom-pussy out in the barn. I’ll give you that
too, if you’d like it. Say the word,” he said.

“No, thank you,” said Faith decidedly. “I don’t like cats, and besides,
I have a rooster.”

“Listen to her. You can’t cuddle a rooster as you can a kitten. Who
ever heard of petting a rooster? Better take little Tom. I want to find
a good home for him.”

“No. Aunt Martha has a cat and he would kill a strange kitten.”

Norman yielded the point rather reluctantly. He gave Faith an exciting
drive home, behind his wild two-year old, and when he had let her out
at the kitchen door of the manse and dumped his cargo on the back
veranda he drove away shouting,

“It’s only once a month—only once a month, mind!”

Faith went up to bed, feeling a little dizzy and breathless, as if she
had just escaped from the grasp of a genial whirlwind. She was happy
and thankful. No fear now that they would have to leave the Glen and
the graveyard and Rainbow Valley. But she fell asleep troubled by a
disagreeable subconsciousness that Dan Reese had called her pig-girl
and that, having stumbled on such a congenial epithet, he would
continue to call her so whenever opportunity offered.




CHAPTER XVII.
A DOUBLE VICTORY


Norman Douglas came to church the first Sunday in November and made all
the sensation he desired. Mr. Meredith shook hands with him absently on
the church steps and hoped dreamily that Mrs. Douglas was well.

“She wasn’t very well just before I buried her ten years ago, but I
reckon she has better health now,” boomed Norman, to the horror and
amusement of every one except Mr. Meredith, who was absorbed in
wondering if he had made the last head of his sermon as clear as he
might have, and hadn’t the least idea what Norman had said to him or he
to Norman.

Norman intercepted Faith at the gate.

“Kept my word, you see—kept my word, Red Rose. I’m free now till the
first Sunday in December. Fine sermon, girl—fine sermon. Your father
has more in his head than he carries on his face. But he contradicted
himself once—tell him he contradicted himself. And tell him I want that
brimstone sermon in December. Great way to wind up the old year—with a
taste of hell, you know. And what’s the matter with a nice tasty
discourse on heaven for New Year’s? Though it wouldn’t be half as
interesting as hell, girl—not half. Only I’d like to know what your
father thinks about heaven—he _can_ think—rarest thing in the world—a
person who can think. But he _did_ contradict himself. Ha, ha! Here’s a
question you might ask him sometime when he’s awake, girl. ‘Can God
make a stone so big He couldn’t lift it Himself?’ Don’t forget now. I
want to hear his opinion on it. I’ve stumped many a minister with that,
girl.”

Faith was glad to escape him and run home. Dan Reese, standing among
the crowd of boys at the gate, looked at her and shaped his mouth into
“pig-girl,” but dared not utter it aloud just there. Next day in school
was a different matter. At noon recess Faith encountered Dan in the
little spruce plantation behind the school and Dan shouted once more,

“Pig-girl! Pig-girl! _Rooster-girl!_”

Walter Blythe suddenly rose from a mossy cushion behind a little clump
of firs where he had been reading. He was very pale, but his eyes
blazed.

“You hold your tongue, Dan Reese!” he said.

“Oh, hello, Miss Walter,” retorted Dan, not at all abashed. He vaulted
airily to the top of the rail fence and chanted insultingly,

“Cowardy, cowardy-custard
Stole a pot of mustard,
Cowardy, cowardy-custard!”

“You are a coincidence!” said Walter scornfully, turning still whiter.
He had only a very hazy idea what a coincidence was, but Dan had none
at all and thought it must be something peculiarly opprobrious.

“Yah! Cowardy!” he yelled gain. “Your mother writes lies—lies—lies! And
Faith Meredith is a pig-girl—a—pig-girl—a pig-girl! And she’s a
rooster-girl—a rooster-girl—a rooster-girl! Yah! Cowardy—cowardy—cust—”

Dan got no further. Walter had hurled himself across the intervening
space and knocked Dan off the fence backward with one well-directed
blow. Dan’s sudden inglorious sprawl was greeted with a burst of
laughter and a clapping of hands from Faith. Dan sprang up, purple with
rage, and began to climb the fence. But just then the school-bell rang
and Dan knew what happened to boys who were late during Mr. Hazard’s
regime.

“We’ll fight this out,” he howled. “Cowardy!”

“Any time you like,” said Walter.

“Oh, no, no, Walter,” protested Faith. “Don’t fight him. _I_ don’t mind
what he says—I wouldn’t condescend to mind the like of _him_.”

“He insulted you and he insulted my mother,” said Walter, with the same
deadly calm. “Tonight after school, Dan.”

“I’ve got to go right home from school to pick taters after the
harrows, dad says,” answered Dan sulkily. “But to-morrow night’ll do.”

“All right—here to-morrow night,” agreed Walter.

“And I’ll smash your sissy-face for you,” promised Dan.

Walter shuddered—not so much from fear of the threat as from repulsion
over the ugliness and vulgarity of it. But he held his head high and
marched into school. Faith followed in a conflict of emotions. She
hated to think of Walter fighting that little sneak, but oh, he had
been splendid! And he was going to fight for _her_—Faith Meredith—to
punish her insulter! Of course he would win—such eyes spelled victory.

Faith’s confidence in her champion had dimmed a little by evening,
however. Walter had seemed so very quiet and dull the rest of the day
in school.

“If it were only Jem,” she sighed to Una, as they sat on Hezekiah
Pollock’s tombstone in the graveyard. “_He_ is such a fighter—he could
finish Dan off in no time. But Walter doesn’t know much about
fighting.”

“I’m so afraid he’ll be hurt,” sighed Una, who hated fighting and
couldn’t understand the subtle, secret exultation she divined in Faith.

“He oughtn’t to be,” said Faith uncomfortably. “He’s every bit as big
as Dan.”

“But Dan’s so much older,” said Una. “Why, he’s nearly a year older.”

“Dan hasn’t done much fighting when you come to count up,” said Faith.
“I believe he’s really a coward. He didn’t think Walter would fight, or
he wouldn’t have called names before him. Oh, if you could just have
seen Walter’s face when he looked at him, Una! It made me shiver—with a
nice shiver. He looked just like Sir Galahad in that poem father read
us on Saturday.”

“I hate the thought of them fighting and I wish it could be stopped,”
said Una.

“Oh, it’s got to go on now,” cried Faith. “It’s a matter of honour.
Don’t you _dare_ tell anyone, Una. If you do I’ll never tell you
secrets again!”

“I won’t tell,” agreed Una. “But I won’t stay to-morrow to watch the
fight. I’m coming right home.”

“Oh, all right. _I_ have to be there—it would be mean not to, when
Walter is fighting for me. I’m going to tie my colours on his
arm—that’s the thing to do when he’s my knight. How lucky Mrs. Blythe
gave me that pretty blue hair-ribbon for my birthday! I’ve only worn it
twice so it will be almost new. But I wish I was sure Walter would win.
It will be so—so _humiliating_ if he doesn’t.”

Faith would have been yet more dubious if she could have seen her
champion just then. Walter had gone home from school with all his
righteous anger at a low ebb and a very nasty feeling in its place. He
had to fight Dan Reese the next night—and he didn’t want to—he hated
the thought of it. And he kept thinking of it all the time. Not for a
minute could he get away from the thought. Would it hurt much? He was
terribly afraid that it would hurt. And would he be defeated and
shamed?

He could not eat any supper worth speaking of. Susan had made a big
batch of his favourite monkey-faces, but he could choke only one down.
Jem ate four. Walter wondered how he could. How could _anybody_ eat?
And how could they all talk gaily as they were doing? There was mother,
with her shining eyes and pink cheeks. _She_ didn’t know her son had to
fight next day. Would she be so gay if she knew, Walter wondered
darkly. Jem had taken Susan’s picture with his new camera and the
result was passed around the table and Susan was terribly indignant
over it.

“I am no beauty, Mrs. Dr. dear, and well I know it, and have always
known it,” she said in an aggrieved tone, “but that I am as ugly as
that picture makes me out I will never, no, never believe.”

Jem laughed over this and Anne laughed again with him. Walter couldn’t
endure it. He got up and fled to his room.

“That child has got something on his mind, Mrs. Dr. dear,” said Susan.
“He has et next to nothing. Do you suppose he is plotting another
poem?”

Poor Walter was very far removed in spirit from the starry realms of
poesy just then. He propped his elbow on his open window-sill and
leaned his head drearily on his hands.

“Come on down to the shore, Walter,” cried Jem, busting in. “The boys
are going to burn the sand-hill grass to-night. Father says we can go.
Come on.”

At any other time Walter would have been delighted. He gloried in the
burning of the sand-hill grass. But now he flatly refused to go, and no
arguments or entreaties could move him. Disappointed Jem, who did not
care for the long dark walk to Four Winds Point alone, retreated to his
museum in the garret and buried himself in a book. He soon forgot his
disappointment, revelling with the heroes of old romance, and pausing
occasionally to picture himself a famous general, leading his troops to
victory on some great battlefield.

Walter sat at his window until bedtime. Di crept in, hoping to be told
what was wrong, but Walter could not talk of it, even to Di. Talking of
it seemed to give it a reality from which he shrank. It was torture
enough to think of it. The crisp, withered leaves rustled on the maple
trees outside his window. The glow of rose and flame had died out of
the hollow, silvery sky, and the full moon was rising gloriously over
Rainbow Valley. Afar off, a ruddy woodfire was painting a page of glory
on the horizon beyond the hills. It was a sharp, clear evening when
far-away sounds were heard distinctly. A fox was barking across the
pond; an engine was puffing down at the Glen station; a blue-jay was
screaming madly in the maple grove; there was laughter over on the
manse lawn. How could people laugh? How could foxes and blue-jays and
engines behave as if nothing were going to happen on the morrow?

“Oh, I wish it was over,” groaned Walter.

He slept very little that night and had hard work choking down his
porridge in the morning. Susan _was_ rather lavish in her platefuls.
Mr. Hazard found him an unsatisfactory pupil that day. Faith Meredith’s
wits seemed to be wool-gathering, too. Dan Reese kept drawing
surreptitious pictures of girls, with pig or rooster heads, on his
slate and holding them up for all to see. The news of the coming battle
had leaked out and most of the boys and many of the girls were in the
spruce plantation when Dan and Walter sought it after school. Una had
gone home, but Faith was there, having tied her blue ribbon around
Walter’s arm. Walter was thankful that neither Jem nor Di nor Nan were
among the crowd of spectators. Somehow they had not heard of what was
in the wind and had gone home, too. Walter faced Dan quite undauntedly
now. At the last moment all his fear had vanished, but he still felt
disgust at the idea of fighting. Dan, it was noted, was really paler
under his freckles than Walter was. One of the older boys gave the word
and Dan struck Walter in the face.

Walter reeled a little. The pain of the blow tingled through all his
sensitive frame for a moment. Then he felt pain no longer. Something,
such as he had never experienced before, seemed to roll over him like a
flood. His face flushed crimson, his eyes burned like flame. The
scholars of Glen St. Mary school had never dreamed that “Miss Walter”
could look like that. He hurled himself forward and closed with Dan
like a young wildcat.

There were no particular rules in the fights of the Glen school boys.
It was catch-as-catch can, and get your blows in anyhow. Walter fought
with a savage fury and a joy in the struggle against which Dan could
not hold his ground. It was all over very speedily. Walter had no clear
consciousness of what he was doing until suddenly the red mist cleared
from his sight and he found himself kneeling on the body of the
prostrate Dan whose nose—oh, horror!—was spouting blood.

“Have you had enough?” demanded Walter through his clenched teeth.

Dan sulkily admitted that he had.

“My mother doesn’t write lies?”

“No.”

“Faith Meredith isn’t a pig-girl?”

“No.”

“Nor a rooster-girl?”

“No.”

“And I’m not a coward?”

“No.”

Walter had intended to ask, “And you are a liar?” but pity intervened
and he did not humiliate Dan further. Besides, that blood was so
horrible.

“You can go, then,” he said contemptuously.

There was a loud clapping from the boys who were perched on the rail
fence, but some of the girls were crying. They were frightened. They
had seen schoolboy fights before, but nothing like Walter as he had
grappled with Dan. There had been something terrifying about him. They
thought he would kill Dan. Now that all was over they sobbed
hysterically—except Faith, who still stood tense and crimson cheeked.

Walter did not stay for any conqueror’s meed. He sprang over the fence
and rushed down the spruce hill to Rainbow Valley. He felt none of the
victor’s joy, but he felt a certain calm satisfaction in duty done and
honour avenged—mingled with a sickish qualm when he thought of Dan’s
gory nose. It had been so ugly, and Walter hated ugliness.

Also, he began to realize that he himself was somewhat sore and
battered up. His lip was cut and swollen and one eye felt very strange.
In Rainbow Valley he encountered Mr. Meredith, who was coming home from
an afternoon call on the Miss Wests. That reverend gentleman looked
gravely at him.

“It seems to me that you have been fighting, Walter?”

“Yes, sir,” said Walter, expecting a scolding.

“What was it about?”

“Dan Reese said my mother wrote lies and that that Faith was a
pig-girl,” answered Walter bluntly.

“Oh—h! Then you were certainly justified, Walter.”

“Do you think it’s right to fight, sir?” asked Walter curiously.

“Not always—and not often—but sometimes—yes, sometimes,” said John
Meredith. “When womenkind are insulted for instance—as in your case. My
motto, Walter, is, don’t fight till you’re sure you ought to, and
_then_ put every ounce of you into it. In spite of sundry
discolorations I infer that you came off best.”

“Yes. I made him take it all back.”

“Very good—very good, indeed. I didn’t think you were such a fighter,
Walter.”

“I never fought before—and I didn’t want to right up to the last—and
then,” said Walter, determined to make a clean breast of it, “I liked
it while I was at it.”

The Rev. John’s eyes twinkled.

“You were—a little frightened—at first?”

“I was a whole lot frightened,” said honest Walter. “But I’m not going
to be frightened any more, sir. Being frightened of things is worse
than the things themselves. I’m going to ask father to take me over to
Lowbridge to-morrow to get my tooth out.”

“Right again. ‘Fear is more pain than is the pain it fears.’ Do you
know who wrote that, Walter? It was Shakespeare. Was there any feeling
or emotion or experience of the human heart that that wonderful man did
not know? When you go home tell your mother I am proud of you.”

Walter did not tell her that, however; but he told her all the rest,
and she sympathized with him and told him she was glad he had stood up
for her and Faith, and she anointed his sore spots and rubbed cologne
on his aching head.

“Are all mothers as nice as you?” asked Walter, hugging her. “You’re
_worth_ standing up for.”

Miss Cornelia and Susan were in the living room when Anne came
downstairs, and listened to the story with much enjoyment. Susan in
particular was highly gratified.

“I am real glad to hear he has had a good fight, Mrs. Dr. dear. Perhaps
it may knock that poetry nonsense out of him. And I never, no, never
could bear that little viper of a Dan Reese. Will you not sit nearer to
the fire, Mrs. Marshall Elliott? These November evenings are very
chilly.”

“Thank you, Susan, I’m not cold. I called at the manse before I came
here and got quite warm—though I had to go to the kitchen to do it, for
there was no fire anywhere else. The kitchen looked as if it had been
stirred up with a stick, believe _me_. Mr. Meredith wasn’t home. I
couldn’t find out where he was, but I have an idea that he was up at
the Wests’. Do you know, Anne dearie, they say he has been going there
frequently all the fall and people are beginning to think he is going
to see Rosemary.”

“He would get a very charming wife if he married Rosemary,” said Anne,
piling driftwood on the fire. “She is one of the most delightful girls
I’ve ever known—truly one of the race of Joseph.”

“Ye—s—only she is an Episcopalian,” said Miss Cornelia doubtfully. “Of
course, that is better than if she was a Methodist—but I do think Mr.
Meredith could find a good enough wife in his own denomination.
However, very likely there is nothing in it. It’s only a month ago that
I said to him, ‘You ought to marry again, Mr. Meredith.’ He looked as
shocked as if I had suggested something improper. ‘My wife is in her
grave, Mrs. Elliott,’ he said, in that gentle, saintly way of his. ‘I
suppose so,’ I said, ‘or I wouldn’t be advising you to marry again.’
Then he looked more shocked than ever. So I doubt if there is much in
this Rosemary story. If a single minister calls twice at a house where
there is a single woman all the gossips have it he is courting her.”

“It seems to me—if I may presume to say so—that Mr. Meredith is too shy
to go courting a second wife,” said Susan solemnly.

“He _isn’t_ shy, believe _me_,” retorted Miss Cornelia.
“Absent-minded,—yes—but shy, no. And for all he is so abstracted and
dreamy he has a very good opinion of himself, man-like, and when he is
really awake he wouldn’t think it much of a chore to ask any woman to
have him. No, the trouble is, he’s deluding himself into believing that
his heart is buried, while all the time it’s beating away inside of him
just like anybody else’s. He may have a notion of Rosemary West and he
may not. If he has, we must make the best of it. She is a sweet girl
and a fine housekeeper, and would make a good mother for those poor,
neglected children. And,” concluded Miss Cornelia resignedly, “my own
grandmother was an Episcopalian.”




CHAPTER XVIII.
MARY BRINGS EVIL TIDINGS


Mary Vance, whom Mrs. Elliott had sent up to the manse on an errand,
came tripping down Rainbow Valley on her way to Ingleside where she was
to spend the afternoon with Nan and Di as a Saturday treat. Nan and Di
had been picking spruce gum with Faith and Una in the manse woods and
the four of them were now sitting on a fallen pine by the brook, all,
it must be admitted, chewing rather vigorously. The Ingleside twins
were not allowed to chew spruce gum anywhere but in the seclusion of
Rainbow Valley, but Faith and Una were unrestricted by such rules of
etiquette and cheerfully chewed it everywhere, at home and abroad, to
the very proper horror of the Glen. Faith had been chewing it in church
one day; but Jerry had realized the enormity of _that_, and had given
her such an older-brotherly scolding that she never did it again.

“I was so hungry I just felt as if I had to chew something,” she
protested. “You know well enough what breakfast was like, Jerry
Meredith. I _couldn’t_ eat scorched porridge and my stomach just felt
so queer and empty. The gum helped a lot—and I didn’t chew _very_ hard.
I didn’t make any noise and I never cracked the gum once.”

“You mustn’t chew gum in church, anyhow,” insisted Jerry. “Don’t let me
catch you at it again.”

“You chewed yourself in prayer-meeting last week,” cried Faith.

“_that’s_ different,” said Jerry loftily. “Prayer-meeting isn’t on
Sunday. Besides, I sat away at the back in a dark seat and nobody saw
me. You were sitting right up front where every one saw you. And I took
the gum out of my mouth for the last hymn and stuck it on the back of
the pew right up in front where every one saw you. Then I came away and
forgot it. I went back to get it next morning, but it was gone. I
suppose Rod Warren swiped it. And it was a dandy chew.”

Mary Vance walked down the Valley with her head held high. She had on a
new blue velvet cap with a scarlet rosette in it, a coat of navy blue
cloth and a little squirrel-fur muff. She was very conscious of her new
clothes and very well pleased with herself. Her hair was elaborately
crimped, her face was quite plump, her cheeks rosy, her white eyes
shining. She did not look much like the forlorn and ragged waif the
Merediths had found in the old Taylor barn. Una tried not to feel
envious. Here was Mary with a new velvet cap, but she and Faith had to
wear their shabby old gray tams again this winter. Nobody ever thought
of getting them new ones and they were afraid to ask their father for
them for fear that he might be short of money and then he would feel
badly. Mary had told them once that ministers were always short of
money, and found it “awful hard” to make ends meet. Since then Faith
and Una would have gone in rags rather than ask their father for
anything if they could help it. They did not worry a great deal over
their shabbiness; but it was rather trying to see Mary Vance coming out
in such style and putting on such airs about it, too. The new squirrel
muff was really the last straw. Neither Faith nor Una had ever had a
muff, counting themselves lucky if they could compass mittens without
holes in them. Aunt Martha could not see to darn holes and though Una
tried to, she made sad cobbling. Somehow, they could not make their
greeting of Mary very cordial. But Mary did not mind or notice that;
she was not overly sensitive. She vaulted lightly to a seat on the pine
tree, and laid the offending muff on a bough. Una saw that it was lined
with shirred red satin and had red tassels. She looked down at her own
rather purple, chapped, little hands and wondered if she would ever,
_ever_ be able to put them into a muff like that.

“Give us a chew,” said Mary companionably. Nan, Di and Faith all
produced an amber-hued knot or two from their pockets and passed them
to Mary. Una sat very still. She had four lovely big knots in the
pocket of her tight, thread-bare little jacket, but she wasn’t going to
give one of them to Mary Vance—not one Let Mary pick her own gum!
People with squirrel muffs needn’t expect to get everything in the
world.

“Great day, isn’t it?” said Mary, swinging her legs, the better,
perhaps, to display new boots with very smart cloth tops. Una tucked
_her_ feet under her. There was a hole in the toe of one of her boots
and both laces were much knotted. But they were the best she had. Oh,
this Mary Vance! Why hadn’t they left her in the old barn?

Una never felt badly because the Ingleside twins were better dressed
than she and Faith were. _They_ wore their pretty clothes with careless
grace and never seemed to think about them at all. Somehow, they did
not make other people feel shabby. But when Mary Vance was dressed up
she seemed fairly to exude clothes—to walk in an atmosphere of
clothes—to make everybody else feel and think clothes. Una, as she sat
there in the honey-tinted sunshine of the gracious December afternoon,
was acutely and miserably conscious of everything she had on—the faded
tam, which was yet her best, the skimpy jacket she had worn for three
winters, the holes in her skirt and her boots, the shivering
insufficiency of her poor little undergarments. Of course, Mary was
going out for a visit and she was not. But even if she had been she had
nothing better to put on and in this lay the sting.

“Say, this is great gum. Listen to me cracking it. There ain’t any gum
spruces down at Four Winds,” said Mary. “Sometimes I just hanker after
a chew. Mrs. Elliott won’t let me chew gum if she sees me. She says it
ain’t lady-like. This lady-business puzzles me. I can’t get on to all
its kinks. Say, Una, what’s the matter with you? Cat got your tongue?”

“No,” said Una, who could not drag her fascinated eyes from that
squirrel muff. Mary leaned past her, picked it up and thrust it into
Una’s hands.

“Stick your paws in that for a while,” she ordered. “They look sorter
pinched. Ain’t that a dandy muff? Mrs. Elliott give it to me last week
for a birthday present. I’m to get the collar at Christmas. I heard her
telling Mr. Elliott that.”

“Mrs. Elliott is very good to you,” said Faith.

“You bet she is. And _I’m_ good to her, too,” retorted Mary. “I work
like a nigger to make it easy for her and have everything just as she
likes it. We was made for each other. ‘Tisn’t every one could get along
with her as well as I do. She’s pizen neat, but so am I, and so we
agree fine.”

“I told you she would never whip you.”

“So you did. She’s never tried to lay a finger on me and I ain’t never
told a lie to her—not one, true’s you live. She combs me down with her
tongue sometimes though, but that just slips off _me_ like water off a
duck’s back. Say, Una, why didn’t you hang on to the muff?”

