wind could
blow bright and gay as ever, though hearts were writhing in agony!

She hoped she would not see any of the people she knew, for the pain
that lay like a band of ice around her heart might be showing in her
face--and Pearl knew that the one thing she could not stand was a word
of sympathy. That would be fatal. So she hurried on. She would send a
wire of acceptance to her inspector friend, and then go over to the
stable for her horse, and be on her way home.

But there is something whimsical about fate. It takes a hand in our
affairs without apology, and throws a switch at the last moment. If
Pearl had not met Mrs. Crocks at the corner, just before she took the
street to the station, this would have been a different story. But who
knows? We never get a chance to try the other way, and it is best and
wisest and easiest of comprehension to believe that whatever is, is
best!

Mrs. Crocks was easily the best informed person regarding local
happenings, in the small town of Millford. She really knew. Every
community has its unlicensed and unauthorized gossips, who think they
know what their neighbors are thinking and doing, but who more often
than not get their data wrong, and are always careless of detail. Mrs.
Crocks was not one of these.

When Bill Cavers got drunk, and spent in one grand, roaring spree all
the money which he and his wife and Libby Anne had saved for their
trip to Ontario, there were those who said that he went through six
hundred dollars that one night, making a rough guess at the amount.
Mrs. Crocks did not use any such amateur and unsatisfactory way of
arriving at conclusions. She did not need to--there was a way of
finding out! To the elevator she went, and looked at the books under
cover of looking up a wheat ticket which her husband had cashed and
found that Bill Cavers had marketed seventeen hundred and eight
dollars worth of wheat. From this he had paid his store bill, and the
blacksmith's bill, which when deducted, left him eight hundred and
fourteen dollars--she did not bother with the cents. The deductions
were easily verified--both the storekeeper and the blacksmith were
married men!

This was the method she followed in all her research--careful,
laborious and accurate at all costs, with a fine contempt for her less
scientific contemporaries. The really high spots in her life had been
when she was able to cover her competitors with confusion by showing
that their facts were all