ing, as it lashed itself foaming
and pounding just below her feet. It called to the world to listen.

"Look how I'm used," it sobbed, "and abused--and confused."

Pearl put her hands in the silk-lined pockets of her coat, and thought
about what she had just seen.

"Life is like this," she said at last, "human nature is full of
mischief. It loves to start trouble and fan a fire into a destructive
mood; and there's only one way to stop it--plough a fire-guard. I wish
there had been some one here to plough a fire-guard when the fires of
gossip began to run here three years ago."

"I'll go now and dress up, and break the news to the neighborhood that
I am going to the house at Purple Springs to board. There will be
a row--there will be a large row--unless I can make the people
understand, and in a row there is nothing so sustaining as good
clothes--next to the consciousness of being right, of course," she
added after a pause. An hour later, Pearl Watson, in her best dress
of brown silk, with her high brown boots well polished, and her small
brown hat, made by herself, with a band of crushed burnt orange
poppies around the crown, safely anchored and softened by a messaline
drape; with her hair drawn over the tops of her ears, and a smart
fawn summer coat, with buttons which showed a spot of red like a
pigeon-blood ruby. Pearl looked at herself critically in the glass:

"These things should not count," she said, as she fastened a thin veil
over her face and made it very neat at the back with a hairpin, "but
they do."

CHAPTER XX

ANNIE GRAY'S STORY

The Purple Springs district was going through a period of intense
excitement. Housework languished, dough ran over, dish-water cooled.
The news which paralyzed household operations came shortly after one
o'clock, when Mrs. Cowan phoned to Mrs. Brownless that the teacher had
just been in, and said she was going to board with the woman who lived
alone. The teacher had said it, according to Mrs. Cowan, in the "most
off-hand manner, just as if she said she had found her jackknife or
her other rubber--just as easy as that, she said she had found a
boarding house. Mrs. Howser could not take her, but Mrs. Gray could,
and she was moving over right away."

Mrs. Cowan, according to her own testimony, nearly dropped. She did
not really drop, but any one could easily have knocked her down;
she could have been knocked down with a pin feather. She could not
speak--she just s