This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler

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ANNIE LAURIE
AND AZALEA

BY
ELIA W. PEATTIE

Illustrations by
Joseph Pierre Nuyttens

The Reilly & Britton Co.
Chicago

Copyright, 1913
by
The Reilly & Britton Co.

Annie Laurie and Azalea

Annie Laurie and Azalea
beg to be presented to
Loraine, Catherine, Elizabeth and Bernice

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
TWO AND ONE MAKE—HOW MANY?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Watch out, you two!” he warned.

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

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

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

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

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

“Good-bye, boy,” she called.

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

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

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

Helena Parkhurst gave a pardoning smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carin shrugged her pretty shoulders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carin held out a chilly white hand.

“How do you do?” she said stiffly.

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

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

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

The new girl looked toward Mrs. Carson.

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Carson raised a white hand.

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

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

The three girls?

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

CHAPTER II
ANNIE LAURIE PACE

Annie Laurie Pace was making ready for church.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss Adnah snapped the fasteners of her gloves sharply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III
TRIAL WITHOUT JURY

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

“Child!” gasped Miss Adnah.

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

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

“What have you done?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A head,” said Annie Laurie disgustedly.

“A head! Whose?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annie Laurie gave a final gurgle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She turned to Azalea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What, ma’am?” said Azalea.

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

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

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

Azalea shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And do you say it?”

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

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

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

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

“We swear,” they said in chorus.

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

CHAPTER IV
A RAINY NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Azalea laughed lightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Azalea laughed.

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

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

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

“But let me help, Annie Laurie.”

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

“Why not?”