Una had put it back on the bough.

“My hands aren’t cold, thank you,” she said stiffly.

“Well, if you’re satisfied, _I_ am. Say, old Kitty Alec has come back
to church as meek as Moses and nobody knows why. But everybody is
saying it was Faith brought Norman Douglas out. His housekeeper says
you went there and gave him an awful tongue-lashing. Did you?”

“I went and asked him to come to church,” said Faith uncomfortably.

“Fancy your spunk!” said Mary admiringly. “_I_ wouldn’t have dared do
that and I’m not so slow. Mrs. Wilson says the two of you jawed
something scandalous, but you come off best and then he just turned
round and like to eat you up. Say, is your father going to preach here
to-morrow?”

“No. He’s going to exchange with Mr. Perry from Charlottetown. Father
went to town this morning and Mr. Perry is coming out to-night.”

“I _thought_ there was something in the wind, though old Martha
wouldn’t give me any satisfaction. But I felt sure she wouldn’t have
been killing that rooster for nothing.”

“What rooster? What do you mean?” cried Faith, turning pale.

“_I_ don’t know what rooster. I didn’t see it. When she took the butter
Mrs. Elliott sent up she said she’d been out to the barn killing a
rooster for dinner tomorrow.”

Faith sprang down from the pine.

“It’s Adam—we have no other rooster—she has killed Adam.”

“Now, don’t fly off the handle. Martha said the butcher at the Glen had
no meat this week and she had to have something and the hens were all
laying and too poor.”

“If she has killed Adam—” Faith began to run up the hill.

Mary shrugged her shoulders.

“She’ll go crazy now. She was so fond of that Adam. He ought to have
been in the pot long ago—he’ll be as tough as sole leather. But _I_
wouldn’t like to be in Martha’s shoes. Faith’s just white with rage;
Una, you’d better go after her and try to peacify her.”

Mary had gone a few steps with the Blythe girls when Una suddenly
turned and ran after her.

“Here’s some gum for you, Mary,” she said, with a little repentant
catch in her voice, thrusting all her four knots into Mary’s hands,
“and I’m glad you have such a pretty muff.”

“Why, thanks,” said Mary, rather taken by surprise. To the Blythe
girls, after Una had gone, she said, “Ain’t she a queer little mite?
But I’ve always said she had a good heart.”




CHAPTER XIX.
POOR ADAM!


When Una got home Faith was lying face downwards on her bed, utterly
refusing to be comforted. Aunt Martha had killed Adam. He was reposing
on a platter in the pantry that very minute, trussed and dressed,
encircled by his liver and heart and gizzard. Aunt Martha heeded
Faith’s passion of grief and anger not a whit.

“We had to have something for the strange minister’s dinner,” she said.
“You’re too big a girl to make such a fuss over an old rooster. You
knew he’d have to be killed sometime.”

“I’ll tell father when he comes home what you’ve done,” sobbed Faith.

“Don’t you go bothering your poor father. He has troubles enough. And
_I’m_ housekeeper here.”

“Adam was _mine_—Mrs. Johnson gave him to me. You had no business to
touch him,” stormed Faith.

“Don’t you get sassy now. The rooster’s killed and there’s an end of
it. I ain’t going to set no strange minister down to a dinner of cold
b’iled mutton. I was brought up to know better than that, if I have
come down in the world.”

Faith would not go down to supper that night and she would not go to
church the next morning. But at dinner time she went to the table, her
eyes swollen with crying, her face sullen.

The Rev. James Perry was a sleek, rubicund man, with a bristling white
moustache, bushy white eyebrows, and a shining bald head. He was
certainly not handsome and he was a very tiresome, pompous sort of
person. But if he had looked like the Archangel Michael and talked with
the tongues of men and angels Faith would still have utterly detested
him. He carved Adam up dexterously, showing off his plump white hands
and very handsome diamond ring. Also, he made jovial remarks all
through the performance. Jerry and Carl giggled, and even Una smiled
wanly, because she thought politeness demanded it. But Faith only
scowled darkly. The Rev. James thought her manners shockingly bad.
Once, when he was delivering himself of an unctuous remark to Jerry,
Faith broke in rudely with a flat contradiction. The Rev. James drew
his bushy eyebrows together at her.

“Little girls should not interrupt,” he said, “and they should not
contradict people who know far more than they do.”

This put Faith in a worse temper than ever. To be called “little girl”
as if she were no bigger than chubby Rilla Blythe over at Ingleside! It
was insufferable. And how that abominable Mr. Perry did eat! He even
picked poor Adam’s bones. Neither Faith nor Una would touch a mouthful,
and looked upon the boys as little better than cannibals. Faith felt
that if that awful repast did not soon come to an end she would wind it
up by throwing something at Mr. Perry’s gleaming head. Fortunately, Mr.
Perry found Aunt Martha’s leathery apple pie too much even for his
powers of mastication and the meal came to an end, after a long grace
in which Mr. Perry offered up devout thanks for the food which a kind
and beneficent Providence had provided for sustenance and temperate
pleasure.

“God hadn’t a single thing to do with providing Adam for you,” muttered
Faith rebelliously under her breath.

The boys gladly made their escape to outdoors, Una went to help Aunt
Martha with the dishes—though that rather grumpy old dame never
welcomed her timid assistance—and Faith betook herself to the study
where a cheerful wood fire was burning in the grate. She thought she
would thereby escape from the hated Mr. Perry, who had announced his
intention of taking a nap in his room during the afternoon. But
scarcely had Faith settled herself in a corner, with a book, when he
walked in and, standing before the fire, proceeded to survey the
disorderly study with an air of disapproval.

“You father’s books seem to be in somewhat deplorable confusion, my
little girl,” he said severely.

Faith darkled in her corner and said not a word. She would _not_ talk
to this—this creature.

“You should try to put them in order,” Mr. Perry went on, playing with
his handsome watch chain and smiling patronizingly on Faith. “You are
quite old enough to attend to such duties. _My_ little daughter at home
is only ten and she is already an excellent little housekeeper and the
greatest help and comfort to her mother. She is a very sweet child. I
wish you had the privilege of her acquaintance. She could help you in
many ways. Of course, you have not had the inestimable privilege of a
good mother’s care and training. A sad lack—a very sad lack. I have
spoken more than once to your father in this connection and pointed out
his duty to him faithfully, but so far with no effect. I trust he may
awaken to a realization of his responsibility before it is too late. In
the meantime, it is your duty and privilege to endeavour to take your
sainted mother’s place. You might exercise a great influence over your
brothers and your little sister—you might be a true mother to them. I
fear that you do not think of these things as you should. My dear
child, allow me to open your eyes in regard to them.”

Mr. Perry’s oily, complacent voice trickled on. He was in his element.
Nothing suited him better than to lay down the law, patronize and
exhort. He had no idea of stopping, and he did not stop. He stood
before the fire, his feet planted firmly on the rug, and poured out a
flood of pompous platitudes. Faith heard not a word. She was really not
listening to him at all. But she was watching his long black coat-tails
with impish delight growing in her brown eyes. Mr. Perry was standing
_very_ near the fire. His coat-tails began to scorch—his coat-tails
began to smoke. He still prosed on, wrapped up in his own eloquence.
The coat-tails smoked worse. A tiny spark flew up from the burning wood
and alighted in the middle of one. It clung and caught and spread into
a smouldering flame. Faith could restrain herself no longer and broke
into a stifled giggle.

Mr. Perry stopped short, angered over this impertinence. Suddenly he
became conscious that a reek of burning cloth filled the room. He
whirled round and saw nothing. Then he clapped his hands to his
coat-tails and brought them around in front of him. There was already
quite a hole in one of them—and this was his new suit. Faith shook with
helpless laughter over his pose and expression.

“Did you see my coat-tails burning?” he demanded angrily.

“Yes, sir,” said Faith demurely.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded, glaring at her.

“You said it wasn’t good manners to interrupt, sir,” said Faith, more
demurely still.

“If—if I was your father, I would give you a spanking that you would
remember all your life, Miss,” said a very angry reverend gentleman, as
he stalked out of the study. The coat of Mr. Meredith’s second best
suit would not fit Mr. Perry, so he had to go to the evening service
with his singed coat-tail. But he did not walk up the aisle with his
usual consciousness of the honour he was conferring on the building. He
never would agree to an exchange of pulpits with Mr. Meredith again,
and he was barely civil to the latter when they met for a few minutes
at the station the next morning. But Faith felt a certain gloomy
satisfaction. Adam was partially avenged.




CHAPTER XX.
FAITH MAKES A FRIEND


Next day in school was a hard one for Faith. Mary Vance had told the
tale of Adam, and all the scholars, except the Blythes, thought it
quite a joke. The girls told Faith, between giggles, that it was too
bad, and the boys wrote sardonic notes of condolence to her. Poor Faith
went home from school feeling her very soul raw and smarting within
her.

“I’m going over to Ingleside to have a talk with Mrs. Blythe,” she
sobbed. “_She_ won’t laugh at me, as everybody else does. I’ve just
_got_ to talk to somebody who understands how bad I feel.”

She ran down through Rainbow Valley. Enchantment had been at work the
night before. A light snow had fallen and the powdered firs were
dreaming of a spring to come and a joy to be. The long hill beyond was
richly purple with leafless beeches. The rosy light of sunset lay over
the world like a pink kiss. Of all the airy, fairy places, full of
weird, elfin grace, Rainbow Valley that winter evening was the most
beautiful. But all its dreamlike loveliness was lost on poor,
sore-hearted little Faith.

By the brook she came suddenly upon Rosemary West, who was sitting on
the old pine tree. She was on her way home from Ingleside, where she
had been giving the girls their music lesson. She had been lingering in
Rainbow Valley quite a little time, looking across its white beauty and
roaming some by-ways of dream. Judging from the expression of her face,
her thoughts were pleasant ones. Perhaps the faint, occasional tinkle
from the bells on the Tree Lovers brought the little lurking smile to
her lips. Or perhaps it was occasioned by the consciousness that John
Meredith seldom failed to spend Monday evening in the gray house on the
white wind-swept hill.

Into Rosemary’s dreams burst Faith Meredith full of rebellious
bitterness. Faith stopped abruptly when she saw Miss West. She did not
know her very well—just well enough to speak to when they met. And she
did not want to see any one just then—except Mrs. Blythe. She knew her
eyes and nose were red and swollen and she hated to have a stranger
know she had been crying.

“Good evening, Miss West,” she said uncomfortably.

“What is the matter, Faith?” asked Rosemary gently.

“Nothing,” said Faith rather shortly.

“Oh!” Rosemary smiled. “You mean nothing that you can tell to
outsiders, don’t you?”

Faith looked at Miss West with sudden interest. Here was a person who
understood things. And how pretty she was! How golden her hair was
under her plumy hat! How pink her cheeks were over her velvet coat! How
blue and companionable her eyes were! Faith felt that Miss West could
be a lovely friend—if only she were a friend instead of a stranger!

“I—I’m going up to tell Mrs. Blythe,” said Faith. “She always
understands—she never laughs at us. I always talk things over with her.
It helps.”

“Dear girlie, I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mrs. Blythe isn’t
home,” said Miss West, sympathetically. “She went to Avonlea to-day and
isn’t coming back till the last of the week.”

Faith’s lip quivered.

“Then I might as well go home again,” she said miserably.

“I suppose so—unless you think you could bring yourself to talk it over
with me instead,” said Miss Rosemary gently. “It _is_ such a help to
talk things over. _I_ know. I don’t suppose I can be as good at
understanding as Mrs. Blythe—but I promise you that I won’t laugh.”

“You wouldn’t laugh outside,” hesitated Faith. “But you might—inside.”

“No, I wouldn’t laugh inside, either. Why should I? Something has hurt
you—it never amuses me to see anybody hurt, no matter what hurts them.
If you feel that you’d like to tell me what has hurt you I’ll be glad
to listen. But if you think you’d rather not—that’s all right, too,
dear.”

Faith took another long, earnest look into Miss West’s eyes. They were
very serious—there was no laughter in them, not even far, far back.
With a little sigh she sat down on the old pine beside her new friend
and told her all about Adam and his cruel fate.

Rosemary did not laugh or feel like laughing. She understood and
sympathized—really, she was almost as good as Mrs. Blythe—yes, quite as
good.

“Mr. Perry is a minister, but he should have been a _butcher_,” said
Faith bitterly. “He is so fond of carving things up. He _enjoyed_
cutting poor Adam to pieces. He just sliced into him as if he were any
common rooster.”

“Between you and me, Faith, _I_ don’t like Mr. Perry very well myself,”
said Rosemary, laughing a little—but at Mr. Perry, not at Adam, as
Faith clearly understood. “I never did like him. I went to school with
him—he was a Glen boy, you know—and he was a most detestable little
prig even then. Oh, how we girls used to hate holding his fat, clammy
hands in the ring-around games. But we must remember, dear, that he
didn’t know that Adam had been a pet of yours. He thought he _was_ just
a common rooster. We must be just, even when we are terribly hurt.”

“I suppose so,” admitted Faith. “But why does everybody seem to think
it funny that I should have loved Adam so much, Miss West? If it had
been a horrid old cat nobody would have thought it queer. When Lottie
Warren’s kitten had its legs cut off by the binder everybody was sorry
for her. She cried two days in school and nobody laughed at her, not
even Dan Reese. And all her chums went to the kitten’s funeral and
helped her bury it—only they couldn’t bury its poor little paws with
it, because they couldn’t find them. It was a horrid thing to have
happen, of course, but I don’t think it was as dreadful as seeing your
pet _eaten up_. Yet everybody laughs at _me_.”

“I think it is because the name ‘rooster’ seems rather a funny one,”
said Rosemary gravely. “There _is_ something in it that is comical.
Now, ‘chicken’ is different. It doesn’t sound so funny to talk of
loving a chicken.”

“Adam was the dearest little chicken, Miss West. He was just a little
golden ball. He would run up to me and peck out of my hand. And he was
handsome when he grew up, too—white as snow, with such a beautiful
curving white tail, though Mary Vance said it was too short. He knew
his name and always came when I called him—he was a very intelligent
rooster. And Aunt Martha had no right to kill him. He was mine. It
wasn’t fair, was it, Miss West?”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Rosemary decidedly. “Not a bit fair. I remember I
had a pet hen when I was a little girl. She was such a pretty little
thing—all golden brown and speckly. I loved her as much as I ever loved
any pet. She was never killed—she died of old age. Mother wouldn’t have
her killed because she was my pet.”

“If _my_ mother had been living she wouldn’t have let Adam be killed,”
said Faith. “For that matter, father wouldn’t have either, if he’d been
home and known of it. I’m _sure_ he wouldn’t, Miss West.”

“I’m sure, too,” said Rosemary. There was a little added flush on her
face. She looked rather conscious but Faith noticed nothing.

“Was it _very_ wicked of me not to tell Mr. Perry his coat-tails were
scorching?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, terribly wicked,” answered Rosemary, with dancing eyes. “But _I_
would have been just as naughty, Faith—_I_ wouldn’t have told him they
were scorching—and I don’t believe I would ever have been a bit sorry
for my wickedness, either.”

“Una thought I should have told him because he was a minister.”

“Dearest, if a minister doesn’t behave as a gentleman we are not bound
to respect his coat-tails. I know _I_ would just have loved to see
Jimmy Perry’s coat-tails burning up. It must have been fun.”

Both laughed; but Faith ended with a bitter little sigh.

“Well, anyway, Adam is dead and I am _never_ going to love anything
again.”

“Don’t say that, dear. We miss so much out of life if we don’t love.
The more we love the richer life is—even if it is only some little
furry or feathery pet. Would you like a canary, Faith—a little golden
bit of a canary? If you would I’ll give you one. We have two up home.”

“Oh, I _would_ like that,” cried Faith. “I love birds. Only—would Aunt
Martha’s cat eat it? It’s so _tragic_ to have your pets eaten. I don’t
think I could endure it a second time.”

“If you hang the cage far enough from the wall I don’t think the cat
could harm it. I’ll tell you just how to take care of it and I’ll bring
it to Ingleside for you the next time I come down.”

To herself, Rosemary was thinking,

“It will give every gossip in the Glen something to talk of, but I
_will_ not care. I want to comfort this poor little heart.”

Faith was comforted. Sympathy and understanding were very sweet. She
and Miss Rosemary sat on the old pine until the twilight crept softly
down over the white valley and the evening star shone over the gray
maple grove. Faith told Rosemary all her small history and hopes, her
likes and dislikes, the ins and outs of life at the manse, the ups and
downs of school society. Finally they parted firm friends.

Mr. Meredith was, as usual, lost in dreams when supper began that
evening, but presently a name pierced his abstraction and brought him
back to reality. Faith was telling Una of her meeting with Rosemary.

“She is just lovely, I think,” said Faith. “Just as nice as Mrs.
Blythe—but different. I felt as if I wanted to hug her. She did hug
_me_—such a nice, velvety hug. And she called me ‘dearest.’ It
_thriled_ me. I could tell her _anything_.”

“So you liked Miss West, Faith?” Mr. Meredith asked, with a rather odd
intonation.

“I love her,” cried Faith.

“Ah!” said Mr. Meredith. “Ah!”




CHAPTER XXI.
THE IMPOSSIBLE WORD


John Meredith walked meditatively through the clear crispness of a
winter night in Rainbow Valley. The hills beyond glistened with the
chill splendid lustre of moonlight on snow. Every little fir tree in
the long valley sang its own wild song to the harp of wind and frost.
His children and the Blythe lads and lasses were coasting down the
eastern slope and whizzing over the glassy pond. They were having a
glorious time and their gay voices and gayer laughter echoed up and
down the valley, dying away in elfin cadences among the trees. On the
right the lights of Ingleside gleamed through the maple grove with the
genial lure and invitation which seems always to glow in the beacons of
a home where we know there is love and good-cheer and a welcome for all
kin, whether of flesh or spirit. Mr. Meredith liked very well on
occasion to spend an evening arguing with the doctor by the drift wood
fire, where the famous china dogs of Ingleside kept ceaseless watch and
ward, as became deities of the hearth, but to-night he did not look
that way. Far on the western hill gleamed a paler but more alluring
star. Mr. Meredith was on his way to see Rosemary West, and he meant to
tell her something which had been slowly blossoming in his heart since
their first meeting and had sprung into full flower on the evening when
Faith had so warmly voiced her admiration for Rosemary.

He had come to realize that he had learned to care for Rosemary. Not as
he had cared for Cecilia, of course. _That_ was entirely different.
That love of romance and dream and glamour could never, he thought,
return. But Rosemary was beautiful and sweet and dear—very dear. She
was the best of companions. He was happier in her company than he had
ever expected to be again. She would be an ideal mistress for his home,
a good mother to his children.

During the years of his widowhood Mr. Meredith had received innumerable
hints from brother members of Presbytery and from many parishioners who
could not be suspected of any ulterior motive, as well as from some who
could, that he ought to marry again: But these hints never made any
impression on him. It was commonly thought he was never aware of them.
But he was quite acutely aware of them. And in his own occasional
visitations of common sense he knew that the common sensible thing for
him to do was to marry. But common sense was not the strong point of
John Meredith, and to choose out, deliberately and cold-bloodedly, some
“suitable” woman, as one might choose a housekeeper or a business
partner, was something he was quite incapable of doing. How he hated
that word “suitable.” It reminded him so strongly of James Perry. “A
_suit_ able woman of _suit_ able age,” that unctuous brother of the
cloth had said, in his far from subtle hint. For the moment John
Meredith had had a perfectly unbelievable desire to rush madly away and
propose marriage to the youngest, most unsuitable woman it was possible
to discover.

Mrs. Marshall Elliott was his good friend and he liked her. But when
she had bluntly told him he should marry again he felt as if she had
torn away the veil that hung before some sacred shrine of his innermost
life, and he had been more or less afraid of her ever since. He knew
there were women in his congregation “of suitable age” who would marry
him quite readily. That fact had seeped through all his abstraction
very early in his ministry in Glen St. Mary. They were good,
substantial, uninteresting women, one or two fairly comely, the others
not exactly so and John Meredith would as soon have thought of marrying
any one of them as of hanging himself. He had some ideals to which no
seeming necessity could make him false. He could ask no woman to fill
Cecilia’s place in his home unless he could offer her at least some of
the affection and homage he had given to his girlish bride. And where,
in his limited feminine acquaintance, was such a woman to be found?

Rosemary West had come into his life on that autumn evening bringing
with her an atmosphere in which his spirit recognized native air.
Across the gulf of strangerhood they clasped hands of friendship. He
knew her better in that ten minutes by the hidden spring than he knew
Emmeline Drew or Elizabeth Kirk or Amy Annetta Douglas in a year, or
could know them, in a century. He had fled to her for comfort when Mrs.
Alec Davis had outraged his mind and soul and had found it. Since then
he had gone often to the house on the hill, slipping through the
shadowy paths of night in Rainbow Valley so astutely that Glen gossip
could never be absolutely certain that he _did_ go to see Rosemary
West. Once or twice he had been caught in the West living room by other
visitors; that was all the Ladies’ Aid had to go by. But when Elizabeth
Kirk heard it she put away a secret hope she had allowed herself to
cherish, without a change of expression on her kind plain face, and
Emmeline Drew resolved that the next time she saw a certain old
bachelor of Lowbridge she would not snub him as she had done at a
previous meeting. Of course, if Rosemary West was out to catch the
minister she would catch him; she looked younger than she was and _men_
thought her pretty; besides, the West girls had money!

“It is to be hoped that he won’t be so absent-minded as to propose to
Ellen by mistake,” was the only malicious thing she allowed herself to
say to a sympathetic sister Drew. Emmeline bore no further grudge
towards Rosemary. When all was said and done, an unencumbered bachelor
was far better than a widower with four children. It had been only the
glamour of the manse that had temporarily blinded Emmeline’s eyes to
the better part.

A sled with three shrieking occupants sped past Mr. Meredith to the
pond. Faith’s long curls streamed in the wind and her laughter rang
above that of the others. John Meredith looked after them kindly and
longingly. He was glad that his children had such chums as the
Blythes—glad that they had so wise and gay and tender a friend as Mrs.
Blythe. But they needed something more, and that something would be
supplied when he brought Rosemary West as a bride to the old manse.
There was in her a quality essentially maternal.

It was Saturday night and he did not often go calling on Saturday
night, which was supposed to be dedicated to a thoughtful revision of
Sunday’s sermon. But he had chosen this night because he had learned
that Ellen West was going to be away and Rosemary would be alone. Often
as he had spent pleasant evenings in the house on the hill he had
never, since that first meeting at the spring, seen Rosemary alone.
Ellen had always been there.

He did not precisely object to Ellen being there. He liked Ellen West
very much and they were the best of friends. Ellen had an almost
masculine understanding and a sense of humour which his own shy, hidden
appreciation of fun found very agreeable. He liked her interest in
politics and world events. There was no man in the Glen, not even
excepting Dr. Blythe, who had a better grasp of such things.

