rinted
by Louis. In this document, brief but explicit, they sent their love,
but declined to return. If Pere Michaux came after them, they would run
away again, and _this_ time no one should ever know where they were,
"exsep, purhaps, the _Mormons_." With this dark threat the letter ended.

Pere Michaux, as in the case of Tita, took the matter into his own
hands. He wrote to Rast to keep the boys, and find some regular
occupation for them as soon as possible. Anne's ideas about them had
always been rather Quixotic; he doubted whether they could ever have
been induced to attend school regularly. But now they would grow to
manhood in a region where such natural gifts as they possessed would be
an advantage to them, and where, also, their deficiencies would not be
especially apparent. The old priest rather enjoyed this escapade. He
considered that three of the Douglas children were now, on the whole,
well placed, and that Anne was freed from the hampering responsibility
which her father's ill-advised course had imposed upon her. He sailed
round his water parish with brisker zeal than ever, although in truth he
was very lonely. The little white fort was empty; even Miss Lois was
gone; but he kept himself busy, and read his old classics on stormy
evenings when the rain poured down on his low roof.

But Anne grieved.

As several of her pupils wished to continue their music lessons during
the vacation, it was decided by Miss Lois and herself that she should
remain where she was for the present; the only cheer she had was in the
hope that in autumn Miss Lois and the little boy would come to her. But
in spite of all her efforts, the long weeks of summer stretched before
her like a desert; in her lonely rooms without the boys, without
mademoiselle, she was pursued by a silent depression unlike anything she
had felt before. She fell into the habit of allowing herself to sit
alone in the darkness through the evening brooding upon the past. The
kind-hearted woman who kept the house, in whose charge she had been left
by mademoiselle, said that she was "homesick."

"How can one be homesick who has no home?" answered the girl, smiling
sadly.

One day the principal of the school asked her if she would go on
Saturdays for a while, and assist those who were at work in the Aid
Rooms for the soldiers' hospitals. Anne consented languidly; but once
within the dingy walls, languor vanished. There personal sorrow seemed
small in the prese