f you want to; it
isn't really a love letter. I told Gilbert he wasn't to write silly
letters. Come, pussy, I'm going to get ready for prayer meeting. We've
got a nice, new, young, good-looking minister in Exeter, pussy, and
that makes prayer meeting _very_ interesting."

Anna shut the door, her departing laugh rippling mockingly through the
dusk. Alma picked up Gilbert Murray's letter and went to her room. She
wanted to cry, since she could not shake Anna. Even if she could have
shook her, it would only have made her more perverse. Anna was in
earnest; Alma knew that, even while she hoped and believed that it was
but the earnestness of a freak that would pass in time. Anna had had
one like it a year ago, when she had cast Gilbert off for three
months, driving him distracted by flirting with Charlie Moore. Then
she had suddenly repented and taken him back. Alma thought that this
whim would run its course likewise and leave a repentant Anna. But
meanwhile everything might be spoiled. Gilbert might not prove
forgiving a second time.

Alma would have given much if she could only have induced Anna to
answer Gilbert's letter, but coaxing Anna to do anything was a very
sure and effective way of preventing her from doing it.

* * * * *

Alma and Anna had lived alone at the old Williams homestead ever since
their mother's death four years before. Exeter matrons thought this
hardly proper, since Alma, in spite of her grave ways, was only
twenty-four. The farm was rented, so that Alma's only responsibilities
were the post office which she kept, and that harum-scarum beauty of
an Anna.

The Murray homestead adjoined theirs. Gilbert Murray had grown up with
Alma; they had been friends ever since she could remember. Alma loved
Gilbert with a love which she herself believed to be purely sisterly,
and which nobody else doubted could be, since she had been at pains to
make a match--Exeter matrons' phrasing--between Gil and Anna, and was
manifestly delighted when Gilbert obligingly fell in love with the
latter.

There was a small mortgage on the Murray place which Mr. Murray senior
had not been able to pay off. Gilbert determined to get rid of it, and
his thoughts turned to the west. His father was an active, hale old
man, quite capable of managing the farm in Gilbert's absence.
Alexander MacNair had gone to the west two years previously and got
work on a new railroad. He wrote to Gilbert to come t