“I think it is just as well to be interested in things as long as you
live,” she had said. “If you’re not, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s
much difference between the quick and the dead.”

He liked her pleasant, deep, rumbly voice; he liked the hearty laugh
with which she always ended up some jolly and well-told story. She
never gave him digs about his children as other Glen women did; she
never bored him with local gossip; she had no malice and no pettiness.
She was always splendidly sincere. Mr. Meredith, who had picked up Miss
Cornelia’s way of classifying people, considered that Ellen belonged to
the race of Joseph. Altogether, an admirable woman for a sister-in-law.
Nevertheless, a man did not want even the most admirable of women
around when he was proposing to another woman. And Ellen was always
around. She did not insist on talking to Mr. Meredith herself all the
time. She let Rosemary have a fair share of him. Many evenings, indeed,
Ellen effaced herself almost totally, sitting back in the corner with
St. George in her lap, and letting Mr. Meredith and Rosemary talk and
sing and read books together. Sometimes they quite forgot her presence.
But if their conversation or choice of duets ever betrayed the least
tendency to what Ellen considered philandering, Ellen promptly nipped
that tendency in the bud and blotted Rosemary out for the rest of the
evening. But not even the grimmest of amiable dragons can altogether
prevent a certain subtle language of eye and smile and eloquent
silence; and so the minister’s courtship progressed after a fashion.

But if it was ever to reach a climax that climax must come when Ellen
was away. And Ellen was so seldom away, especially in winter. She found
her own fireside the pleasantest place in the world, she vowed. Gadding
had no attraction for her. She was fond of company but she wanted it at
home. Mr. Meredith had almost been driven to the conclusion that he
must write to Rosemary what he wanted to say, when Ellen casually
announced one evening that she was going to a silver wedding next
Saturday night. She had been bridesmaid when the principals were
married. Only old guests were invited, so Rosemary was not included.
Mr. Meredith pricked up his ears a trifle and a gleam flashed into his
dreamy dark eyes. Both Ellen and Rosemary saw it; and both Ellen and
Rosemary felt, with a tingling shock, that Mr. Meredith would certainly
come up the hill next Saturday night.

“Might as well have it over with, St. George,” Ellen sternly told the
black cat, after Mr. Meredith had gone home and Rosemary had silently
gone upstairs. “He means to ask her, St. George—I’m perfectly sure of
that. So he might as well have his chance to do it and find out he
can’t get her, George. She’d rather like to take him, Saint. I know
that—but she promised, and she’s got to keep her promise. I’m rather
sorry in some ways, St. George. I don’t know of a man I’d sooner have
for a brother-in-law if a brother-in-law was convenient. I haven’t a
thing against him, Saint—not a thing except that he won’t see and can’t
be made to see that the Kaiser is a menace to the peace of Europe.
That’s _his_ blind spot. But he’s good company and I like him. A woman
can say anything she likes to a man with a mouth like John Meredith’s
and be sure of not being misunderstood. Such a man is more precious
than rubies, Saint—and much rarer, George. But he can’t have
Rosemary—and I suppose when he finds out he can’t have her he’ll drop
us both. And we’ll miss him, Saint—we’ll miss him something scandalous,
George. But she promised, and I’ll see that she keeps her promise!”

Ellen’s face looked almost ugly in its lowering resolution. Upstairs
Rosemary was crying into her pillow.

So Mr. Meredith found his lady alone and looking very beautiful.
Rosemary had not made any special toilet for the occasion; she wanted
to, but she thought it would be absurd to dress up for a man you meant
to refuse. So she wore her plain dark afternoon dress and looked like a
queen in it. Her suppressed excitement coloured her face to brilliancy,
her great blue eyes were pools of light less placid than usual.

She wished the interview were over. She had looked forward to it all
day with dread. She felt quite sure that John Meredith cared a great
deal for her after a fashion—and she felt just as sure that he did not
care for her as he had cared for his first love. She felt that her
refusal would disappoint him considerably, but she did not think it
would altogether overwhelm him. Yet she hated to make it; hated for his
sake and—Rosemary was quite honest with herself—for her own. She knew
she could have loved John Meredith if—if it had been permissible. She
knew that life would be a blank thing if, rejected as lover, he refused
longer to be a friend. She knew that she could be very happy with him
and that she could make him happy. But between her and happiness stood
the prison gate of the promise she had made to Ellen years ago.
Rosemary could not remember her father. He had died when she was only
three years old. Ellen, who had been thirteen, remembered him, but with
no special tenderness. He had been a stern, reserved man many years
older than his fair, pretty wife. Five years later their brother of
twelve died also; since his death the two girls had always lived alone
with their mother. They had never mingled very freely in the social
life of the Glen or Lowbridge, though where they went the wit and
spirit of Ellen and the sweetness and beauty of Rosemary made them
welcome guests. Both had what was called “a disappointment” in their
girlhood. The sea had not given up Rosemary’s lover; and Norman
Douglas, then a handsome, red-haired young giant, noted for wild
driving and noisy though harmless escapades, had quarrelled with Ellen
and left her in a fit of pique.

There were not lacking candidates for both Martin’s and Norman’s
places, but none seemed to find favour in the eyes of the West girls,
who drifted slowly out of youth and bellehood without any seeming
regret. They were devoted to their mother, who was a chronic invalid.
The three had a little circle of home interests—books and pets and
flowers—which made them happy and contented.

Mrs. West’s death, which occurred on Rosemary’s twenty-fifth birthday,
was a bitter grief to them. At first they were intolerably lonely.
Ellen, especially, continued to grieve and brood, her long, moody
musings broken only by fits of stormy, passionate weeping. The old
Lowbridge doctor told Rosemary that he feared permanent melancholy or
worse.

Once, when Ellen had sat all day, refusing either to speak or eat,
Rosemary had flung herself on her knees by her sister’s side.

“Oh, Ellen, you have me yet,” she said imploringly. “Am I nothing to
you? We have always loved each other so.”

“I won’t have you always,” Ellen had said, breaking her silence with
harsh intensity. “You will marry and leave me. I shall be left all
alone. I cannot bear the thought—I _cannot_. I would rather die.”

“I will never marry,” said Rosemary, “never, Ellen.”

Ellen bent forward and looked searchingly into Rosemary’s eyes.

“Will you promise me that solemnly?” she said. “Promise it on mother’s
Bible.”

Rosemary assented at once, quite willing to humour Ellen. What did it
matter? She knew quite well she would never want to marry any one. Her
love had gone down with Martin Crawford to the deeps of the sea; and
without love she could not marry any one. So she promised readily,
though Ellen made rather a fearsome rite of it. They clasped hands over
the Bible, in their mother’s vacant room, and both vowed to each other
that they would never marry and would always live together.

Ellen’s condition improved from that hour. She soon regained her normal
cheery poise. For ten years she and Rosemary lived in the old house
happily, undisturbed by any thought of marrying or giving in marriage.
Their promise sat very lightly on them. Ellen never failed to remind
her sister of it whenever any eligible male creature crossed their
paths, but she had never been really alarmed until John Meredith came
home that night with Rosemary. As for Rosemary, Ellen’s obsession
regarding that promise had always been a little matter of mirth to
her—until lately. Now, it was a merciless fetter, self-imposed but
never to be shaken off. Because of it to-night she must turn her face
from happiness.

It was true that the shy, sweet, rosebud love she had given to her
boy-lover she could never give to another. But she knew now that she
could give to John Meredith a love richer and more womanly. She knew
that he touched deeps in her nature that Martin had never touched—that
had not, perhaps, been in the girl of seventeen to touch. And she must
send him away to-night—send him back to his lonely hearth and his empty
life and his heart-breaking problems, because she had promised Ellen,
ten years before, on their mother’s Bible, that she would never marry.

John Meredith did not immediately grasp his opportunity. On the
contrary, he talked for two good hours on the least lover-like of
subjects. He even tried politics, though politics always bored
Rosemary. The later began to think that she had been altogether
mistaken, and her fears and expectations suddenly seemed to her
grotesque. She felt flat and foolish. The glow went out of her face and
the lustre out of her eyes. John Meredith had not the slightest
intention of asking her to marry him.

And then, quite suddenly, he rose, came across the room, and standing
by her chair, he asked it. The room had grown terribly still. Even St.
George ceased to purr. Rosemary heard her own heart beating and was
sure John Meredith must hear it too.

Now was the time for her to say no, gently but firmly. She had been
ready for days with her stilted, regretful little formula. And now the
words of it had completely vanished from her mind. She had to say
no—and she suddenly found she could not say it. It was the impossible
word. She knew now that it was not that she _could_ have loved John
Meredith, but that she _did_ love him. The thought of putting him from
her life was agony.

She must say _something;_ she lifted her bowed golden head and asked
him stammeringly to give her a few days for—for consideration.

John Meredith was a little surprised. He was not vainer than any man
has a right to be, but he had expected that Rosemary West would say
yes. He had been tolerably sure she cared for him. Then why this
doubt—this hesitation? She was not a school girl to be uncertain as to
her own mind. He felt an ugly shock of disappointment and dismay. But
he assented to her request with his unfailing gentle courtesy and went
away at once.

“I will tell you in a few days,” said Rosemary, with downcast eyes and
burning face.

When the door shut behind him she went back into the room and wrung her
hands.




CHAPTER XXII.
ST. GEORGE KNOWS ALL ABOUT IT


At midnight Ellen West was walking home from the Pollock silver
wedding. She had stayed a little while after the other guests had gone,
to help the gray-haired bride wash the dishes. The distance between the
two houses was not far and the road good, so that Ellen was enjoying
the walk back home in the moonlight.

The evening had been a pleasant one. Ellen, who had not been to a party
for years, found it very pleasant. All the guests had been members of
her old set and there was no intrusive youth to spoil the flavour, for
the only son of the bride and groom was far away at college and could
not be present. Norman Douglas had been there and they had met socially
for the first time in years, though she had seen him once or twice in
church that winter. Not the least sentiment was awakened in Ellen’s
heart by their meeting. She was accustomed to wonder, when she thought
about it at all, how she could ever have fancied him or felt so badly
over his sudden marriage. But she had rather liked meeting him again.
She had forgotten how bracing and stimulating he could be. No gathering
was ever stagnant when Norman Douglas was present. Everybody had been
surprised when Norman came. It was well known he never went anywhere.
The Pollocks had invited him because he had been one of the original
guests, but they never thought he would come. He had taken his second
cousin, Amy Annetta Douglas, out to supper and seemed rather attentive
to her. But Ellen sat across the table from him and had a spirited
argument with him—an argument during which all his shouting and banter
could not fluster her and in which she came off best, flooring Norman
so composedly and so completely that he was silent for ten minutes. At
the end of which time he had muttered in his ruddy beard—“spunky as
ever—spunky as ever”—and began to hector Amy Annetta, who giggled
foolishly over his sallies where Ellen would have retorted bitingly.

Ellen thought these things over as she walked home, tasting them with
reminiscent relish. The moonlit air sparkled with frost. The snow
crisped under her feet. Below her lay the Glen with the white harbour
beyond. There was a light in the manse study. So John Meredith had gone
home. Had he asked Rosemary to marry him? And after what fashion had
she made her refusal known? Ellen felt that she would never know this,
though she was quite curious. She was sure Rosemary would never tell
her anything about it and she would not dare to ask. She must just be
content with the fact of the refusal. After all, that was the only
thing that really mattered.

“I hope he’ll have sense enough to come back once in a while and be
friendly,” she said to herself. She disliked so much to be alone that
thinking aloud was one of her devices for circumventing unwelcome
solitude. “It’s awful never to have a man-body with some brains to talk
to once in a while. And like as not he’ll never come near the house
again. There’s Norman Douglas, too—I like that man, and I’d like to
have a good rousing argument with him now and then. But he’d never dare
come up for fear people would think he was courting me again—for fear
_I’d_ think it, too, most likely—though he’s more a stranger to me now
than John Meredith. It seems like a dream that we could ever have been
beaus. But there it is—there’s only two men in the Glen I’d ever want
to talk to—and what with gossip and this wretched love-making business
it’s not likely I’ll ever see either of them again. I could,” said
Ellen, addressing the unmoved stars with a spiteful emphasis, “I could
have made a better world myself.”

She paused at her gate with a sudden vague feeling of alarm. There was
still a light in the living-room and to and fro across the
window-shades went the shadow of a woman walking restlessly up and
down. What was Rosemary doing up at this hour of the night? And why was
she striding about like a lunatic?

Ellen went softly in. As she opened the hall door Rosemary came out of
the room. She was flushed and breathless. An atmosphere of stress and
passion hung about her like a garment.

“Why aren’t you in bed, Rosemary?” demanded Ellen.

“Come in here,” said Rosemary intensely. “I want to tell you
something.”

Ellen composedly removed her wraps and overshoes, and followed her
sister into the warm, fire-lighted room. She stood with her hand on the
table and waited. She was looking very handsome herself, in her own
grim, black-browed style. The new black velvet dress, with its train
and V-neck, which she had made purposely for the party, became her
stately, massive figure. She wore coiled around her neck the rich heavy
necklace of amber beads which was a family heirloom. Her walk in the
frosty air had stung her cheeks into a glowing scarlet. But her
steel-blue eyes were as icy and unyielding as the sky of the winter
night. She stood waiting in a silence which Rosemary could break only
by a convulsive effort.

“Ellen, Mr. Meredith was here this evening.”

“Yes?”

“And—and—he asked me to marry him.”

“So I expected. Of course, you refused him?”

“No.”

“Rosemary.” Ellen clenched her hands and took an involuntary step
forward. “Do you mean to tell me that you accepted him?”

“No—no.”

Ellen recovered her self-command.

“What _did_ you do then?”

“I—I asked him to give me a few days to think it over.”

“I hardly see why that was necessary,” said Ellen, coldly contemptuous,
“when there is only the one answer you can make him.”

Rosemary held out her hands beseechingly.

“Ellen,” she said desperately, “I love John Meredith—I want to be his
wife. Will you set me free from that promise?”

“No,” said Ellen, merciless, because she was sick from fear.

“Ellen—Ellen—”

“Listen,” interrupted Ellen. “I did not ask you for that promise. You
offered it.”

“I know—I know. But I did not think then that I could ever care for
anyone again.”

“You offered it,” went on Ellen unmovably. “You promised it over our
mother’s Bible. It was more than a promise—it was an oath. Now you want
to break it.”

“I only asked you to set me free from it, Ellen.”

“I will not do it. A promise is a promise in my eyes. I will not do it.
Break your promise—be forsworn if you will—but it shall not be with any
assent of mine.”

“You are very hard on me, Ellen.”

“Hard on you! And what of me? Have you ever given a thought to what my
loneliness would be here if you left me? I could not bear it—I would go
crazy. I _cannot_ live alone. Haven’t I been a good sister to you? Have
I ever opposed any wish of yours? Haven’t I indulged you in
everything?”

“Yes—yes.”

“Then why do you want to leave me for this man whom you hadn’t seen a
year ago?”

“I love him, Ellen.”

“Love! You talk like a school miss instead of a middle-aged woman. He
doesn’t love you. He wants a housekeeper and a governess. You don’t
love him. You want to be ‘Mrs.’—you are one of those weak-minded women
who think it’s a disgrace to be ranked as an old maid. That’s all there
is to it.”

Rosemary quivered. Ellen could not, or would not, understand. There was
no use arguing with her.

“So you won’t release me, Ellen?”

“No, I won’t. And I won’t talk of it again. You promised and you’ve got
to keep your word. That’s all. Go to bed. Look at the time! You’re all
romantic and worked up. To-morrow you’ll be more sensible. At any rate,
don’t let me hear any more of this nonsense. Go.”

Rosemary went without another word, pale and spiritless. Ellen walked
stormily about the room for a few minutes, then paused before the chair
where St. George had been calmly sleeping through the whole evening. A
reluctant smile overspread her dark face. There had been only one time
in her life—the time of her mother’s death—when Ellen had not been able
to temper tragedy with comedy. Even in that long ago bitterness, when
Norman Douglas had, after a fashion, jilted her, she had laughed at
herself quite as often as she had cried.

“I expect there’ll be some sulking, St. George. Yes, Saint, I expect we
are in for a few unpleasant foggy days. Well, we’ll weather them
through, George. We’ve dealt with foolish children before, Saint.
Rosemary’ll sulk a while—and then she’ll get over it—and all will be as
before, George. She promised—and she’s got to keep her promise. And
that’s the last word on the subject I’ll say to you or her or anyone,
Saint.”

But Ellen lay savagely awake till morning.

There was no sulking, however. Rosemary was pale and quiet the next
day, but beyond that Ellen could detect no difference in her.
Certainly, she seemed to bear Ellen no grudge. It was stormy, so no
mention was made of going to church. In the afternoon Rosemary shut
herself in her room and wrote a note to John Meredith. She could not
trust herself to say “no” in person. She felt quite sure that if he
suspected she was saying “no” reluctantly he would not take it for an
answer, and she could not face pleading or entreaty. She must make him
think she cared nothing at all for him and she could do that only by
letter. She wrote him the stiffest, coolest little refusal imaginable.
It was barely courteous; it certainly left no loophole of hope for the
boldest lover—and John Meredith was anything but that. He shrank into
himself, hurt and mortified, when he read Rosemary’s letter next day in
his dusty study. But under his mortification a dreadful realization
presently made itself felt. He had thought he did not love Rosemary as
deeply as he had loved Cecilia. Now, when he had lost her, he knew that
he did. She was everything to him—everything! And he must put her out
of his life completely. Even friendship was impossible now. Life
stretched before him in intolerable dreariness. He must go on—there was
his work—his children—but the heart had gone out of him. He sat alone
all that evening in his dark, cold, comfortless study with his head
bowed on his hands. Up on the hill Rosemary had a headache and went
early to bed, while Ellen remarked to St. George, purring his disdain
of foolish humankind, who did not know that a soft cushion was the only
thing that really mattered,

“What would women do if headaches had never been invented, St. George?
But never mind, Saint. We’ll just wink the other eye for a few weeks. I
admit I don’t feel comfortable myself, George. I feel as if I had
drowned a kitten. But she promised, Saint—and she was the one to offer
it, George. Bismillah!”




CHAPTER XXIII.
THE GOOD-CONDUCT CLUB


A light rain had been falling all day—a little, delicate, beautiful
spring rain, that somehow seemed to hint and whisper of mayflowers and
wakening violets. The harbour and the gulf and the low-lying shore
fields had been dim with pearl-gray mists. But now in the evening the
rain had ceased and the mists had blown out to sea. Clouds sprinkled
the sky over the harbour like little fiery roses. Beyond it the hills
were dark against a spendthrift splendour of daffodil and crimson. A
great silvery evening star was watching over the bar. A brisk, dancing,
new-sprung wind was blowing up from Rainbow Valley, resinous with the
odours of fir and damp mosses. It crooned in the old spruces around the
graveyard and ruffled Faith’s splendid curls as she sat on Hezekiah
Pollock’s tombstone with her arms round Mary Vance and Una. Carl and
Jerry were sitting opposite them on another tombstone and all were
rather full of mischief after being cooped up all day.

“The air just _shines_ to-night, doesn’t it? It’s been washed so clean,
you see,” said Faith happily.

Mary Vance eyed her gloomily. Knowing what she knew, or fancied she
knew, Mary considered that Faith was far too light-hearted. Mary had
something on her mind to say and she meant to say it before she went
home. Mrs. Elliott had sent her up to the manse with some new-laid
eggs, and had told her not to stay longer than half an hour. The half
hour was nearly up, so Mary uncurled her cramped legs from under her
and said abruptly,

“Never mind about the air. Just you listen to me. You manse young ones
have just got to behave yourselves better than you’ve been doing this
spring—that’s all there is to it. I just come up to-night a-purpose to
tell you so. The way people are talking about you is awful.”

“What have we been doing now?” cried Faith in amazement, pulling her
arm away from Mary. Una’s lips trembled and her sensitive little soul
shrank within her. Mary was always so brutally frank. Jerry began to
whistle out of bravado. He meant to let Mary see he didn’t care for
_her_ tirades. Their behaviour was no business of _hers_ anyway. What
right had _she_ to lecture them on their conduct?

“Doing now! You’re doing _all_ the time,” retorted Mary. “Just as soon
as the talk about one of your didos fades away you do something else to
start it up again. It seems to me you haven’t any idea of how manse
children ought to behave!”

“Maybe _you_ can tell us,” said Jerry, killingly sarcastic.

Sarcasm was quite thrown away on Mary.

“_I_ can tell you what will happen if you don’t learn to behave
yourselves. The session will ask your father to resign. There now,
Master Jerry-know-it-all. Mrs. Alec Davis said so to Mrs. Elliott. I
heard her. I always have my ears pricked up when Mrs. Alec Davis comes
to tea. She said you were all going from bad to worse and that though
it was only what was to be expected when you had nobody to bring you
up, still the congregation couldn’t be expected to put up with it much
longer, and something would have to be done. The Methodists just laugh
and laugh at you, and that hurts the Presbyterian feelings. _She_ says
you all need a good dose of birch tonic. Lor’, if that would make folks
good _I_ oughter be a young saint. I’m not telling you this because I
want to hurt _your_ feelings. I’m sorry for you”—Mary was past mistress
of the gentle art of condescension. “_I_ understand that you haven’t
much chance, the way things are. But other people don’t make as much
allowance as _I_ do. Miss Drew says Carl had a frog in his pocket in
Sunday School last Sunday and it hopped out while she was hearing the
lesson. She says she’s going to give up the class. Why don’t you keep
your insecks home?”

“I popped it right back in again,” said Carl. “It didn’t hurt anybody—a
poor little frog! And I wish old Jane Drew _would_ give up our class. I
hate her. Her own nephew had a dirty plug of tobacco in his pocket and
offered us fellows a chew when Elder Clow was praying. I guess that’s
worse than a frog.”

“No, ‘cause frogs are more unexpected-like. They make more of a
sensation. ‘Sides, he wasn’t caught at it. And then that praying
competition you had last week has made a fearful scandal. Everybody is
talking about it.”

“Why, the Blythes were in that as well as us,” cried Faith,
indignantly. “It was Nan Blythe who suggested it in the first place.
And Walter took the prize.”

“Well, you get the credit of it any way. It wouldn’t have been so bad
if you hadn’t had it in the graveyard.”

“I should think a graveyard was a very good place to pray in,” retorted
Jerry.

“Deacon Hazard drove past when _you_ were praying,” said Mary, “and he
saw and heard you, with your hands folded over your stomach, and
groaning after every sentence. He thought you were making fun of
_him_.”

“So I was,” declared unabashed Jerry. “Only I didn’t know he was going
by, of course. That was just a mean accident. _I_ wasn’t praying in
real earnest—I knew I had no chance of winning the prize. So I was just
getting what fun I could out of it. Walter Blythe can pray bully. Why,
he can pray as well as dad.”

“Una is the only one of US who really likes praying,” said Faith
pensively.

“Well, if praying scandalizes people so much we mustn’t do it any
more,” sighed Una.

“Shucks, you can pray all you want to, only not in the graveyard—and
don’t make a game of it. That was what made it so bad—that, and having
a tea-party on the tombstones.”

