ing _on_, Sally! That's
it,--I'm just going on. _And_ on, I hope! And I'll write you miles of
letters."

"Letters!" her friend sniffed. "What are letters?"

"Mine are something rather special, I've been told. I'll write you
everything, Sally,--letters like diaries, letters like stories, letters
like books. Think of all the marvelous things I'll have to write about!
Why, Rodney Harrison thinks my letters from Wetherby Ridge, with
nothing----"

Sarah Farraday jerked away from her, her cheeks suddenly hot, her eyes
accusing. "So, that's it! That's the reason! It's the man you met on the
boat!" She said it with hyphens--"The-man-you-met-on-the-boat!" She knew
his name quite well, but she always spoke of him thus descriptively; it
was her little way of keeping him in his place, which was well outside of
the sacred circle of Wetherby Ridge.

Jane laughed. "Goose! Of course, he's part of the picture, and a very
pleasant part, and it will be very nice to have him meet me and drive me
opulently to Hetty Hills' sedate boarding-house. Aunt Lyddy is so
rejoiced to have me there with some one from the village that I couldn't
refuse, but I suspect it will be a section of the Old People's Home."

"Poor Marty!" said Sarah. "Poor old Marty! After all his years of
devotion----"

"But don't you think he got large chunks of enjoyment out of them?" Her
best friend's earnestness made her flippant, and it was a curious fact
that good old Sally, a predestinate spinster herself, settled on her
moated grange of music teaching, always took a most militant part in
other people's love affairs. In every lovers' quarrel in the village, in
the rare divorces, she had stood fiercely, hot dabs of color on her
cheekbones, for the swain or the husband. "I still contend," she would
say, "that with all his faults, and I'm not denying that he has faults, a
different sort of a woman could have saved him and made something of
him!"

Sarah came to stay the night with her before she was to leave in the
morning, and cried herself to sleep with a thin drizzle of tears which
Jane found at once flattering and touching and irritating, and when at
last the weeper was drawing long and peaceful breaths she slipped out of
bed and flung on her orange-colored kimono and knelt down before the open
window, her shining hair, so darkly brown that it was almost black,
hanging gypsylike about her shoulders. (The greater portion of Sarah's
hair was at rest upon the rosewo