“We hadn’t.”

“Well, a soap-bubble party then. You had _something_. The over-harbour
people swear you had a tea-party, but I’m willing to take your word.
And you used this tombstone as a table.”

“Well, Martha wouldn’t let us blow bubbles in the house. She was awful
cross that day,” explained Jerry. “And this old slab made such a jolly
table.”

“Weren’t they pretty?” cried Faith, her eyes sparkling over the
remembrance. “They reflected the trees and the hills and the harbour
like little fairy worlds, and when we shook them loose they floated
away down to Rainbow Valley.”

“All but one and it went over and bust up on the Methodist spire,” said
Carl.

“I’m glad we did it once, anyhow, before we found out it was wrong,”
said Faith.

“It wouldn’t have been wrong to blow them on the lawn,” said Mary
impatiently. “Seems like I can’t knock any sense into your heads.
You’ve been told often enough you shouldn’t play in the graveyard. The
Methodists are sensitive about it.”

“We forget,” said Faith dolefully. “And the lawn is so small—and so
caterpillary—and so full of shrubs and things. We can’t be in Rainbow
Valley all the time—and where are we to go?”

“It’s the things you _do_ in the graveyard. It wouldn’t matter if you
just sat here and talked quiet, same as we’re doing now. Well, I don’t
know what is going to come of it all, but I _do_ know that Elder Warren
is going to speak to your pa about it. Deacon Hazard is his cousin.”

“I wish they wouldn’t bother father about us,” said Una.

“Well, people think he ought to bother himself about you a little more.
_I_ don’t—_I_ understand him. He’s a child in some ways himself—that’s
what he is, and needs some one to look after him as bad as you do.
Well, perhaps he’ll have some one before long, if all tales is true.”

“What do you mean?” asked Faith.

“Haven’t you got any idea—honest?” demanded Mary.

“No, no. What _do_ you mean?”

“Well, you are a lot of innocents, upon my word. Why, _every_body is
talking of it. Your pa goes to see Rosemary West. _She_ is going to be
your step-ma.”

“I don’t believe it,” cried Una, flushing crimson.

“Well, _I_ dunno. I just go by what folks say. _I_ don’t give it for a
fact. But it would be a good thing. Rosemary West’d make you toe the
mark if she came here, I’ll bet a cent, for all she’s so sweet and
smiley on the face of her. They’re always that way till they’ve caught
them. But you need some one to bring you up. You’re disgracing your pa
and I feel for him. I’ve always thought an awful lot of your pa ever
since that night he talked to me so nice. I’ve never said a single
swear word since, or told a lie. And I’d like to see him happy and
comfortable, with his buttons on and his meals decent, and you young
ones licked into shape, and that old cat of a Martha put in _her_
proper place. The way she looked at the eggs I brought her to-night. ‘I
hope they’re fresh,’ says she. I just wished they _was_ rotten. But you
just mind that she gives you all one for breakfast, including your pa.
Make a fuss if she doesn’t. That was what they was sent up for—but I
don’t trust old Martha. She’s quite capable of feeding ‘em to her cat.”

Mary’s tongue being temporarily tired, a brief silence fell over the
graveyard. The manse children did not feel like talking. They were
digesting the new and not altogether palatable ideas Mary had suggested
to them. Jerry and Carl were somewhat startled. But, after all, what
did it matter? And it wasn’t likely there was a word of truth in it.
Faith, on the whole, was pleased. Only Una was seriously upset. She
felt that she would like to get away and cry.

“Will there be any stars in my crown?” sang the Methodist choir,
beginning to practise in the Methodist church.

“_I_ want just three,” said Mary, whose theological knowledge had
increased notably since her residence with Mrs. Elliott. “Just
three—setting up on my head, like a corownet, a big one in the middle
and a small one each side.”

“Are there different sizes in souls?” asked Carl.

“Of course. Why, little babies must have smaller ones than big men.
Well, it’s getting dark and I must scoot home. Mrs. Elliott doesn’t
like me to be out after dark. Laws, when I lived with Mrs. Wiley the
dark was just the same as the daylight to me. I didn’t mind it no
more’n a gray cat. Them days seem a hundred years ago. Now, you mind
what I’ve said and try to behave yourselves, for you pa’s sake. _I’ll_
always back you up and defend you—you can be dead sure of that. Mrs.
Elliott says she never saw the like of me for sticking up for my
friends. I was real sassy to Mrs. Alec Davis about you and Mrs. Elliott
combed me down for it afterwards. The fair Cornelia has a tongue of her
own and no mistake. But she was pleased underneath for all, ‘cause she
hates old Kitty Alec and she’s real fond of you. _I_ can see through
folks.”

Mary sailed off, excellently well pleased with herself, leaving a
rather depressed little group behind her.

“Mary Vance always says something that makes us feel bad when she comes
up,” said Una resentfully.

“I wish we’d left her to starve in the old barn,” said Jerry
vindictively.

“Oh, that’s wicked, Jerry,” rebuked Una.

“May as well have the game as the name,” retorted unrepentant Jerry.
“If people say we’re so bad let’s _be_ bad.”

“But not if it hurts father,” pleaded Faith.

Jerry squirmed uncomfortably. He adored his father. Through the
unshaded study window they could see Mr. Meredith at his desk. He did
not seem to be either reading or writing. His head was in his hands and
there was something in his whole attitude that spoke of weariness and
dejection. The children suddenly felt it.

“I dare say somebody’s been worrying him about us to-day,” said Faith.
“I wish we _could_ get along without making people talk. Oh—Jem Blythe!
How you scared me!”

Jem Blythe had slipped into the graveyard and sat down beside the
girls. He had been prowling about Rainbow Valley and had succeeded in
finding the first little star-white cluster of arbutus for his mother.
The manse children were rather silent after his coming. Jem was
beginning to grow away from them somewhat this spring. He was studying
for the entrance examination of Queen’s Academy and stayed after school
with the older pupils for extra lessons. Also, his evenings were so
full of work that he seldom joined the others in Rainbow Valley now. He
seemed to be drifting away into grown-up land.

“What is the matter with you all to-night?” he asked. “There’s no fun
in you.”

“Not much,” agreed Faith dolefully. “There wouldn’t be much fun in you
either if _you_ knew you were disgracing your father and making people
talk about you.”

“Who’s been talking about you now?”

“Everybody—so Mary Vance says.” And Faith poured out her troubles to
sympathetic Jem. “You see,” she concluded dolefully, “we’ve nobody to
bring us up. And so we get into scrapes and people think we’re bad.”

“Why don’t you bring yourselves up?” suggested Jem. “I’ll tell you what
to do. Form a Good-Conduct Club and punish yourselves every time you do
anything that’s not right.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Faith, struck by it. “But,” she added
doubtfully, “things that don’t seem a bit of harm to US seem simply
dreadful to other people. How can we tell? We can’t be bothering father
all the time—and he has to be away a lot, anyhow.”

“You could mostly tell if you stopped to think a thing over before
doing it and ask yourselves what the congregation would say about it,”
said Jem. “The trouble is you just rush into things and don’t think
them over at all. Mother says you’re all too impulsive, just as she
used to be. The Good-Conduct Club would help you to think, if you were
fair and honest about punishing yourselves when you broke the rules.
You’d have to punish in some way that really _hurt_, or it wouldn’t do
any good.”

“Whip each other?”

“Not exactly. You’d have to think up different ways of punishment to
suit the person. You wouldn’t punish each other—you’d punish
_yourselves_. I read all about such a club in a story-book. You try it
and see how it works.”

“Let’s,” said Faith; and when Jem was gone they agreed they would. “If
things aren’t right we’ve just got to make them right,” said Faith,
resolutely.

“We’ve got to be fair and square, as Jem says,” said Jerry. “This is a
club to bring ourselves up, seeing there’s nobody else to do it.
There’s no use in having many rules. Let’s just have one and any of us
that breaks it has got to be punished hard.”

“But _how_.”

“We’ll think that up as we go along. We’ll hold a session of the club
here in the graveyard every night and talk over what we’ve done through
the day, and if we think we’ve done anything that isn’t right or that
would disgrace dad the one that does it, or is responsible for it, must
be punished. That’s the rule. We’ll all decide on the kind of
punishment—it must be made to fit the crime, as Mr. Flagg says. And the
one that’s, guilty will be bound to carry it out and no shirking.
There’s going to be fun in this,” concluded Jerry, with a relish.

“You suggested the soap-bubble party,” said Faith.

“But that was before we’d formed the club,” said Jerry hastily.
“Everything starts from to-night.”

“But what if we can’t agree on what’s right, or what the punishment
ought to be? S’pose two of us thought of one thing and two another.
There ought to be five in a club like this.”

“We can ask Jem Blythe to be umpire. He is the squarest boy in Glen St.
Mary. But I guess we can settle our own affairs mostly. We want to keep
this as much of a secret as we can. Don’t breathe a word to Mary Vance.
She’d want to join and do the bringing up.”

“_I_ think,” said Faith, “that there’s no use in spoiling every day by
dragging punishments in. Let’s have a punishment day.”

“We’d better choose Saturday because there is no school to interfere,”
suggested Una.

“And spoil the one holiday in the week,” cried Faith. “Not much! No,
let’s take Friday. That’s fish day, anyhow, and we all hate fish. We
may as well have all the disagreeable things in one day. Then other
days we can go ahead and have a good time.”

“Nonsense,” said Jerry authoritatively. “Such a scheme wouldn’t work at
all. We’ll just punish ourselves as we go along and keep a clear slate.
Now, we all understand, don’t we? This is a Good-Conduct Club, for the
purpose of bringing ourselves up. We agree to punish ourselves for bad
conduct, and always to stop before we do anything, no matter what, and
ask ourselves if it is likely to hurt dad in any way, and any one who
shirks is to be cast out of the club and never allowed to play with the
rest of us in Rainbow Valley again. Jem Blythe to be umpire in case of
disputes. No more taking bugs to Sunday School, Carl, and no more
chewing gum in public, if you please, Miss Faith.”

“No more making fun of elders praying or going to the Methodist prayer
meeting,” retorted Faith.

“Why, it isn’t any harm to go to the Methodist prayer meeting,”
protested Jerry in amazement.

“Mrs. Elliott says it is, She says manse children have no business to
go anywhere but to Presbyterian things.”

“Darn it, I won’t give up going to the Methodist prayer meeting,” cried
Jerry. “It’s ten times more fun than ours is.”

“You said a naughty word,” cried Faith. “_Now_, you’ve got to punish
yourself.”

“Not till it’s all down in black and white. We’re only talking the club
over. It isn’t really formed until we’ve written it out and signed it.
There’s got to be a constitution and by-laws. And you _know_ there’s
nothing wrong in going to a prayer meeting.”

“But it’s not only the wrong things we’re to punish ourselves for, but
anything that might hurt father.”

“It won’t hurt anybody. You know Mrs. Elliott is cracked on the subject
of Methodists. Nobody else makes any fuss about my going. I always
behave myself. You ask Jem or Mrs. Blythe and see what they say. I’ll
abide by their opinion. I’m going for the paper now and I’ll bring out
the lantern and we’ll all sign.”

Fifteen minutes later the document was solemnly signed on Hezekiah
Pollock’s tombstone, on the centre of which stood the smoky manse
lantern, while the children knelt around it. Mrs. Elder Clow was going
past at the moment and next day all the Glen heard that the manse
children had been having another praying competition and had wound it
up by chasing each other all over the graves with a lantern. This piece
of embroidery was probably suggested by the fact that, after the
signing and sealing was completed, Carl had taken the lantern and had
walked circumspectly to the little hollow to examine his ant-hill. The
others had gone quietly into the manse and to bed.

“Do you think it is true that father is going to marry Miss West?” Una
had tremulously asked of Faith, after their prayers had been said.

“I don’t know, but I’d like it,” said Faith.

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” said Una, chokingly. “She is nice the way she is. But
Mary Vance says it changes people _altogether_ to be made stepmothers.
They get horrid cross and mean and hateful then, and turn your father
against you. She says they’re sure to do that. She never knew it to
fail in a single case.”

“I don’t believe Miss West would _ever_ try to do that,” cried Faith.

“Mary says _anybody_ would. She knows _all_ about stepmothers,
Faith—she says she’s seen hundreds of them—and you’ve never seen one.
Oh, Mary has told me blood-curdling things about them. She says she
knew of one who whipped her husband’s little girls on their bare
shoulders till they bled, and then shut them up in a cold, dark coal
cellar all night. She says they’re _all_ aching to do things like
that.”

“I don’t believe Miss West would. You don’t know her as well as I do,
Una. Just think of that sweet little bird she sent me. I love it far
more even than Adam.”

“It’s just being a stepmother changes them. Mary says they can’t help
it. I wouldn’t mind the whippings so much as having father hate us.”

“You know nothing could make father hate us. Don’t be silly, Una. I
dare say there’s nothing to worry over. Likely if we run our club right
and bring ourselves up properly father won’t think of marrying any one.
And if he does, I _know_ Miss West will be lovely to us.”

But Una had no such conviction and she cried herself to sleep.




CHAPTER XXIV.
A CHARITABLE IMPULSE


For a fortnight things ran smoothly in the Good-Conduct Club. It seemed
to work admirably. Not once was Jem Blythe called in as umpire. Not
once did any of the manse children set the Glen gossips by the ears. As
for their minor peccadilloes at home, they kept sharp tabs on each
other and gamely underwent their self-imposed punishment—generally a
voluntary absence from some gay Friday night frolic in Rainbow Valley,
or a sojourn in bed on some spring evening when all young bones ached
to be out and away. Faith, for whispering in Sunday School, condemned
herself to pass a whole day without speaking a single word, unless it
was absolutely necessary, and accomplished it. It was rather
unfortunate that Mr. Baker from over-harbour should have chosen that
evening for calling at the manse, and that Faith should have happened
to go to the door. Not one word did she reply to his genial greeting,
but went silently away to call her father briefly. Mr. Baker was
slightly offended and told his wife when he went home that that the
biggest Meredith girl seemed a very shy, sulky little thing, without
manners enough to speak when she was spoken to. But nothing worse came
of it, and generally their penances did no harm to themselves or
anybody else. All of them were beginning to feel quite cocksure that
after all, it was a very easy matter to bring yourself up.

“I guess people will soon see that we can behave ourselves properly as
well as anybody,” said Faith jubilantly. “It isn’t hard when we put our
minds to it.”

She and Una were sitting on the Pollock tombstone. It had been a cold,
raw, wet day of spring storm and Rainbow Valley was out of the question
for girls, though the manse and the Ingleside boys were down there
fishing. The rain had held up, but the east wind blew mercilessly in
from the sea, cutting to bone and marrow. Spring was late in spite of
its early promise, and there was even yet a hard drift of old snow and
ice in the northern corner of the graveyard. Lida Marsh, who had come
up to bring the manse a mess of herring, slipped in through the gate
shivering. She belonged to the fishing village at the harbour mouth and
her father had, for thirty years, made a practice of sending a mess
from his first spring catch to the manse. He never darkened a church
door; he was a hard drinker and a reckless man, but as long as he sent
those herring up to the manse every spring, as his father had done
before him, he felt comfortably sure that his account with the Powers
That Govern was squared for the year. He would not have expected a good
mackerel catch if he had not so sent the first fruits of the season.

Lida was a mite of ten and looked younger, because she was such a
small, wizened little creature. To-night, as she sidled boldly enough
up to the manse girls, she looked as if she had never been warm since
she was born. Her face was purple and her pale-blue, bold little eyes
were red and watery. She wore a tattered print dress and a ragged
woollen comforter, tied across her thin shoulders and under her arms.
She had walked the three miles from the harbour mouth barefooted, over
a road where there was still snow and slush and mud. Her feet and legs
were as purple as her face. But Lida did not mind this much. She was
used to being cold, and she had been going barefooted for a month
already, like all the other swarming young fry of the fishing village.
There was no self-pity in her heart as she sat down on the tombstone
and grinned cheerfully at Faith and Una. Faith and Una grinned
cheerfully back. They knew Lida slightly, having met her once or twice
the preceding summer when they had gone down the harbour with the
Blythes.

“Hello!” said Lida, “ain’t this a fierce kind of a night? ‘T’ain’t fit
for a dog to be out, is it?”

“Then why are you out?” asked Faith.

“Pa made me bring you up some herring,” returned Lida. She shivered,
coughed, and stuck out her bare feet. Lida was not thinking about
herself or her feet, and was making no bid for sympathy. She held her
feet out instinctively to keep them from the wet grass around the
tombstone. But Faith and Una were instantly swamped with a wave of pity
for her. She looked so cold—so miserable.

“Oh, why are you barefooted on such a cold night?” cried Faith. “Your
feet must be almost frozen.”

“Pretty near,” said Lida proudly. “I tell you it was fierce walking up
that harbour road.”

“Why didn’t you put on your shoes and stockings?” asked Una.

“Hain’t none to put on. All I had was wore out by the time winter was
over,” said Lida indifferently.

For a moment Faith stated in horror. This was terrible. Here was a
little girl, almost a neighbour, half frozen because she had no shoes
or stockings in this cruel spring weather. Impulsive Faith thought of
nothing but the dreadfulness of it. In a moment she was pulling off her
own shoes and stockings.

“Here, take these and put them right on,” she said, forcing them into
the hands of the astonished Lida. “Quick now. You’ll catch your death
of cold. I’ve got others. Put them right on.”

Lida, recovering her wits, snatched at the offered gift, with a sparkle
in her dull eyes. Sure she would put them on, and that mighty quick,
before any one appeared with authority to recall them. In a minute she
had pulled the stockings over her scrawny little legs and slipped
Faith’s shoes over her thick little ankles.

“I’m obliged to you,” she said, “but won’t your folks be cross?”

“No—and I don’t care if they are,” said Faith. “Do you think I could
see any one freezing to death without helping them if I could? It
wouldn’t be right, especially when my father’s a minister.”

“Will you want them back? It’s awful cold down at the harbour
mouth—long after it’s warm up here,” said Lida slyly.

“No, you’re to keep them, of course. That is what I meant when I gave
them. I have another pair of shoes and plenty of stockings.”

Lida had meant to stay awhile and talk to the girls about many things.
But now she thought she had better get away before somebody came and
made her yield up her booty. So she shuffled off through the bitter
twilight, in the noiseless, shadowy way she had slipped in. As soon as
she was out of sight of the manse she sat down, took off the shoes and
stockings, and put them in her herring basket. She had no intention of
keeping them on down that dirty harbour road. They were to be kept good
for gala occasions. Not another little girl down at the harbour mouth
had such fine black cashmere stockings and such smart, almost new
shoes. Lida was furnished forth for the summer. She had no qualms in
the matter. In her eyes the manse people were quite fabulously rich,
and no doubt those girls had slathers of shoes and stockings. Then Lida
ran down to the Glen village and played for an hour with the boys
before Mr. Flagg’s store, splashing about in a pool of slush with the
maddest of them, until Mrs. Elliott came along and bade her begone
home.

“I don’t think, Faith, that you should have done that,” said Una, a
little reproachfully, after Lida had gone. “You’ll have to wear your
good boots every day now and they’ll soon scuff out.”

“I don’t care,” cried Faith, still in the fine glow of having done a
kindness to a fellow creature. “It isn’t fair that I should have two
pairs of shoes and poor little Lida Marsh not have any. _Now_ we both
have a pair. You know perfectly well, Una, that father said in his
sermon last Sunday that there was no real happiness in getting or
having—only in giving. And it’s true. I feel _far_ happier now than I
ever did in my whole life before. Just think of Lida walking home this
very minute with her poor little feet all nice and warm and comfy.”

“You know you haven’t another pair of black cashmere stockings,” said
Una. “Your other pair were so full of holes that Aunt Martha said she
couldn’t darn them any more and she cut the legs up for stove dusters.
You’ve nothing but those two pairs of striped stockings you hate so.”

All the glow and uplift went out of Faith. Her gladness collapsed like
a pricked balloon. She sat for a few dismal minutes in silence, facing
the consequences of her rash act.

“Oh, Una, I never thought of that,” she said dolefully. “I didn’t stop
to think at all.”

The striped stockings were thick, heavy, coarse, ribbed stockings of
blue and red which Aunt Martha had knit for Faith in the winter. They
were undoubtedly hideous. Faith loathed them as she had never loathed
anything before. Wear them she certainly would not. They were still
unworn in her bureau drawer.

“You’ll have to wear the striped stockings after this,” said Una. “Just
think how the boys in school will laugh at you. You know how they laugh
at Mamie Warren for her striped stockings and call her barber pole and
yours are far worse.”

“I won’t wear them,” said Faith. “I’ll go barefooted first, cold as it
is.”

“You can’t go barefooted to church to-morrow. Think what people would
say.”

“Then I’ll stay home.”

“You can’t. You know very well Aunt Martha will make you go.”

Faith did know this. The one thing on which Aunt Martha troubled
herself to insist was that they must all go to church, rain or shine.
How they were dressed, or if they were dressed at all, never concerned
her. But go they must. That was how Aunt Martha had been brought up
seventy years ago, and that was how she meant to bring them up.

“Haven’t you got a pair you can lend me, Una?” said poor Faith
piteously.

Una shook her head. “No, you know I only have the one black pair. And
they’re so tight I can hardly get them on. They wouldn’t go on you.
Neither would my gray ones. Besides, the legs of _them_ are all darned
_and_ darned.”

“I won’t wear those striped stockings,” said Faith stubbornly. “The
feel of them is even worse than the looks. They make me feel as if my
legs were as big as barrels and they’re so _scratchy_.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do.”

“If father was home I’d go and ask him to get me a new pair before the
store closes. But he won’t be home till too late. I’ll ask him
Monday—and I won’t go to church tomorrow. I’ll pretend I’m sick and
Aunt Martha’ll _have_ to let me stay home.”

“That would be acting a lie, Faith,” cried Una. “You _can’t_ do that.
You know it would be dreadful. What would father say if he knew? Don’t
you remember how he talked to us after mother died and told us we must
always be _true_, no matter what else we failed in. He said we must
never tell or act a lie—he said he’d _trust_ us not to. You _can’t_ do
it, Faith. Just wear the striped stockings. It’ll only be for once.
Nobody will notice them in church. It isn’t like school. And your new
brown dress is so long they won’t show much. Wasn’t it lucky Aunt
Martha made it big, so you’d have room to grow in it, for all you hated
it so when she finished it?”

“I won’t wear those stockings,” repeated Faith. She uncoiled her bare,
white legs from the tombstone and deliberately walked through the wet,
cold grass to the bank of snow. Setting her teeth, she stepped upon it
and stood there.

“What are you doing?” cried Una aghast. “You’ll catch your death of
cold, Faith Meredith.”

“I’m trying to,” answered Faith. “I hope I’ll catch a fearful cold and
be _awful_ sick to-morrow. Then I won’t be acting a lie. I’m going to
stand here as long as I can bear it.”

“But, Faith, you might really die. You might get pneumonia. Please,
Faith don’t. Let’s go into the house and get _something_ for your feet.
Oh, here’s Jerry. I’m so thankful. Jerry, _make_ Faith get off that
snow. Look at her feet.”

“Holy cats! Faith, what _are_ you doing?” demanded Jerry. “Are you
crazy?”

“No. Go away!” snapped Faith.

“Then are you punishing yourself for something? It isn’t right, if you
are. You’ll be sick.”

“I want to be sick. I’m not punishing myself. Go away.”

“Where’s her shoes and stockings?” asked Jerry of Una.

“She gave them to Lida Marsh.”

“Lida Marsh? What for?”

“Because Lida had none—and her feet were so cold. And now she wants to
be sick so that she won’t have to go to church to-morrow and wear her
striped stockings. But, Jerry, she may die.”

“Faith,” said Jerry, “get off that ice-bank or I’ll pull you off.”

“Pull away,” dared Faith.

Jerry sprang at her and caught her arms. He pulled one way and Faith
pulled another. Una ran behind Faith and pushed. Faith stormed at Jerry
to leave her alone. Jerry stormed back at her not to be a dizzy idiot;
and Una cried. They made no end of noise and they were close to the
road fence of the graveyard. Henry Warren and his wife drove by and
heard and saw them. Very soon the Glen heard that the manse children
had been having an awful fight in the graveyard and using most improper
language. Meanwhile, Faith had allowed herself to be pulled off the ice
because her feet were aching so sharply that she was ready to get off
any way. They all went in amiably and went to bed. Faith slept like a
cherub and woke in the morning without a trace of a cold. She felt that
she couldn’t feign sickness and act a lie, after remembering that
long-ago talk with her father. But she was still as fully determined as
ever that she would not wear those abominable stockings to church.




CHAPTER XXV.
ANOTHER SCANDAL AND ANOTHER “EXPLANATION”


Faith went early to Sunday School and was seated in the corner of her
class pew before any one came. Therefore, the dreadful truth did not
burst upon any one until Faith left the class pew near the door to walk
up to the manse pew after Sunday School. The church was already half
filled and all who were sitting near the aisle saw that the minister’s
daughter had boots on but no stockings!

Faith’s new brown dress, which Aunt Martha had made from an ancient
pattern, was absurdly long for her, but even so it did not meet her
boot-tops. Two good inches of bare white leg showed plainly.

Faith and Carl sat alone in the manse pew. Jerry had gone into the
gallery to sit with a chum and the Blythe girls had taken Una with
them. The Meredith children were given to “sitting all over the church”
in this fashion and a great many people thought it very improper. The
gallery especially, where irresponsible lads congregated and were known
to whisper and suspected of chewing tobacco during service, was no
place, for a son of the manse. But Jerry hated the manse pew at the
very top of the church, under the eyes of Elder Clow and his family. He
escaped from it whenever he could.

Carl, absorbed in watching a spider spinning its web at the window, did
not notice Faith’s legs. She walked home with her father after church
and he never noticed them. She got on the hated striped stockings
before Jerry and Una arrived, so that for the time being none of the
occupants of the manse knew what she had done. But nobody else in Glen
St. Mary was ignorant of it. The few who had not seen soon heard.
Nothing else was talked of on the way home from church. Mrs. Alec Davis
said it was only what she expected, and the next thing you would see
some of those young ones coming to church with no clothes on at all.
The president of the Ladies’ Aid decided that she would bring the
matter up at the next Aid meeting, and suggest that they wait in a body
on the minister and protest. Miss Cornelia said that she, for her part,
gave up. There was no use worrying over the manse fry any longer. Even
Mrs. Dr. Blythe felt a little shocked, though she attributed the
occurrence solely to Faith’s forgetfulness. Susan could not immediately
begin knitting stockings for Faith because it was Sunday, but she had
one set up before any one else was out of bed at Ingleside the next
morning.

“You need not tell me anything but that it was old Martha’s fault, Mrs.
Dr. dear.” she told Anne. “I suppose that poor little child had no
decent stockings to wear. I suppose every stocking she had was in
holes, as you know very well they generally are. And _I_ think, Mrs.
Dr. dear, that the Ladies’ Aid would be better employed in knitting
some for them than in fighting over the new carpet for the pulpit
platform. _I_ am not a Ladies’ Aider, but I shall knit Faith two pairs
of stockings, out of this nice black yarn, as fast as my fingers can
move and that you may tie to. Never shall I forget my sensations, Mrs.
Dr. dear, when I saw a minister’s child walking up the aisle of our
church with no stockings on. I really did not know what way to look.”

“And the church was just full of Methodists yesterday, too,” groaned
Miss Cornelia, who had come up to the Glen to do some shopping and run
into Ingleside to talk the affair over. “I don’t know how it is, but
just as sure as those manse children do something especially awful the
church is sure to be crowded with Methodists. I thought Mrs. Deacon
Hazard’s eyes would drop out of her head. When she came out of church
she said, ‘Well, that exhibition was no more than decent. I do pity the
Presbyterians.’ And we just had to _take_ it. There was nothing one
could say.”

“There was something _I_ could have said, Mrs. Dr. dear, if I had heard
her,” said Susan grimly. “I would have said, for one thing, that in my
opinion clean bare legs were quite as decent as holes. And I would have
said, for another, that the Presbyterians did not feel greatly in need
of pity seeing that they had a minister who could _preach_ and the
Methodists had _not_. I could have squelched Mrs. Deacon Hazard, Mrs.
Dr dear, and that you may tie to.”

“I wish Mr. Meredith didn’t preach quite so well and looked after his
family a little better,” retorted Miss Cornelia. “He could at least
glance over his children before they went to church and see that they
were quite properly clothed. I’m tired making excuses for him, believe
_me_.”

Meanwhile, Faith’s soul was being harrowed up in Rainbow Valley. Mary
Vance was there and, as usual, in a lecturing mood. She gave Faith to
understand that she had disgraced herself and her father beyond
redemption and that she, Mary Vance, was done with her. “Everybody” was
talking, and “everybody” said the same thing.

“I simply feel that I can’t associate with you any longer,” she
concluded.

“_We_ are going to associate with her then,” cried Nan Blythe. Nan
secretly thought Faith _had_ done a awful thing, but she wasn’t going
to let Mary Vance run matters in this high-handed fashion. “And if
_you_ are not you needn’t come any more to Rainbow Valley, _Miss_
Vance.”

Nan and Di both put their arms around Faith and glared defiance at
Mary. The latter suddenly crumpled up, sat down on a stump and began to
cry.

“It ain’t that I don’t want to,” she wailed. “But if I keep in with
Faith people’ll be saying I put her up to doing things. Some are saying
it now, true’s you live. I can’t afford to have such things said of me,
now that I’m in a respectable place and trying to be a lady. And _I_
never went bare-legged in church in my toughest days. I’d never have
thought of doing such a thing. But that hateful old Kitty Alec says
Faith has never been the same girl since that time I stayed in the
manse. She says Cornelia Elliott will live to rue the day she took me
in. It hurts my feelings, I tell you. But it’s Mr. Meredith I’m really
worried over.”

“I think you needn’t worry about him,” said Di scornfully. “It isn’t
likely necessary. Now, Faith darling, stop crying and tell us why you
did it.”

Faith explained tearfully. The Blythe girls sympathized with her, and
even Mary Vance agreed that it was a hard position to be in. But Jerry,
on whom the thing came like a thunderbolt, refused to be placated. So
_this_ was what some mysterious hints he had got in school that day
meant! He marched Faith and Una home without ceremony, and the
Good-Conduct Club held an immediate session in the graveyard to sit in
judgment on Faith’s case.

“I don’t see that it was any harm,” said Faith defiantly. “Not _much_
of my legs showed. It wasn’t _wrong_ and it didn’t hurt anybody.”

“It will hurt Dad. You _know_ it will. You know people blame him
whenever we do anything queer.”

“I didn’t think of that,” muttered Faith.

“That’s just the trouble. You didn’t think and you _should_ have
thought. That’s what our Club is for—to bring us up and _make_ us
think. We promised we’d always stop and think before doing things. You
didn’t and you’ve got to be punished, Faith—and real hard, too. You’ll
wear those striped stockings to school for a week for punishment.”

“Oh, Jerry, won’t a day do—two days? Not a whole week!”

“Yes, a whole week,” said inexorable Jerry. “It is fair—ask Jem Blythe
if it isn’t.”

Faith felt she would rather submit then ask Jem Blythe about such a
matter. She was beginning to realize that her offence was a quite
shameful one.

“I’ll do it, then,” she muttered, a little sulkily.

“You’re getting off easy,” said, Jerry severely. “And no matter how we
punish you it won’t help father. People will always think you just did
it for mischief, and they’ll blame father for not stopping it. We can
never explain it to everybody.”

This aspect of the case weighed on Faith’s mind. Her own condemnation
she could bear, but it tortured her that her father should be blamed.
If people knew the true facts of the case they would not blame him. But
how could she make them known to all the world? Getting up in church,
as she had once done, and explaining the matter was out of the
question. Faith had heard from Mary Vance how the congregation had
looked upon that performance and realized that she must not repeat it.
Faith worried over the problem for half a week. Then she had an
inspiration and promptly acted upon it. She spent that evening in the
garret, with a lamp and an exercise book, writing busily, with flushed
cheeks and shining eyes. It was the very thing! How clever she was to
have thought of it! It would put everything right and explain
everything and yet cause no scandal. It was eleven o’clock when she had
finished to her satisfaction and crept down to bed, dreadfully tired,
but perfectly happy.

In a few days the little weekly published in the Glen under the name of
_The Journal_ came out as usual, and the Glen had another sensation. A
letter signed “Faith Meredith” occupied a prominent place on the front
page and ran as follows:—

“TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

“I want to explain to everybody how it was I came to go to church
without stockings on, so that everybody will know that father was not
to blame one bit for it, and the old gossips need not say he is,
because it is not true. I gave my only pair of black stockings to Lida
Marsh, because she hadn’t any and her poor little feet were awful cold
and I was so sorry for her. No child ought to have to go without shoes
and stockings in a Christian community before the snow is all gone, and
I think the W. F. M. S. ought to have given her stockings. Of course, I
know they are sending things to the little heathen children, and that
is all right and a kind thing to do. But the little heathen children
have lots more warm weather than we have, and I think the women of our
church ought to look after Lida and not leave it all to me. When I gave
her my stockings I forgot they were the only black pair I had without
holes, but I am glad I did give them to her, because my conscience
would have been uncomfortable if I hadn’t. When she had gone away,
looking so proud and happy, the poor little thing, I remembered that
all I had to wear were the horrid red and blue things Aunt Martha knit
last winter for me out of some yarn that Mrs. Joseph Burr of Upper Glen
sent us. It was dreadfully coarse yarn and all knots, and I never saw
any of Mrs. Burr’s own children wearing things made of such yarn. But
Mary Vance says Mrs. Burr gives the minister stuff that she can’t use
or eat herself, and thinks it ought to go as part of the salary her
husband signed to pay, but never does.

“I just couldn’t bear to wear those hateful stockings. They were so
ugly and rough and felt so scratchy. Everybody would have made fun of
me. I thought at first I’d pretend to be sick and not go to church next
day, but I decided I couldn’t do that, because it would be acting a
lie, and father told us after mother died that was something we must
never, never do. It is just as bad to act a lie as to tell one, though
I know some people, right here in the Glen, who act them, and never
seem to feel a bit bad about it. I will not mention any names, but I
know who they are and so does father.

“Then I tried my best to catch cold and really be sick by standing on
the snowbank in the Methodist graveyard with my bare feet until Jerry
pulled me off. But it didn’t hurt me a bit and so I couldn’t get out of
going to church. So I just decided I would put my boots on and go that
way. I can’t see why it was so wrong and I was so careful to wash my
legs just as clean as my face, but, anyway, father wasn’t to blame for
it. He was in the study thinking of his sermon and other heavenly
things, and I kept out of his way before I went to Sunday School.
Father does not look at people’s legs in church, so of course he did
not notice mine, but all the gossips did and talked about it, and that
is why I am writing this letter to the _Journal_ to explain. I suppose
I did very wrong, since everybody says so, and I am sorry and I am
wearing those awful stockings to punish myself, although father bought
me two nice new black pairs as soon as Mr. Flagg’s store opened on
Monday morning. But it was all my fault, and if people blame father for
it after they read this they are not Christians and so I do not mind
what they say.

“There is another thing I want to explain about before I stop. Mary
Vance told me that Mr. Evan Boyd is blaming the Lew Baxters for
stealing potatoes out of his field last fall. They did not touch his
potatoes. They are very poor, but they are honest. It was us did
it—Jerry and Carl and I. Una was not with us at the time. We never
thought it was stealing. We just wanted a few potatoes to cook over a
fire in Rainbow Valley one evening to eat with our fried trout. Mr.
Boyd’s field was the nearest, just between the valley and the village,
so we climbed over his fence and pulled up some stalks. The potatoes
were awful small, because Mr. Boyd did not put enough fertilizer on
them and we had to pull up a lot of stalks before we got enough, and
then they were not much bigger than marbles. Walter and Di Blythe
helped us eat them, but they did not come along until we had them
cooked and did not know where we got them, so they were not to blame at
all, only us. We didn’t mean any harm, but if it was stealing we are
very sorry and we will pay Mr. Boyd for them if he will wait until we
grow up. We never have any money now because we are not big enough to
earn any, and Aunt Martha says it takes every cent of poor father’s
salary, even when it is paid up regularly—and it isn’t often—to run
this house. But Mr. Boyd must not blame the Lew Baxters any more, when
they were quite innocent, and give them a bad name.

“Yours respectfully,
“FAITH MEREDITH.”




CHAPTER XXVI.
MISS CORNELIA GETS A NEW POINT OF VIEW


“Susan, after I’m dead I’m going to come back to earth every time when
the daffodils blow in this garden,” said Anne rapturously. “Nobody may
see me, but I’ll be here. If anybody is in the garden at the time—I
_think_ I’ll come on an evening just like this, but it _might_ be just
at dawn—a lovely, pale-pinky spring dawn—they’ll just see the daffodils
nodding wildly as if an extra gust of wind had blown past them, but it
will be _I_.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Dr. dear, you will not be thinking of flaunting worldly
things like daffies after you are dead,” said Susan. “And I do _not_
believe in ghosts, seen or unseen.”

“Oh, Susan, I shall not be a ghost! That has such a horrible sound. I
shall just be _me_. And I shall run around in the twilight, whether it
is morn or eve, and see all the spots I love. Do you remember how badly
I felt when I left our little House of Dreams, Susan? I thought I could
never love Ingleside so well. But I do. I love every inch of the ground
and every stick and stone on it.”

“I am rather fond of the place myself,” said Susan, who would have died
if she had been removed from it, “but we must not set our affections
too much on earthly things, Mrs. Dr. dear. There are such things as
fires and earthquakes. We should always be prepared. The Tom
MacAllisters over-harbour were burned out three nights ago. Some say
Tom MacAllister set the house on fire himself to get the insurance.
That may or may not be. But I advise the doctor to have our chimneys
seen to at once. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But I
see Mrs. Marshall Elliott coming in at the gate, looking as if she had
been sent for and couldn’t go.”

“Anne dearie, have you seen the _Journal_ to-day?”

Miss Cornelia’s voice was trembling, partly from emotion, partly from
the fact that she had hurried up from the store too fast and lost her
breath.

Anne bent over the daffodils to hide a smile. She and Gilbert had
laughed heartily and heartlessly over the front page of the _Journal_
that day, but she knew that to dear Miss Cornelia it was almost a
tragedy, and she must not wound her feelings by any display of levity.

“Isn’t it dreadful? What _is_ to be done?” asked Miss Cornelia
despairingly. Miss Cornelia had vowed that she was done with worrying
over the pranks of the manse children, but she went on worrying just
the same.

Anne led the way to the veranda, where Susan was knitting, with Shirley
and Rilla conning their primers on either side. Susan was already on
her second pair of stockings for Faith. Susan never worried over poor
humanity. She did what in her lay for its betterment and serenely left
the rest to the Higher Powers.

“Cornelia Elliott thinks she was born to run this world, Mrs. Dr.
dear,” she had once said to Anne, “and so she is always in a stew over
something. I have never thought _I_ was, and so I go calmly along. Not
but what it has sometimes occurred to me that things might be run a
little better than they are. But it is not for us poor worms to nourish
such thoughts. They only make us uncomfortable and do not get us
anywhere.”

“I don’t see that anything can be done—now—” said Anne, pulling out a
nice, cushiony chair for Miss Cornelia. “But how in the world did Mr.
Vickers allow that letter to be printed? Surely he should have known
better.”

“Why, he’s away, Anne dearie—he’s been away to New Brunswick for a
week. And that young scalawag of a Joe Vickers is editing the _Journal_
in his absence. Of course, Mr. Vickers would never have put it in, even
if he is a Methodist, but Joe would just think it a good joke. As you
say, I don’t suppose there is anything to be done now, only live it
down. But if I ever get Joe Vickers cornered somewhere I’ll give him a
talking to he won’t forget in a hurry. I wanted Marshall to stop our
subscription to the _Journal_ instantly, but he only laughed and said
that to-day’s issue was the only one that had had anything readable in
it for a year. Marshall never will take anything seriously—just like a
man. Fortunately, Evan Boyd is like that, too. He takes it as a joke
and is laughing all over the place about it. And he’s another
Methodist! As for Mrs. Burr of Upper Glen, of course she will be
furious and they will leave the church. Not that it will be a great
loss from any point of view. The Methodists are quite welcome to
_them_.”

“It serves Mrs. Burr right,” said Susan, who had an old feud with the
lady in question and had been hugely tickled over the reference to her
in Faith’s letter. “She will find that she will not be able to cheat
the Methodist parson out of _his_ salary with bad yarn.”

“The worst of it is, there’s not much hope of things getting any
better,” said Miss Cornelia gloomily. “As long as Mr. Meredith was
going to see Rosemary West I did hope the manse would soon have a
proper mistress. But that is all off. I suppose she wouldn’t have him
on account of the children—at least, everybody seems to think so.”

“I do not believe that he ever asked her,” said Susan, who could not
conceive of any one refusing a minister.

“Well, nobody knows anything about _that_. But one thing is certain, he
doesn’t go there any longer. And Rosemary didn’t look well all the
spring. I hope her visit to Kingsport will do her good. She’s been gone
for a month and will stay another month, I understand. I can’t remember
when Rosemary was away from home before. She and Ellen could never bear
to be parted. But I understand Ellen insisted on her going this time.
And meanwhile Ellen and Norman Douglas are warming up the old soup.”

“Is that really so?” asked Anne, laughing. “I heard a rumour of it, but
I hardly believed it.”

“Believe it! You may believe it all right, Anne, dearie. Nobody is in
ignorance of it. Norman Douglas never left anybody in doubt as to his
intentions in regard to anything. He always did his courting before the
public. He told Marshall that he hadn’t thought about Ellen for years,
but the first time he went to church last fall he saw her and fell in
love with her all over again. He said he’d clean forgot how handsome
she was. He hadn’t seen her for twenty years, if you can believe it. Of
course he never went to church, and Ellen never went anywhere else
round here. Oh, we all know what Norman means, but what Ellen means is
a different matter. I shan’t take it upon me to predict whether it will
be a match or not.”

“He jilted her once—but it seems that does not count with some people,
Mrs. Dr. dear,” Susan remarked rather acidly.

“He jilted her in a fit of temper and repented it all his life,” said
Miss Cornelia. “That is different from a cold-blooded jilting. For my
part, I never detested Norman as some folks do. He could never
over-crow _me_. I _do_ wonder what started him coming to church. I have
never been able to believe Mrs. Wilsons’s story that Faith Meredith
went there and bullied him into it. I’ve always intended to ask Faith
herself, but I’ve never happened to think of it just when I saw her.
What influence could _she_ have over Norman Douglas? He was in the
store when I left, bellowing with laughter over that scandalous letter.
You could have heard him at Four Winds Point. ‘The greatest girl in the
world,’ he was shouting. ‘She’s that full of spunk she’s bursting with
it. And all the old grannies want to tame her, darn them. But they’ll
never be able to do it—never! They might as well try to drown a fish.
Boyd, see that you put more fertilizer on your potatoes next year. Ho,
ho, ho!’ And then he laughed till the roof shook.”

“Mr. Douglas pays well to the salary, at least,” remarked Susan.

“Oh, Norman isn’t mean in some ways. He’d give a thousand without
blinking a lash, and roar like a Bull of Bashan if he had to pay five
cents too much for anything. Besides, he likes Mr. Meredith’s sermons,
and Norman Douglas was always willing to shell out if he got his brains
tickled up. There is no more Christianity about him than there is about
a black, naked heathen in Africa and never will be. But he’s clever and
well read and he judges sermons as he would lectures. Anyhow, it’s well
he backs up Mr. Meredith and the children as he does, for they’ll need
friends more than ever after this. I am tired of making excuses for
them, believe _me_.”

“Do you know, dear Miss Cornelia,” said Anne seriously, “I think we
have all been making too many excuses. It is very foolish and we ought
to stop it. I am going to tell you what I’d _like_ to do. I shan’t do
it, of course”—Anne had noted a glint of alarm in Susan’s eye—“it would
be too unconventional, and we must be conventional or die, after we
reach what is supposed to be a dignified age. But I’d _like_ to do it.
I’d like to call a meeting of the Ladies Aid and W.M.S. and the Girls
Sewing Society, and include in the audience all and any Methodists who
have been criticizing the Merediths—although I do think if we
Presbyterians stopped criticizing and excusing we would find that other
denominations would trouble themselves very little about our manse
folks. I would say to them, ‘Dear Christian friends’—with marked
emphasis on ‘Christian’—I have something to say to you and I want to
say it good and hard, that you may take it home and repeat it to your
families. You Methodists need not pity us, and we Presbyterians need
not pity ourselves. We are not going to do it any more. And we are
going to say, boldly and truthfully, to all critics and sympathizers,
‘We are _proud_ of our minister and his family. Mr. Meredith is the
best preacher Glen St. Mary church ever had. Moreover, he is a sincere,
earnest teacher of truth and Christian charity. He is a faithful
friend, a judicious pastor in all essentials, and a refined, scholarly,
well-bred man. His family are worthy of him. Gerald Meredith is the
cleverest pupil in the Glen school, and Mr. Hazard says that he is
destined to a brilliant career. He is a manly, honourable, truthful
little fellow. Faith Meredith is a beauty, and as inspiring and
original as she is beautiful. There is nothing commonplace about her.
All the other girls in the Glen put together haven’t the vim, and wit,
and joyousness and ‘spunk’ she has. She has not an enemy in the world.
Every one who knows her loves her. Of how many, children or grown-ups,
can that be said? Una Meredith is sweetness personified. She will make
a most lovable woman. Carl Meredith, with his love for ants and frogs
and spiders, will some day be a naturalist whom all Canada—nay, all the
world, will delight to honour. Do you know of any other family in the
Glen, or out of it, of whom all these things can be said? Away with
shamefaced excuses and apologies. We _rejoice_ in our minister and his
splendid boys and girls!”

Anne stopped, partly because she was out of breath after her vehement
speech and partly because she could not trust herself to speak further
in view of Miss Cornelia’s face. That good lady was staring helplessly
at Anne, apparently engulfed in billows of new ideas. But she came up
with a gasp and struck out for shore gallantly.

“Anne Blythe, I wish you _would_ call that meeting and say just that!
You’ve made me ashamed of myself, for one, and far be it from me to
refuse to admit it. _Of course_, that is how we should have
talked—especially to the Methodists. And it’s every word of it
true—every word. We’ve just been shutting our eyes to the big
worth-while things and squinting them on the little things that don’t
really matter a pin’s worth. Oh, Anne dearie, I can see a thing when
it’s hammered into my head. No more apologizing for Cornelia Marshall!
_I_ shall hold _my_ head up after this, believe _me_—though I _may_
talk things over with you as usual just to relieve my feelings if the
Merediths do any more startling stunts. Even that letter I felt so bad
about—why, it’s only a good joke after all, as Norman says. Not many
girls would have been cute enough to think of writing it—and all
punctuated so nicely and not one word misspelled. Just let me hear any
Methodist say one word about it—though all the same I’ll never forgive
Joe Vickers—believe _me!_ Where are the rest of your small fry
to-night?”

“Walter and the twins are in Rainbow Valley. Jem is studying in the
garret.”

“They are all crazy about Rainbow Valley. Mary Vance thinks it’s the
only place in the world. She’d be off up here every evening if I’d let
her. But I don’t encourage her in gadding. Besides, I miss the creature
when she isn’t around, Anne dearie. I never thought I’d get so fond of
her. Not but what I see her faults and try to correct them. But she has
never said one saucy word to me since she came to my house and she is a
_great_ help—for when all is said and done, Anne dearie, I am not so
young as I once was, and there is no sense denying it. I was fifty-nine
my last birthday. I don’t _feel_ it, but there is no gainsaying the
Family Bible.”




CHAPTER XXVII.
A SACRED CONCERT


In spite of Miss Cornelia’s new point of view she could not help
feeling a little disturbed over the next performance of the manse
children. In public she carried off the situation splendidly, saying to
all the gossips the substance of what Anne had said in daffodil time,
and saying it so pointedly and forcibly that her hearers found
themselves feeling rather foolish and began to think that, after all,
they were making too much of a childish prank. But in private Miss
Cornelia allowed herself the relief of bemoaning it to Anne.

“Anne dearie, they had a _concert in the graveyard_ last Thursday
evening, while the Methodist prayer meeting was going on. There they
sat, on Hezekiah Pollock’s tombstone, and sang for a solid hour. Of
course, I understand it was mostly hymns they sang, and it wouldn’t
have been quite so bad if they’d done nothing else. But I’m told they
finished up with _Polly Wolly Doodle_ at full length—and that just when
Deacon Baxter was praying.”

“I was there that night,” said Susan, “and, although I did not say
anything about it to you, Mrs. Dr. dear, I could not help thinking that
it was a great pity they picked that particular evening. It was truly
blood-curdling to hear them sitting there in that abode of the dead,
shouting that frivolous song at the tops of their lungs.”

“I don’t know what _you_ were doing in a Methodist prayer meeting,”
said Miss Cornelia acidly.

“I have never found that Methodism was catching,” retorted Susan
stiffly. “And, as I was going to say when I was interrupted, badly as I
felt, I did _not_ give in to the Methodists. When Mrs. Deacon Baxter
said, as we came out, ‘What a disgraceful exhibition!’ _I_ said,
looking her fairly in the eye, ‘They are all beautiful singers, and
none of _your_ choir, Mrs. Baxter, ever bother themselves coming out to
your prayer meeting, it seems. Their voices appear to be in tune only
on Sundays!’ She was quite meek and I felt that I had snubbed her
properly. But I could have done it much more thoroughly, Mrs. Dr. dear,
if only they had left out _Polly Wolly Doodle_. It is truly terrible to
think of that being sung in a graveyard.”

“Some of those dead folks sang _Polly Wolly Doodle_ when they were
living, Susan. Perhaps they like to hear it yet,” suggested Gilbert.

Miss Cornelia looked at him reproachfully and made up her mind that, on
some future occasion, she would hint to Anne that the doctor should be
admonished not to say such things. They might injure his practice.
People might get it into their heads that he wasn’t orthodox. To be
sure, Marshall said even worse things habitually, but then _he_ was not
a public man.

“I understand that their father was in his study all the time, with his
windows open, but never noticed them at all. Of course, he was lost in
a book as usual. But I spoke to him about it yesterday, when he
called.”

“How could you dare, Mrs. Marshall Elliott?” asked Susan rebukingly.

“Dare! It’s time somebody dared something. Why, they say he knows
nothing about that letter of Faith’s to the _journal_ because nobody
liked to mention it to him. He never looks at a _journal_ of course.
But I thought he ought to know of this to prevent any such performances
in future. He said he would ‘discuss it with them.’ But of course he’d
never think of it again after he got out of our gate. That man has no
sense of humour, Anne, believe _me_. He preached last Sunday on ‘How to
Bring up Children.’ A beautiful sermon it was, too—and everybody in
church thinking ‘what a pity you can’t practise what you preach.’”

Miss Cornelia did Mr. Meredith an injustice in thinking he would soon
forget what she had told him. He went home much disturbed and when the
children came from Rainbow Valley that night, at a much later hour than
they should have been prowling in it, he called them into his study.

They went in, somewhat awed. It was such an unusual thing for their
father to do. What could he be going to say to them? They racked their
memories for any recent transgression of sufficient importance, but
could not recall any. Carl had spilled a saucerful of jam on Mrs. Peter
Flagg’s silk dress two evenings before, when, at Aunt Martha’s
invitation, she had stayed to supper. But Mr. Meredith had not noticed
it, and Mrs. Flagg, who was a kindly soul, had made no fuss. Besides,
Carl had been punished by having to wear Una’s dress all the rest of
the evening.

Una suddenly thought that perhaps her father meant to tell them that he
was going to marry Miss West. Her heart began to beat violently and her
legs trembled. Then she saw that Mr. Meredith looked very stern and
sorrowful. No, it could not be that.

“Children,” said Mr. Meredith, “I have heard something that has pained
me very much. Is it true that you sat out in the graveyard all last
Thursday evening and sang ribald songs while a prayer meeting was being
held in the Methodist church?”

“Great Caesar, Dad, we forgot all about it being their prayer meeting
night,” exclaimed Jerry in dismay.

“Then it is true—you did do this thing?”

“Why, Dad, I don’t know what you mean by ribald songs. We sang hymns—it
was a sacred concert, you know. What harm was that? I tell you we never
thought about it’s being Methodist prayer meeting night. They used to
have their meeting Tuesday nights and since they’ve changed to
Thursdays it’s hard to remember.”

“Did you sing nothing but hymns?”

“Why,” said Jerry, turning red, “we _did_ sing _Polly Wolly Doodle_ at
the last. Faith said, ‘Let’s have something cheerful to wind up with.’
But we didn’t mean any harm, Father—truly we didn’t.”

“The concert was my idea, Father,” said Faith, afraid that Mr. Meredith
might blame Jerry too much. “You know the Methodists themselves had a
sacred concert in their church three Sunday nights ago. I thought it
would be good fun to get one up in imitation of it. Only they had
prayers at theirs, and we left that part out, because we heard that
people thought it awful for us to pray in a graveyard. _You_ were
sitting in here all the time,” she added, “and never said a word to
us.”

“I did not notice what you were doing. That is no excuse for me, of
course. I am more to blame than you—I realize that. But why did you
sing that foolish song at the end?”

“We didn’t think,” muttered Jerry, feeling that it was a very lame
excuse, seeing that he had lectured Faith so strongly in the
Good-Conduct Club sessions for her lack of thought. “We’re sorry,
Father—truly, we are. Pitch into us hard—we deserve a regular combing
down.”

But Mr. Meredith did no combing down or pitching into. He sat down and
gathered his small culprits close to him and talked a little to them,
tenderly and wisely. They were overcome with remorse and shame, and
felt that they could never be so silly and thoughtless again.

“We’ve just got to punish ourselves good and hard for this,” whispered
Jerry as they crept upstairs. “We’ll have a session of the Club first
thing tomorrow and decide how we’ll do it. I never saw father so cut
up. But I wish to goodness the Methodists would stick to one night for
their prayer meeting and not wander all over the week.”

“Anyhow, I’m glad it wasn’t what I was afraid it was,” murmured Una to
herself.

Behind them, in the study, Mr. Meredith had sat down at his desk and
buried his face in his arms.

“God help me!” he said. “I’m a poor sort of father. Oh, Rosemary! If
you had only cared!”




CHAPTER XXVIII.
A FAST DAY


The Good-Conduct Club had a special session the next morning before
school. After various suggestions, it was decided that a fast day would
be an appropriate punishment.

“We won’t eat a single thing for a whole day,” said Jerry. “I’m kind of
curious to see what fasting is like, anyhow. This will be a good chance
to find out.”

“What day will we choose for it?” asked Una, who thought it would be
quite an easy punishment and rather wondered that Jerry and Faith had
not devised something harder.

“Let’s pick Monday,” said Faith. “We mostly have a pretty _filling_
dinner on Sundays, and Mondays meals never amount to much anyhow.”

“But that’s just the point,” exclaimed Jerry. “We mustn’t take the
easiest day to fast, but the hardest—and that’s Sunday, because, as you
say, we mostly have roast beef that day instead of cold ditto. It
wouldn’t be much punishment to fast from ditto. Let’s take next Sunday.
It will be a good day, for father is going to exchange for the morning
service with the Upper Lowbridge minister. Father will be away till
evening. If Aunt Martha wonders what’s got into us, we’ll tell her
right up that we’re fasting for the good of our souls, and it is in the
Bible and she is not to interfere, and I guess she won’t.”

Aunt Martha did not. She merely said in her fretful mumbling way, “What
foolishness are you young rips up to now?” and thought no more about
it. Mr. Meredith had gone away early in the morning before any one was
up. He went without his breakfast, too, but that was, of course, of
common occurrence. Half of the time he forgot it and there was no one
to remind him of it. Breakfast—Aunt Martha’s breakfast—was not a hard
meal to miss. Even the hungry “young rips” did not feel it any great
deprivation to abstain from the “lumpy porridge and blue milk” which
had aroused the scorn of Mary Vance. But it was different at dinner
time. They were furiously hungry then, and the odor of roast beef which
pervaded the manse, and which was wholly delightful in spite of the
fact that the roast beef was badly underdone, was almost more than they
could stand. In desperation they rushed to the graveyard where they
couldn’t smell it. But Una could not keep her eyes from the dining room
window, through which the Upper Lowbridge minister could be seen,
placidly eating.

“If I could only have just a weeny, teeny piece,” she sighed.

“Now, you stop that,” commanded Jerry. “Of course it’s hard—but that’s
the punishment of it. I could eat a graven image this very minute, but
am I complaining? Let’s think of something else. We’ve just got to rise
above our stomachs.”

At supper time they did not feel the pangs of hunger which they had
suffered earlier in the day.

“I suppose we’re getting used to it,” said Faith. “I feel an awfully
queer all-gone sort of feeling, but I can’t say I’m hungry.”

“My head is funny,” said Una. “It goes round and round sometimes.”

But she went gamely to church with the others. If Mr. Meredith had not
been so wholly wrapped up in and carried away with his subject he might
have noticed the pale little face and hollow eyes in the manse pew
beneath. But he noticed nothing and his sermon was something longer
than usual. Then, just before he gave out the final hymn, Una Meredith
tumbled off the seat of the manse pew and lay in a dead faint on the
floor.

Mrs. Elder Clow was the first to reach her. She caught the thin little
body from the arms of white-faced, terrified Faith and carried it into
the vestry. Mr. Meredith forgot the hymn and everything else and rushed
madly after her. The congregation dismissed itself as best it could.

“Oh, Mrs. Clow,” gasped Faith, “is Una dead? Have we killed her?”

“What is the matter with my child?” demanded the pale father.

“She has just fainted, I think,” said Mrs. Clow. “Oh, here’s the
doctor, thank goodness.”

Gilbert did not find it a very easy thing to bring Una back to
consciousness. He worked over her for a long time before her eyes
opened. Then he carried her over to the manse, followed by Faith,
sobbing hysterically in her relief.

“She is just hungry, you know—she didn’t eat a thing to-day—none of us
did—we were all fasting.”

“Fasting!” said Mr. Meredith, and “Fasting?” said the doctor.

“Yes—to punish ourselves for singing _Polly Wolly_ in the graveyard,”
said Faith.

“My child, I don’t want you to punish yourselves for that,” said Mr.
Meredith in distress. “I gave you your little scolding—and you were all
penitent—and I forgave you.”

“Yes, but we had to be punished,” explained Faith. “It’s our rule—in
our Good-Conduct Club, you know—if we do anything wrong, or anything
that is likely to hurt father in the congregation, we _have_ to punish
ourselves. We are bringing ourselves up, you know, because there is
nobody to do it.”

Mr. Meredith groaned, but the doctor got up from Una’s side with an air
of relief.

“Then this child simply fainted from lack of food and all she needs is
a good square meal,” he said. “Mrs. Clow, will you be kind enough to
see she gets it? And I think from Faith’s story that they all would be
the better for something to eat, or we shall have more faintings.”

“I suppose we shouldn’t have made Una fast,” said Faith remorsefully.
“When I think of it, only Jerry and I should have been punished. _We_
got up the concert and we were the oldest.”

“I sang _Polly Wolly_ just the same as the rest of you,” said Una’s
weak little voice, “so I had to be punished, too.”

Mrs. Clow came with a glass of milk, Faith and Jerry and Carl sneaked
off to the pantry, and John Meredith went into his study, where he sat
in the darkness for a long time, alone with his bitter thoughts. So his
children were bringing themselves up because there was “nobody to do
it”—struggling along amid their little perplexities without a hand to
guide or a voice to counsel. Faith’s innocently uttered phrase rankled
in her father’s mind like a barbed shaft. There was “nobody” to look
after them—to comfort their little souls and care for their little
bodies. How frail Una had looked, lying there on the vestry sofa in
that long faint! How thin were her tiny hands, how pallid her little
face! She looked as if she might slip away from him in a breath—sweet
little Una, of whom Cecilia had begged him to take such special care.
Since his wife’s death he had not felt such an agony of dread as when
he had hung over his little girl in her unconsciousness. He must do
something—but what? Should he ask Elizabeth Kirk to marry him? She was
a good woman—she would be kind to his children. He might bring himself
to do it if it were not for his love for Rosemary West. But until he
had crushed that out he could not seek another woman in marriage. And
he could not crush it out—he had tried and he could not. Rosemary had
been in church that evening, for the first time since her return from
Kingsport. He had caught a glimpse of her face in the back of the
crowded church, just as he had finished his sermon. His heart had given
a fierce throb. He sat while the choir sang the “collection piece,”
with his bent head and tingling pulses. He had not seen her since the
evening upon which he had asked her to marry him. When he had risen to
give out the hymn his hands were trembling and his pale face was
flushed. Then Una’s fainting spell had banished everything from his
mind for a time. Now, in the darkness and solitude of the study it
rushed back. Rosemary was the only woman in the world for him. It was
of no use for him to think of marrying any other. He could not commit
such a sacrilege even for his children’s sake. He must take up his
burden alone—he must try to be a better, a more watchful father—he must
tell his children not to be afraid to come to him with all their little
problems. Then he lighted his lamp and took up a bulky new book which
was setting the theological world by the ears. He would read just one
chapter to compose his mind. Five minutes later he was lost to the
world and the troubles of the world.




CHAPTER XXIX.
A WEIRD TALE


On an early June evening Rainbow Valley was an entirely delightful
place and the children felt it to be so, as they sat in the open glade
where the bells rang elfishly on the Tree Lovers, and the White Lady
shook her green tresses. The wind was laughing and whistling about them
like a leal, glad-hearted comrade. The young ferns were spicy in the
hollow. The wild cherry trees scattered over the valley, among the dark
firs, were mistily white. The robins were whistling over in the maples
behind Ingleside. Beyond, on the slopes of the Glen, were blossoming
orchards, sweet and mystic and wonderful, veiled in dusk. It was
spring, and young things _must_ be glad in spring. Everybody was glad
in Rainbow Valley that evening—until Mary Vance froze their blood with
the story of Henry Warren’s ghost.

Jem was not there. Jem spent his evenings now studying for his entrance
examination in the Ingleside garret. Jerry was down near the pond,
trouting. Walter had been reading Longfellow’s sea poems to the others
and they were steeped in the beauty and mystery of the ships. Then they
talked of what they would do when they were grown up—where they would
travel—the far, fair shores they would see. Nan and Di meant to go to
Europe. Walter longed for the Nile moaning past its Egyptian sands, and
a glimpse of the sphinx. Faith opined rather dismally that she supposed
she would have to be a missionary—old Mrs. Taylor told her she ought to
be—and then she would at least see India or China, those mysterious
lands of the Orient. Carl’s heart was set on African jungles. Una said
nothing. She thought she would just like to stay at home. It was
prettier here than anywhere else. It would be dreadful when they were
all grown up and had to scatter over the world. The very idea made Una
feel lonesome and homesick. But the others dreamed on delightedly until
Mary Vance arrived and vanished poesy and dreams at one fell swoop.

“Laws, but I’m out of puff,” she exclaimed. “I’ve run down that hill
like sixty. I got an awful scare up there at the old Bailey place.”

“What frightened you?” asked Di.

“I dunno. I was poking about under them lilacs in the old garden,
trying to see if there was any lilies-of-the-valley out yet. It was
dark as a pocket there—and all at once I seen something stirring and
rustling round at the other side of the garden, in those cherry bushes.
It was _white_. I tell you I didn’t stop for a second look. I flew over
the dyke quicker than quick. I was sure it was Henry Warren’s ghost.”

“Who was Henry Warren?” asked Di.

“And why should he have a ghost?” asked Nan.

“Laws, did you never hear the story? And you brought up in the Glen.
Well, wait a minute till I get by breath all back and I’ll tell you.”

Walter shivered delightsomely. He loved ghost stories. Their mystery,
their dramatic climaxes, their eeriness gave him a fearful, exquisite
pleasure. Longfellow instantly grew tame and commonplace. He threw the
book aside and stretched himself out, propped upon his elbows to listen
whole-heartedly, fixing his great luminous eyes on Mary’s face. Mary
wished he wouldn’t look at her so. She felt she could make a better job
of the ghost story if Walter were not looking at her. She could put on
several frills and invent a few artistic details to enhance the horror.
As it was, she had to stick to the bare truth—or what had been told her
for the truth.

“Well,” she began, “you know old Tom Bailey and his wife used to live
in that house up there thirty years ago. He was an awful old rip, they
say, and his wife wasn’t much better. They’d no children of their own,
but a sister of old Tom’s died and left a little boy—this Henry
Warren—and they took him. He was about twelve when he came to them, and
kind of undersized and delicate. They say Tom and his wife used him
awful from the start—whipped him and starved him. Folks said they
wanted him to die so’s they could get the little bit of money his
mother had left for him. Henry didn’t die right off, but he begun
having fits—epileps, they called ‘em—and he grew up kind of simple,
till he was about eighteen. His uncle used to thrash him in that garden
up there ‘cause it was back of the house where no one could see him.
But folks could hear, and they say it was awful sometimes hearing poor
Henry plead with his uncle not to kill him. But nobody dared interfere
‘cause old Tom was such a reprobate he’d have been sure to get square
with ‘em some way. He burned the barns of a man at Harbour Head who
offended him. At last Henry died and his uncle and aunt give out he
died in one of his fits and that was all anybody ever knowed, but
everybody said Tom had just up and killed him for keeps at last. And it
wasn’t long till it got around that Henry _walked_. That old garden was
_ha’nted_. He was heard there at nights, moaning and crying. Old Tom
and his wife got out—went out West and never came back. The place got
such a bad name nobody’d buy or rent it. That’s why it’s all gone to
ruin. That was thirty years ago, but Henry Warren’s ghost ha’nts it
yet.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Nan scornfully. “_I_ don’t.”

“Well, _good_ people have seen him—and heard him.” retorted Mary. “They
say he appears and grovels on the ground and holds you by the legs and
gibbers and moans like he did when he was alive. I thought of that as
soon as I seen that white thing in the bushes and thought if it caught
me like that and moaned I’d drop down dead on the spot. So I cut and
run. It _mightn’t_ have been his ghost, but I wasn’t going to take any
chances with a ha’nt.”

“It was likely old Mrs. Stimson’s white calf,” laughed Di. “It pastures
in that garden—I’ve seen it.”

“Maybe so. But _I’m_ not going home through the Bailey garden any more.
Here’s Jerry with a big string of trout and it’s my turn to cook them.
Jem and Jerry both say I’m the best cook in the Glen. And Cornelia told
me I could bring up this batch of cookies. I all but dropped them when
I saw Henry’s ghost.”

Jerry hooted when he heard the ghost story—which Mary repeated as she
fried the fish, touching it up a trifle or so, since Walter had gone to
help Faith to set the table. It made no impression on Jerry, but Faith
and Una and Carl had been secretly much frightened, though they would
never have given in to it. It was all right as long as the others were
with them in the valley: but when the feast was over and the shadows
fell they quaked with remembrance. Jerry went up to Ingleside with the
Blythes to see Jem about something, and Mary Vance went around that way
home. So Faith and Una and Carl had to go back to the manse alone. They
walked very close together and gave the old Bailey garden a wide berth.
They did not believe that it was haunted, of course, but they would not
go near it for all that.




CHAPTER XXX.
THE GHOST ON THE DYKE


Somehow, Faith and Carl and Una could not shake off the hold which the
story of Henry Warren’s ghost had taken upon their imaginations. They
had never believed in ghosts. Ghost tales they had heard a-plenty—Mary
Vance had told some far more blood-curdling than this; but those tales
were all of places and people and spooks far away and unknown. After
the first half-awful, half-pleasant thrill of awe and terror they
thought of them no more. But this story came home to them. The old
Bailey garden was almost at their very door—almost in their beloved
Rainbow Valley. They had passed and repassed it constantly; they had
hunted for flowers in it; they had made short cuts through it when they
wished to go straight from the village to the valley. But never again!
After the night when Mary Vance told them its gruesome tale they would
not have gone through or near it on pain of death. Death! What was
death compared to the unearthly possibility of falling into the
clutches of Henry Warren’s grovelling ghost?

One warm July evening the three of them were sitting under the Tree
Lovers, feeling a little lonely. Nobody else had come near the valley
that evening. Jem Blythe was away in Charlottetown, writing on his
entrance examinations. Jerry and Walter Blythe were off for a sail on
the harbour with old Captain Crawford. Nan and Di and Rilla and Shirley
had gone down the harbour road to visit Kenneth and Persis Ford, who
had come with their parents for a flying visit to the little old House
of Dreams. Nan had asked Faith to go with them, but Faith had declined.
She would never have admitted it, but she felt a little secret jealousy
of Persis Ford, concerning whose wonderful beauty and city glamour she
had heard a great deal. No, she wasn’t going to go down there and play
second fiddle to anybody. She and Una took their story books to Rainbow
Valley and read, while Carl investigated bugs along the banks of the
brook, and all three were happy until they suddenly realized that it
was twilight and that the old Bailey garden was uncomfortably near by.
Carl came and sat down close to the girls. They all wished they had
gone home a little sooner, but nobody said anything.

Great, velvety, purple clouds heaped up in the west and spread over the
valley. There was no wind and everything was suddenly, strangely,
dreadfully still. The marsh was full of thousands of fire-flies. Surely
some fairy parliament was being convened that night. Altogether,
Rainbow Valley was not a canny place just then.

Faith looked fearfully up the valley to the old Bailey garden. Then, if
anybody’s blood ever did freeze, Faith Meredith’s certainly froze at
that moment. The eyes of Carl and Una followed her entranced gaze and
chills began gallopading up and down their spines also. For there,
under the big tamarack tree on the tumble-down, grass-grown dyke of the
Bailey garden, was something white—shapelessly white in the gathering
gloom. The three Merediths sat and gazed as if turned to stone.

“It’s—it’s the—calf,” whispered Una at last.

“It’s—too—big—for the calf,” whispered Faith. Her mouth and lips were
so dry she could hardly articulate the words.

Suddenly Carl gasped,

“It’s coming here.”

The girls gave one last agonized glance. Yes, it was creeping down over
the dyke, as no calf ever did or could creep. Reason fled before
sudden, over-mastering panic. For the moment every one of the trio was
firmly convinced that what they saw was Henry Warren’s ghost. Carl
sprang to his feet and bolted blindly. With a simultaneous shriek the
girls followed him. Like mad creatures they tore up the hill, across
the road and into the manse. They had left Aunt Martha sewing in the
kitchen. She was not there. They rushed to the study. It was dark and
tenantless. As with one impulse, they swung around and made for
Ingleside—but not across Rainbow Valley. Down the hill and through the
Glen street they flew on the wings of their wild terror, Carl in the
lead, Una bringing up the rear. Nobody tried to stop them, though
everybody who saw them wondered what fresh devilment those manse
youngsters were up to now. But at the gate of Ingleside they ran into
Rosemary West, who had just been in for a moment to return some
borrowed books.

She saw their ghastly faces and staring eyes. She realized that their
poor little souls were wrung with some awful and real fear, whatever
its cause. She caught Carl with one arm and Faith with the other. Una
stumbled against her and held on desperately.

“Children, dear, what has happened?” she said. “What has frightened
you?”

“Henry Warren’s ghost,” answered Carl, through his chattering teeth.

“Henry—Warren’s—ghost!” said amazed Rosemary, who had never heard the
story.

“Yes,” sobbed Faith hysterically. “It’s there—on the Bailey dyke—we saw
it—and it started to—chase us.”

Rosemary herded the three distracted creatures to the Ingleside
veranda. Gilbert and Anne were both away, having also gone to the House
of Dreams, but Susan appeared in the doorway, gaunt and practical and
unghostlike.

“What is all this rumpus about?” she inquired.

Again the children gasped out their awful tale, while Rosemary held
them close to her and soothed them with wordless comfort.

“Likely it was an owl,” said Susan, unstirred.

An owl! The Meredith children never had any opinion of Susan’s
intelligence after that!

“It was bigger than a million owls,” said Carl, sobbing—oh, how ashamed
Carl was of that sobbing in after days—“and it—it _grovelled_ just as
Mary said—and it was crawling down over the dyke to get at us. Do owls
_crawl?_”

Rosemary looked at Susan.

“They must have seen something to frighten them so,” she said.

“I will go and see,” said Susan coolly. “Now, children, calm
yourselves. Whatever you have seen, it was not a ghost. As for poor
Henry Warren, I feel sure he would be only too glad to rest quietly in
his peaceful grave once he got there. No fear of _him_ venturing back,
and that you may tie to. If you can make them see reason, Miss West, I
will find out the truth of the matter.”

Susan departed for Rainbow Valley, valiantly grasping a pitchfork which
she found leaning against the back fence where the doctor had been
working in his little hay-field. A pitchfork might not be of much use
against “ha’nts,” but it was a comforting sort of weapon. There was
nothing to be seen in Rainbow Valley when Susan reached it. No white
visitants appeared to be lurking in the shadowy, tangled old Bailey
garden. Susan marched boldly through it and beyond it, and rapped with
her pitchfork on the door of the little cottage on the other side,
where Mrs. Stimson lived with her two daughters.

Back at Ingleside Rosemary had succeeded in calming the children. They
still sobbed a little from shock, but they were beginning to feel a
lurking and salutary suspicion that they had made dreadful geese of
themselves. This suspicion became a certainty when Susan finally
returned.

“I have found out what your ghost was,” she said, with a grim smile,
sitting down on a rocker and fanning herself. “Old Mrs. Stimson has had
a pair of factory cotton sheets bleaching in the Bailey garden for a
week. She spread them on the dyke under the tamarack tree because the
grass was clean and short there. This evening she went out to take them
in. She had her knitting in her hands so she hung the sheets over her
shoulders by way of carrying them. And then she must have dropped one
of her needles and find it she could not and has not yet. But she went
down on her knees and crept about to hunt for it, and she was at that
when she heard awful yells down in the valley and saw the three
children tearing up the hill past her. She thought they had been bit by
something and it gave her poor old heart such a turn that she could not
move or speak, but just crouched there till they disappeared. Then she
staggered back home and they have been applying stimulants to her ever
since, and her heart is in a terrible condition and she says she will
not get over this fright all summer.”

The Merediths sat, crimson with a shame that even Rosemary’s
understanding sympathy could not remove. They sneaked off home, met
Jerry at the manse gate and made remorseful confession. A session of
the Good-Conduct Club was arranged for next morning.

“Wasn’t Miss West sweet to us to-night?” whispered Faith in bed.

“Yes,” admitted Una. “It is such a pity it changes people so much to be
made stepmothers.”

“I don’t believe it does,” said Faith loyally.




CHAPTER XXXI.
CARL DOES PENANCE


“I don’t see why we should be punished at all,” said Faith, rather
sulkily. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We couldn’t help being
frightened. And it won’t do father any harm. It was just an accident.”

“You were cowards,” said Jerry with judicial scorn, “and you gave way
to your cowardice. That is why you should be punished. Everybody will
laugh at you about this, and that is a disgrace to the family.”

“If you knew how awful the whole thing was,” said Faith with a shiver,
“you would think we had been punished enough already. I wouldn’t go
through it again for anything in the whole world.”

“I believe you’d have run yourself if you’d been there,” muttered Carl.

“From an old woman in a cotton sheet,” mocked Jerry. “Ho, ho, ho!”

“It didn’t look a bit like an old woman,” cried Faith. “It was just a
great, big, white thing crawling about in the grass just as Mary Vance
said Henry Warren did. It’s all very fine for you to laugh, Jerry
Meredith, but you’d have laughed on the other side of your mouth if
you’d been there. And how are we to be punished? _I_ don’t think it’s
fair, but let’s know what we have to do, Judge Meredith!”

“The way I look at it,” said Jerry, frowning, “is that Carl was the
most to blame. He bolted first, as I understand it. Besides, he was a
boy, so he should have stood his ground to protect you girls, whatever
the danger was. You know that, Carl, don’t you?”

“I s’pose so,” growled Carl shamefacedly.

“Very well. This is to be your punishment. To-night you’ll sit on Mr.
Hezekiah Pollock’s tombstone in the graveyard alone, until twelve
o’clock.”

Carl gave a little shudder. The graveyard was not so very far from the
old Bailey garden. It would be a trying ordeal, but Carl was anxious to
wipe out his disgrace and prove that he was not a coward after all.

“All right,” he said sturdily. “But how’ll I know when it is twelve?”

“The study windows are open and you’ll hear the clock striking. And
mind you that you are not to budge out of that graveyard until the last
stroke. As for you girls, you’ve got to go without jam at supper for a
week.”

Faith and Una looked rather blank. They were inclined to think that
even Carl’s comparatively short though sharp agony was lighter
punishment than this long drawn-out ordeal. A whole week of soggy bread
without the saving grace of jam! But no shirking was permitted in the
club. The girls accepted their lot with such philosophy as they could
summon up.

That night they all went to bed at nine, except Carl, who was already
keeping vigil on the tombstone. Una slipped in to bid him good night.
Her tender heart was wrung with sympathy.

“Oh, Carl, are you much scared?” she whispered.

“Not a bit,” said Carl airily.

“I won’t sleep a wink till after twelve,” said Una. “If you get
lonesome just look up at our window and remember that I’m inside,
awake, and thinking about you. That will be a little company, won’t
it?”

“I’ll be all right. Don’t you worry about me,” said Carl.

But in spite of his dauntless words Carl was a pretty lonely boy when
the lights went out in the manse. He had hoped his father would be in
the study as he so often was. He would not feel alone then. But that
night Mr. Meredith had been summoned to the fishing village at the
harbour mouth to see a dying man. He would not likely be back until
after midnight. Carl must dree his weird alone.

A Glen man went past carrying a lantern. The mysterious shadows caused
by the lantern-light went hurtling madly over the graveyard like a
dance of demons or witches. Then they passed and darkness fell again.
One by one the lights in the Glen went out. It was a very dark night,
with a cloudy sky, and a raw east wind that was cold in spite of the
calendar. Far away on the horizon was the low dim lustre of the
Charlottetown lights. The wind wailed and sighed in the old fir-trees.
Mr. Alec Davis’ tall monument gleamed whitely through the gloom. The
willow beside it tossed long, writhing arms spectrally. At times, the
gyrations of its boughs made it seem as if the monument were moving,
too.

Carl curled himself up on the tombstone with his legs tucked under him.
It wasn’t precisely pleasant to hang them over the edge of the stone.
Just suppose—just suppose—bony hands should reach up out of Mr.
Pollock’s grave under it and clutch him by the ankles. That had been
one of Mary Vance’s cheerful speculations one time when they had all
been sitting there. It returned to haunt Carl now. He didn’t believe
those things; he didn’t even really believe in Henry Warren’s ghost. As
for Mr. Pollock, he had been dead sixty years, so it wasn’t likely he
cared who sat on his tombstone now. But there is something very strange
and terrible in being awake when all the rest of the world is asleep.
You are alone then with nothing but your own feeble personality to pit
against the mighty principalities and powers of darkness. Carl was only
ten and the dead were all around him—and he wished, oh, he wished that
the clock would strike twelve. Would it _never_ strike twelve? Surely
Aunt Martha must have forgotten to wind it.

And then it struck eleven—only eleven! He must stay yet another hour in
that grim place. If only there were a few friendly stars to be seen!
The darkness was so thick it seemed to press against his face. There
was a sound as of stealthy passing footsteps all over the graveyard.
Carl shivered, partly with prickling terror, partly with real cold.

Then it began to rain—a chill, penetrating drizzle. Carl’s thin little
cotton blouse and shirt were soon wet through. He felt chilled to the
bone. He forgot mental terrors in his physical discomfort. But he must
stay there till twelve—he was punishing himself and he was on his
honour. Nothing had been said about rain—but it did not make any
difference. When the study clock finally struck twelve a drenched
little figure crept stiffly down off Mr. Pollock’s tombstone, made its
way into the manse and upstairs to bed. Carl’s teeth were chattering.
He thought he would never get warm again.

He was warm enough when morning came. Jerry gave one startled look at
his crimson face and then rushed to call his father. Mr. Meredith came
hurriedly, his own face ivory white from the pallor of his long night
vigil by a death bed. He had not got home until daylight. He bent over
his little lad anxiously.

“Carl, are you sick?” he said.

“That—tombstone—over here,” said Carl, “it’s—moving—about—it’s
coming—at—me—keep it—away—please.”

Mr. Meredith rushed to the telephone. In ten minutes Dr. Blythe was at
the manse. Half an hour later a wire was sent to town for a trained
nurse, and all the Glen knew that Carl Meredith was very ill with
pneumonia and that Dr. Blythe had been seen to shake his head.

Gilbert shook his head more than once in the fortnight that followed.
Carl developed double pneumonia. There was one night when Mr. Meredith
paced his study floor, and Faith and Una huddled in their bedroom and
cried, and Jerry, wild with remorse, refused to budge from the floor of
the hall outside Carl’s door. Dr. Blythe and the nurse never left the
bedside. They fought death gallantly until the red dawn and they won
the victory. Carl rallied and passed the crisis in safety. The news was
phoned about the waiting Glen and people found out how much they really
loved their minister and his children.

“I haven’t had one decent night’s sleep since I heard the child was
sick,” Miss Cornelia told Anne, “and Mary Vance has cried until those
queer eyes of hers looked like burnt holes in a blanket. Is it true
that Carl got pneumonia from straying out in the graveyard that wet
night for a dare?”

“No. He was staying there to punish himself for cowardice in that
affair of the Warren ghost. It seems they have a club for bringing
themselves up, and they punish themselves when they do wrong. Jerry
told Mr. Meredith all about it.”

“The poor little souls,” said Miss Cornelia.

Carl got better rapidly, for the congregation took enough nourishing
things to the manse to furnish forth a hospital. Norman Douglas drove
up every evening with a dozen fresh eggs and a jar of Jersey cream.
Sometimes he stayed an hour and bellowed arguments on predestination
with Mr. Meredith in the study; oftener he drove on up to the hill that
overlooked the Glen.

When Carl was able to go again to Rainbow Valley they had a special
feast in his honour and the doctor came down and helped them with the
fireworks. Mary Vance was there, too, but she did not tell any ghost
stories. Miss Cornelia had given her a talking on that subject which
Mary would not forget in a hurry.




CHAPTER XXXII.
TWO STUBBORN PEOPLE


Rosemary West, on her way home from a music lesson at Ingleside, turned
aside to the hidden spring in Rainbow Valley. She had not been there
all summer; the beautiful little spot had no longer any allurement for
her. The spirit of her young lover never came to the tryst now; and the
memories connected with John Meredith were too painful and poignant.
But she had happened to glance backward up the valley and had seen
Norman Douglas vaulting as airily as a stripling over the old stone
dyke of the Bailey garden and thought he was on his way up the hill. If
he overtook her she would have to walk home with him and she was not
going to do that. So she slipped at once behind the maples of the
spring, hoping he had not seen her and would pass on.

But Norman had seen her and, what was more, was in pursuit of her. He
had been wanting for some time to have talk with Rosemary, but she had
always, so it seemed, avoided him. Rosemary had never, at any time,
liked Norman Douglas very well. His bluster, his temper, his noisy
hilarity, had always antagonized her. Long ago she had often wondered
how Ellen could possibly be attracted to him. Norman Douglas was
perfectly aware of her dislike and he chuckled over it. It never
worried Norman if people did not like him. It did not even make him
dislike them in return, for he took it as a kind of extorted
compliment. He thought Rosemary a fine girl, and he meant to be an
excellent, generous brother-in-law to her. But before he could be her
brother-in-law he had to have a talk with her, so, having seen her
leaving Ingleside as he stood in the doorway of a Glen store, he had
straightway plunged into the valley to overtake her.

Rosemary was sitting pensively on the maple seat where John Meredith
had been sitting on that evening nearly a year ago. The tiny spring
shimmered and dimpled under its fringe of ferns. Ruby-red gleams of
sunset fell through the arching boughs. A tall clump of perfect asters
grew at her side. The little spot was as dreamy and witching and
evasive as any retreat of fairies and dryads in ancient forests. Into
it Norman Douglas bounced, scattering and annihilating its charm in a
moment. His personality seemed to swallow the place up. There was
simply nothing there but Norman Douglas, big, red-bearded, complacent.

“Good evening,” said Rosemary coldly, standing up.

“‘Evening, girl. Sit down again—sit down again. I want to have a talk
with you. Bless the girl, what’s she looking at me like that for? I
don’t want to eat you—I’ve had my supper. Sit down and be civil.”

“I can hear what you have to say quite as well here,” said Rosemary.

“So you can, girl, if you use your ears. I only wanted you to be
comfortable. You look so durned uncomfortable, standing there. Well,
_I’ll_ sit anyway.”

Norman accordingly sat down in the very place John Meredith had once
sat. The contrast was so ludicrous that Rosemary was afraid she would
go off into a peal of hysterical laughter over it. Norman cast his hat
aside, placed his huge, red hands on his knees, and looked up at her
with his eyes a-twinkle.

“Come, girl, don’t be so stiff,” he said, ingratiatingly. When he liked
he could be very ingratiating. “Let’s have a reasonable, sensible,
friendly chat. There’s something I want to ask you. Ellen says she
won’t, so it’s up to me to do it.”

Rosemary looked down at the spring, which seemed to have shrunk to the
size of a dewdrop. Norman gazed at her in despair.

“Durn it all, you might help a fellow out a bit,” he burst forth.

“What is it you want me to help you say?” asked Rosemary scornfully.

“You know as well as I do, girl. Don’t be putting on your tragedy airs.
No wonder Ellen was scared to ask you. Look here, girl, Ellen and I
want to marry each other. That’s plain English, isn’t it? Got that? And
Ellen says she can’t unless you give her back some tom-fool promise she
made. Come now, will you do it? Will you do it?”

“Yes,” said Rosemary.

Norman bounced up and seized her reluctant hand.

“Good! I knew you would—I told Ellen you would. I knew it would only
take a minute. Now, girl, you go home and tell Ellen, and we’ll have a
wedding in a fortnight and you’ll come and live with us. We shan’t
leave you to roost on that hill-top like a lonely crow—don’t you worry.
I know you hate me, but, Lord, it’ll be great fun living with some one
that hates me. Life’ll have some spice in it after this. Ellen will
roast me and you’ll freeze me. I won’t have a dull moment.”

Rosemary did not condescend to tell him that nothing would ever induce
her to live in his house. She let him go striding back to the Glen,
oozing delight and complacency, and she walked slowly up the hill home.
She had known this was coming ever since she had returned from
Kingsport, and found Norman Douglas established as a frequent evening
caller. His name was never mentioned between her and Ellen, but the
very avoidance of it was significant. It was not in Rosemary’s nature
to feel bitter, or she would have felt very bitter. She was coldly
civil to Norman, and she made no difference in any way with Ellen. But
Ellen had not found much comfort in her second courtship.

She was in the garden, attended by St. George, when Rosemary came home.
The two sisters met in the dahlia walk. St. George sat down on the
gravel walk between them and folded his glossy black tail gracefully
around his white paws, with all the indifference of a well-fed,
well-bred, well-groomed cat.

“Did you ever see such dahlias?” demanded Ellen proudly. “They are just
the finest we’ve ever had.”

Rosemary had never cared for dahlias. Their presence in the garden was
her concession to Ellen’s taste. She noticed one huge mottled one of
crimson and yellow that lorded it over all the others.

“That dahlia,” she said, pointing to it, “is exactly like Norman
Douglas. It might easily be his twin brother.”

Ellen’s dark-browed face flushed. She admired the dahlia in question,
but she knew Rosemary did not, and that no compliment was intended. But
she dared not resent Rosemary’s speech—poor Ellen dared not resent
anything just then. And it was the first time Rosemary had ever
mentioned Norman’s name to her. She felt that this portended something.

“I met Norman Douglas in the valley,” said Rosemary, looking straight
at her sister, “and he told me you and he wanted to be married—if I
would give you permission.”

“Yes? What did you say?” asked Ellen, trying to speak naturally and
off-handedly, and failing completely. She could not meet Rosemary’s
eyes. She looked down at St. George’s sleek back and felt horribly
afraid. Rosemary had either said she would or she wouldn’t. If she
would Ellen would feel so ashamed and remorseful that she would be a
very uncomfortable bride-elect; and if she wouldn’t—well, Ellen had
once learned to live without Norman Douglas, but she had forgotten the
lesson and felt that she could never learn it again.

“I said that as far as I was concerned you were at full liberty to
marry each other as soon as you liked,” said Rosemary.

“Thank you,” said Ellen, still looking at St. George.

Rosemary’s face softened.

“I hope you’ll be happy, Ellen,” she said gently.

“Oh, Rosemary,” Ellen looked up in distress, “I’m so ashamed—I don’t
deserve it—after all I said to you—”

“We won’t speak about that,” said Rosemary hurriedly and decidedly.

“But—but,” persisted Ellen, “you are free now, too—and it’s not too
late—John Meredith—”

“Ellen West!” Rosemary had a little spark of temper under all her
sweetness and it flashed forth now in her blue eyes. “Have you quite
lost your senses in _every_ respect? Do you suppose for an instant that
_I_ am going to go to John Meredith and say meekly, ‘Please, sir, I’ve
changed my mind and please, sir, I hope you haven’t changed yours.’ Is
that what you want me to do?”

“No—no—but a little—encouragement—he would come back—”

“Never. He despises me—and rightly. No more of this, Ellen. I bear you
no grudge—marry whom you like. But no meddling in my affairs.”

“Then you must come and live with me,” said Ellen. “I shall not leave
you here alone.”

“Do you really think that I would go and live in Norman Douglas’s
house?”

“Why not?” cried Ellen, half angrily, despite her humiliation.

Rosemary began to laugh.

“Ellen, I thought you had a sense of humour. Can you see me doing it?”

“I don’t see why you wouldn’t. His house is big enough—you’d have your
share of it to yourself—he wouldn’t interfere.”

“Ellen, the thing is not to be thought of. Don’t bring this up again.”

“Then,” said Ellen coldly, and determinedly, “I shall not marry him. I
shall not leave you here alone. That is all there is to be said about
it.”

“Nonsense, Ellen.”

“It is not nonsense. It is my firm decision. It would be absurd for you
to think of living here by yourself—a mile from any other house. If you
won’t come with me I’ll stay with you. Now, we won’t argue the matter,
so don’t try.”

“I shall leave Norman to do the arguing,” said Rosemary.

“_I’ll_ deal with Norman. I can manage _him_. I would never have asked
you to give me back my promise—never—but I had to tell Norman why I
couldn’t marry him and he said _he_ would ask you. I couldn’t prevent
him. You need not suppose you are the only person in the world who
possesses self-respect. I never dreamed of marrying and leaving you
here alone. And you’ll find I can be as determined as yourself.”

Rosemary turned away and went into the house, with a shrug of her
shoulders. Ellen looked down at St. George, who had never blinked an
eyelash or stirred a whisker during the whole interview.

“St. George, this world would be a dull place without the men, I’ll
admit, but I’m almost tempted to wish there wasn’t one of ‘em in it.
Look at the trouble and bother they’ve made right here, George—torn our
happy old life completely up by the roots, Saint. John Meredith began
it and Norman Douglas has finished it. And now both of them have to go
into limbo. Norman is the only man I ever met who agrees with me that
the Kaiser of Germany is the most dangerous creature alive on this
earth—and I can’t marry this sensible person because my sister is
stubborn and I’m stubborner. Mark my words, St. George, the minister
would come back if she raised her little finger. But she won’t
George—she’ll never do it—she won’t even crook it—and I don’t dare
meddle, Saint. I won’t sulk, George; Rosemary didn’t sulk, so I’m
determined I won’t either, Saint; Norman will tear up the turf, but the
long and short of it is, St. George, that all of us old fools must just
stop thinking of marrying. Well, well, ‘despair is a free man, hope is
a slave,’ Saint. So now come into the house, George, and I’ll solace
you with a saucerful of cream. Then there will be one happy and
contented creature on this hill at least.”




CHAPTER XXXIII.
CARL IS—NOT—WHIPPED


“There is something I think I ought to tell you,” said Mary Vance
mysteriously.

She and Faith and Una were walking arm in arm through the village,
having foregathered at Mr. Flagg’s store. Una and Faith exchanged looks
which said, “_Now_ something disagreeable is coming.” When Mary Vance
thought she ought to tell them things there was seldom much pleasure in
the hearing. They often wondered why they kept on liking Mary Vance—for
like her they did, in spite of everything. To be sure, she was
generally a stimulating and agreeable companion. If only she would not
have those convictions that it was her duty to tell them things!

“Do you know that Rosemary West won’t marry your pa because she thinks
you are such a wild lot? She’s afraid she couldn’t bring you up right
and so she turned him down.”

Una’s heart thrilled with secret exultation. She was very glad to hear
that Miss West would not marry her father. But Faith was rather
disappointed.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Oh, everybody’s saying it. I heard Mrs. Elliott talking it over with
Mrs. Doctor. They thought I was too far away to hear, but I’ve got ears
like a cat’s. Mrs. Elliott said she hadn’t a doubt that Rosemary was
afraid to try stepmothering you because you’d got such a reputation.
Your pa never goes up the hill now. Neither does Norman Douglas. Folks
say Ellen has jilted him just to get square with him for jilting her
ages ago. But Norman is going about declaring he’ll get her yet. And I
think you ought to know you’ve spoiled your pa’s match and _I_ think
it’s a pity, for he’s bound to marry somebody before long, and Rosemary
West would have been the best wife _I_ know of for him.”

“You told me all stepmothers were cruel and wicked,” said Una.

“Oh—well,” said Mary rather confusedly, “they’re mostly awful cranky, I
know. But Rosemary West couldn’t be very mean to any one. I tell you if
your pa turns round and marries Emmeline Drew you’ll wish you’d behaved
yourselves better and not frightened Rosemary out of it. It’s awful
that you’ve got such a reputation that no decent woman’ll marry your pa
on account of you. Of course, _I_ know that half the yarns that are
told about you ain’t true. But give a dog a bad name. Why, some folks
are saying that it was Jerry and Carl that threw the stones through
Mrs. Stimson’s window the other night when it was really them two Boyd
boys. But I’m afraid it was Carl that put the eel in old Mrs. Carr’s
buggy, though I said at first I wouldn’t believe it until I’d better
proof than old Kitty Alec’s word. I told Mrs. Elliott so right to her
face.”

“What did Carl do?” cried Faith.

“Well, they say—now, mind, I’m only telling you what people say—so
there’s no use in your blaming me for it—that Carl and a lot of other
boys were fishing eels over the bridge one evening last week. Mrs. Carr
drove past in that old rattletrap buggy of hers with the open back. And
Carl he just up and threw a big eel into the back. When poor old Mrs.
Carr was driving up the hill by Ingleside that eel came squirming out
between her feet. She thought it was a snake and she just give one
awful screech and stood up and jumped clean over the wheels. The horse
bolted, but it went home and no damage was done. But Mrs. Carr jarred
her legs most terrible, and has had nervous spasms ever since whenever
she thinks of the eel. Say, it was a rotten trick to play on the poor
old soul. She’s a decent body, if she is as queer as Dick’s hat band.”

Faith and Una looked at each other again. This was a matter for the
Good-Conduct Club. They would not talk it over with Mary.

“There goes your pa,” said Mary as Mr. Meredith passed them, “and never
seeing us no more’n if we weren’t here. Well, I’m getting so’s I don’t
mind it. But there are folks who do.”

Mr. Meredith had not seen them, but he was not walking along in his
usual dreamy and abstracted fashion. He strode up the hill in agitation
and distress. Mrs. Alec Davis had just told him the story of Carl and
the eel. She had been very indignant about it. Old Mrs. Carr was her
third cousin. Mr. Meredith was more than indignant. He was hurt and
shocked. He had not thought Carl would do anything like this. He was
not inclined to be hard on pranks of heedlessness or forgetfulness, but
_this_ was different. _This_ had a nasty tang in it. When he reached
home he found Carl on the lawn, patiently studying the habits and
customs of a colony of wasps. Calling him into the study Mr. Meredith
confronted him, with a sterner face than any of his children had ever
seen before, and asked him if the story were true.

“Yes,” said Carl, flushing, but meeting his father’s eyes bravely.

Mr. Meredith groaned. He had hoped that there had been at least
exaggeration.

“Tell me the whole matter,” he said.

“The boys were fishing for eels over the bridge,” said Carl. “Link Drew
had caught a whopper—I mean an awful big one—the biggest eel I ever
saw. He caught it right at the start and it had been lying in his
basket a long time, still as still. I thought it was dead, honest I
did. Then old Mrs. Carr drove over the bridge and she called us all
young varmints and told us to go home. And we hadn’t said a word to
her, father, truly. So when she drove back again, after going to the
store, the boys dared me to put Link’s eel in her buggy. I thought it
was so dead it couldn’t hurt her and I threw it in. Then the eel came
to life on the hill and we heard her scream and saw her jump out. I was
awful sorry. That’s all, father.”

It was not quite as bad as Mr. Meredith had feared, but it was quite
bad enough. “I must punish you, Carl,” he said sorrowfully.

“Yes, I know, father.”

“I—I must whip you.”

Carl winced. He had never been whipped. Then, seeing how badly his
father felt, he said cheerfully,

“All right, father.”

Mr. Meredith misunderstood his cheerfulness and thought him insensible.
He told Carl to come to the study after supper, and when the boy had
gone out he flung himself into his chair and groaned again. He dreaded
the evening sevenfold more than Carl did. The poor minister did not
even know what he should whip his boy with. What was used to whip boys?
Rods? Canes? No, that would be too brutal. A timber switch, then? And
he, John Meredith, must hie him to the woods and cut one. It was an
abominable thought. Then a picture presented itself unbidden to his
mind. He saw Mrs. Carr’s wizened, nut-cracker little face at the
appearance of that reviving eel—he saw her sailing witch-like over the
buggy wheels. Before he could prevent himself the minister laughed.
Then he was angry with himself and angrier still with Carl. He would
get that switch at once—and it must not be too limber, after all.

Carl was talking the matter over in the graveyard with Faith and Una,
who had just come home. They were horrified at the idea of his being
whipped—and by father, who had never done such a thing! But they agreed
soberly that it was just.

“You know it was a dreadful thing to do,” sighed Faith. “And you never
owned up in the club.”

“I forgot,” said Carl. “Besides, I didn’t think any harm came of it. I
didn’t know she jarred her legs. But I’m to be whipped and that will
make things square.”

“Will it hurt—very much?” said Una, slipping her hand into Carl’s.

“Oh, not so much, I guess,” said Carl gamely. “Anyhow, I’m not going to
cry, no matter how much it hurts. It would make father feel so bad, if
I did. He’s all cut up now. I wish I could whip myself hard enough and
save him doing it.”

After supper, at which Carl had eaten little and Mr. Meredith nothing
at all, both went silently into the study. The switch lay on the table.
Mr. Meredith had had a bad time getting a switch to suit him. He cut
one, then felt it was too slender. Carl had done a really indefensible
thing. Then he cut another—it was far too thick. After all, Carl had
thought the eel was dead. The third one suited him better; but as he
picked it up from the table it seemed very thick and heavy—more like a
stick than a switch.

“Hold out your hand,” he said to Carl.

Carl threw back his head and held out his hand unflinchingly. But he
was not very old and he could not quite keep a little fear out of his
eyes. Mr. Meredith looked down into those eyes—why, they were Cecilia’s
eyes—her very eyes—and in them was the selfsame expression he had once
seen in Cecilia’s eyes when she had come to him to tell him something
she had been a little afraid to tell him. Here were her eyes in Carl’s
little, white face—and six weeks ago he had thought, through one
endless, terrible night, that his little lad was dying.

John Meredith threw down the switch.

“Go,” he said, “I cannot whip you.”

Carl fled to the graveyard, feeling that the look on his father’s face
was worse than any whipping.

“Is it over so soon?” asked Faith. She and Una had been holding hands
and setting teeth on the Pollock tombstone.

“He—he didn’t whip me at all,” said Carl with a sob, “and—I wish he
had—and he’s in there, feeling just awful.”

Una slipped away. Her heart yearned to comfort her father. As
noiselessly as a little gray mouse she opened the study door and crept
in. The room was dark with twilight. Her father was sitting at his
desk. His back was towards her—his head was in his hands. He was
talking to himself—broken, anguished words—but Una heard—heard and
understood, with the sudden illumination that comes to sensitive,
unmothered children. As silently as she had come in she slipped out and
closed the door. John Meredith went on talking out his pain in what he
deemed his undisturbed solitude.




CHAPTER XXXIV.
UNA VISITS THE HILL


Una went upstairs. Carl and Faith were already on their way through the
early moonlight to Rainbow Valley, having heard therefrom the elfin
lilt of Jerry’s jews-harp and having guessed that the Blythes were
there and fun afoot. Una had no wish to go. She sought her own room
first where she sat down on her bed and had a little cry. She did not
want anybody to come in her dear mother’s place. She did not want a
stepmother who would hate her and make her father hate her. But father
was so desperately unhappy—and if she could do any anything to make him
happier she _must_ do it. There was only one thing she could do—and she
had known the moment she had left the study that she must do it. But it
was a very hard thing to do.

After Una cried her heart out she wiped her eyes and went to the spare
room. It was dark and rather musty, for the blind had not been drawn up
nor the window opened for a long time. Aunt Martha was no fresh-air
fiend. But as nobody ever thought of shutting a door in the manse this
did not matter so much, save when some unfortunate minister came to
stay all night and was compelled to breathe the spare room atmosphere.

There was a closet in the spare room and far back in the closet a gray
silk dress was hanging. Una went into the closet and shut the door,
went down on her knees and pressed her face against the soft silken
folds. It had been her mother’s wedding-dress. It was still full of a
sweet, faint, haunting perfume, like lingering love. Una always felt
very close to her mother there—as if she were kneeling at her feet with
head in her lap. She went there once in a long while when life was
_too_ hard.

“Mother,” she whispered to the gray silk gown, “_I_ will never forget
you, mother, and I’ll _always_ love you best. But I have to do it,
mother, because father is so very unhappy. I know you wouldn’t want him
to be unhappy. And I will be very good to her, mother, and try to love
her, even if she is like Mary Vance said stepmothers always were.”

Una carried some fine, spiritual strength away from her secret shrine.
She slept peacefully that night with the tear stains still glistening
on her sweet, serious, little face.

The next afternoon she put on her best dress and hat. They were shabby
enough. Every other little girl in the Glen had new clothes that summer
except Faith and Una. Mary Vance had a lovely dress of white
embroidered lawn, with scarlet silk sash and shoulder bows. But to-day
Una did not mind her shabbiness. She only wanted to be very neat. She
washed her face carefully. She brushed her black hair until it was as
smooth as satin. She tied her shoelaces carefully, having first sewed
up two runs in her one pair of good stockings. She would have liked to
black her shoes, but she could not find any blacking. Finally, she
slipped away from the manse, down through Rainbow Valley, up through
the whispering woods, and out to the road that ran past the house on
the hill. It was quite a long walk and Una was tired and warm when she
got there.

She saw Rosemary West sitting under a tree in the garden and stole past
the dahlia beds to her. Rosemary had a book in her lap, but she was
gazing afar across the harbour and her thoughts were sorrowful enough.
Life had not been pleasant lately in the house on the hill. Ellen had
not sulked—Ellen had been a brick. But things can be felt that are
never said and at times the silence between the two women was
intolerably eloquent. All the many familiar things that had once made
life sweet had a flavour of bitterness now. Norman Douglas made
periodical irruptions also, bullying and coaxing Ellen by turns. It
would end, Rosemary believed, by his dragging Ellen off with him some
day, and Rosemary felt that she would be almost glad when it happened.
Existence would be horribly lonely then, but it would be no longer
charged with dynamite.

She was roused from her unpleasant reverie by a timid little touch on
her shoulder. Turning, she saw Una Meredith.

“Why, Una, dear, did you walk up here in all this heat?”

“Yes,” said Una, “I came to—I came to—”

But she found it very hard to say what she had come to do. Her voice
failed—her eyes filled with tears.

“Why, Una, little girl, what is the trouble? Don’t be afraid to tell
me.”

Rosemary put her arm around the thin little form and drew the child
close to her. Her eyes were very beautiful—her touch so tender that Una
found courage.

“I came—to ask you—to marry father,” she gasped.

Rosemary was silent for a moment from sheer dumbfounderment. She stared
at Una blankly.

“Oh, don’t be angry, please, dear Miss West,” said Una, pleadingly.
“You see, everybody is saying that you wouldn’t marry father because we
are so bad. He is _very_ unhappy about it. So I thought I would come
and tell you that we are never bad _on purpose_. And if you will only
marry father we will all try to be good and do just what you tell us.
I’m _sure_ you won’t have any trouble with us. _Please_, Miss West.”

Rosemary had been thinking rapidly. Gossiping surmise, she saw, had put
this mistaken idea into Una’s mind. She must be perfectly frank and
sincere with the child.

“Una, dear,” she said softly. “It isn’t because of you poor little
souls that I cannot be your father’s wife. I never thought of such a
thing. You are not bad—I never supposed you were. There—there was
another reason altogether, Una.”

“Don’t you like father?” asked Una, lifting reproachful eyes. “Oh, Miss
West, you don’t know how nice he is. I’m sure he’d make you a _good_
husband.”

Even in the midst of her perplexity and distress Rosemary couldn’t help
a twisted, little smile.

“Oh, don’t laugh, Miss West,” Una cried passionately. “Father feels
_dreadful_ about it.”

“I think you’re mistaken, dear,” said Rosemary.

“I’m not. I’m _sure_ I’m not. Oh, Miss West, father was going to whip
Carl yesterday—Carl had been naughty—and father couldn’t do it because
you see he had no _practice_ in whipping. So when Carl came out and
told us father felt so bad, I slipped into the study to see if I could
help him—he _likes_ me to comfort him, Miss West—and he didn’t hear me
come in and I heard what he was saying. I’ll tell you, Miss West, if
you’ll let me whisper it in your ear.”

Una whispered earnestly. Rosemary’s face turned crimson. So John
Meredith still cared. _He_ hadn’t changed his mind. And he must care
intensely if he had said that—care more than she had ever supposed he
did. She sat still for a moment, stroking Una’s hair. Then she said,

“Will you take a little letter from me to your father, Una?”

“Oh, are you going to marry him, Miss West?” asked Una eagerly.

“Perhaps—if he really wants me to,” said Rosemary, blushing again.

“I’m glad—I’m glad,” said Una bravely. Then she looked up, with
quivering lips. “Oh, Miss West, you won’t turn father against us—you
won’t make him hate us, will you?” she said beseechingly.

Rosemary stared again.

“Una Meredith! Do you think I would do such a thing? Whatever put such
an idea into your head?”

“Mary Vance said stepmothers were all like that—and that they all hated
their stepchildren and made their father hate them—she said they just
couldn’t help it—just being stepmothers made them like that”—

“You poor child! And yet you came up here and asked me to marry your
father because you wanted to make him happy? You’re a darling—a
heroine—as Ellen would say, you’re a brick. Now listen to me, very
closely, dearest. Mary Vance is a silly little girl who doesn’t know
very much and she is dreadfully mistaken about some things. I would
never dream of trying to turn your father against you. I would love you
all dearly. I don’t want to take your own mother’s place—she must
always have that in your hearts. But neither have I any intention of
being a stepmother. I want to be your friend and helper and _chum_.
Don’t you think that would be nice, Una—if you and Faith and Carl and
Jerry could just think of me as a good jolly chum—a big older sister?”

“Oh, it would be lovely,” cried Una, with a transfigured face. She
flung her arms impulsively round Rosemary’s neck. She was so happy that
she felt as if she could fly on wings.

“Do the others—do Faith and the boys have the same idea you had about
stepmothers?”

“No. Faith never believed Mary Vance. I was dreadfully foolish to
believe her, either. Faith loves you already—she has loved you ever
since poor Adam was eaten. And Jerry and Carl will think it is jolly.
Oh, Miss West, when you come to live with us, will you—could you—teach
me to cook—a little—and sew—and—and—and do things? I don’t know
anything. I won’t be much trouble—I’ll try to learn fast.”

“Darling, I’ll teach you and help you all I can. Now, you won’t say a
word to anybody about this, will you—not even to Faith, until your
father himself tells you you may? And you’ll stay and have tea with
me?”

“Oh, thank you—but—but—I think I’d rather go right back and take the
letter to father,” faltered Una. “You see, he’ll be glad that much
_sooner_, Miss West.”

“I see,” said Rosemary. She went to the house, wrote a note and gave it
to Una. When that small damsel had run off, a palpitating bundle of
happiness, Rosemary went to Ellen, who was shelling peas on the back
porch.

“Ellen,” she said, “Una Meredith has just been here to ask me to marry
her father.”

Ellen looked up and read her sister’s face.

“And you’re going to?” she said.

“It’s quite likely.”

Ellen went on shelling peas for a few minutes. Then she suddenly put
her hands up to her own face. There were tears in her black-browed
eyes.

“I—I hope we’ll all be happy,” she said between a sob and a laugh.

Down at the manse Una Meredith, warm, rosy, triumphant, marched boldly
into her father’s study and laid a letter on the desk before him. His
pale face flushed as he saw the clear, fine handwriting he knew so
well. He opened the letter. It was very short—but he shed twenty years
as he read it. Rosemary asked him if he could meet her that evening at
sunset by the spring in Rainbow Valley.




CHAPTER XXXV.
“LET THE PIPER COME”


“And so,” said Miss Cornelia, “the double wedding is to be sometime
about the middle of this month.”

There was a faint chill in the air of the early September evening, so
Anne had lighted her ever ready fire of driftwood in the big living
room, and she and Miss Cornelia basked in its fairy flicker.

“It is so delightful—especially in regard to Mr. Meredith and
Rosemary,” said Anne. “I’m as happy in the thought of it, as I was when
I was getting married myself. I felt exactly like a bride again last
evening when I was up on the hill seeing Rosemary’s trousseau.”

“They tell me her things are fine enough for a princess,” said Susan
from a shadowy corner where she was cuddling her brown boy. “I have
been invited up to see them also and I intend to go some evening. I
understand that Rosemary is to wear white silk and a veil, but Ellen is
to be married in navy blue. I have no doubt, Mrs. Dr. dear, that that
is very sensible of her, but for my own part I have always felt that if
I were ever married _I_ would prefer the white and the veil, as being
more bride-like.”

A vision of Susan in “white and a veil” presented itself before Anne’s
inner vision and was almost too much for her.

“As for Mr. Meredith,” said Miss Cornelia, “even his engagement has
made a different man of him. He isn’t half so dreamy and absent-minded,
believe me. I was so relieved when I heard that he had decided to close
the manse and let the children visit round while he was away on his
honeymoon. If he had left them and old Aunt Martha there alone for a
month I should have expected to wake every morning and see the place
burned down.”

“Aunt Martha and Jerry are coming here,” said Anne. “Carl is going to
Elder Clow’s. I haven’t heard where the girls are going.”

“Oh, I’m going to take them,” said Miss Cornelia. “Of course, I was
glad to, but Mary would have given me no peace till I asked them any
way. The Ladies’ Aid is going to clean the manse from top to bottom
before the bride and groom come back, and Norman Douglas has arranged
to fill the cellar with vegetables. Nobody ever saw or heard anything
quite like Norman Douglas these days, believe _me_. He’s so tickled
that he’s going to marry Ellen West after wanting her all his life. If
_I_ was Ellen—but then, I’m not, and if she is satisfied I can very
well be. I heard her say years ago when she was a schoolgirl that she
didn’t want a tame puppy for a husband. There’s nothing tame about
Norman, believe _me_.”

The sun was setting over Rainbow Valley. The pond was wearing a
wonderful tissue of purple and gold and green and crimson. A faint blue
haze rested on the eastern hill, over which a great, pale, round moon
was just floating up like a silver bubble.

They were all there, squatted in the little open glade—Faith and Una,
Jerry and Carl, Jem and Walter, Nan and Di, and Mary Vance. They had
been having a special celebration, for it would be Jem’s last evening
in Rainbow Valley. On the morrow he would leave for Charlottetown to
attend Queen’s Academy. Their charmed circle would be broken; and, in
spite of the jollity of their little festival, there was a hint of
sorrow in every gay young heart.

“See—there is a great golden palace over there in the sunset,” said
Walter, pointing. “Look at the shining tower—and the crimson banners
streaming from them. Perhaps a conqueror is riding home from battle—and
they are hanging them out to do honour to him.”

“Oh, I wish we had the old days back again,” exclaimed Jem. “I’d love
to be a soldier—a great, triumphant general. I’d give _everything_ to
see a big battle.”

Well, Jem was to be a soldier and see a greater battle than had ever
been fought in the world; but that was as yet far in the future; and
the mother, whose first-born son he was, was wont to look on her boys
and thank God that the “brave days of old,” which Jem longed for, were
gone for ever, and that never would it be necessary for the sons of
Canada to ride forth to battle “for the ashes of their fathers and the
temples of their gods.”

The shadow of the Great Conflict had not yet made felt any forerunner
of its chill. The lads who were to fight, and perhaps fall, on the
fields of France and Flanders, Gallipoli and Palestine, were still
roguish schoolboys with a fair life in prospect before them: the girls
whose hearts were to be wrung were yet fair little maidens a-star with
hopes and dreams.

Slowly the banners of the sunset city gave up their crimson and gold;
slowly the conqueror’s pageant faded out. Twilight crept over the
valley and the little group grew silent. Walter had been reading again
that day in his beloved book of myths and he remembered how he had once
fancied the Pied Piper coming down the valley on an evening just like
this.

He began to speak dreamily, partly because he wanted to thrill his
companions a little, partly because something apart from him seemed to
be speaking through his lips.

“The Piper is coming nearer,” he said, “he is nearer than he was that
evening I saw him before. His long, shadowy cloak is blowing around
him. He pipes—he pipes—and we must follow—Jem and Carl and Jerry and
I—round and round the world. Listen—listen—can’t you hear his wild
music?”

The girls shivered.

“You know you’re only pretending,” protested Mary Vance, “and I wish
you wouldn’t. You make it too real. I hate that old Piper of yours.”

But Jem sprang up with a gay laugh. He stood up on a little hillock,
tall and splendid, with his open brow and his fearless eyes. There were
thousands like him all over the land of the maple.

“Let the Piper come and welcome,” he cried, waving his hand. “_I’ll_
follow him gladly round and round the world.”

THE END




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