merely a
pleasantly sentimental regret I was hugging to my heart. I daresay it's
the latter. Now, Louisa, I see the beginning of the plot far down in
those placid eyes of yours. Strangle it at birth, dear Louisa. There is
no use in your trying to make up a match between Peter and me now--no,
nor in slyly inviting him up here to tea some evening, as you are even
this moment thinking of doing."

"Well, I must go and milk the cows," gasped Louisa, rather glad to make
her escape. Nancy's power of thought-reading struck her as uncanny. She
felt afraid to remain with her cousin any longer, lest Nancy should drag
to light all the secrets of her being.

Nancy sat long on the steps after Louisa had gone--sat until the night
came down, darkly and sweetly, over the garden, and the stars twinkled
out above the firs. This had been her home in girlhood. Here she had
lived and kept house for her father. When he died, Curtis Shaw, newly
married to her cousin Louisa, bought the farm from her and moved in.
Nancy stayed on with them, expecting soon to go to a home of her own.
She and Peter Wright were engaged.

Then came their mysterious quarrel, concerning the cause of which kith
and kin on both sides were left in annoying ignorance. Of the results
they were not ignorant. Nancy promptly packed up and left Avonlea seven
hundred miles behind her. She went to a hospital in Montreal and studied
nursing. In the twenty years that followed she had never even revisited
Avonlea. Her sudden descent on it this summer was a whim born of a
moment's homesick longing for this same old garden. She had not thought
about Peter. In very truth, she had thought little about Peter for the
last fifteen years. She supposed that she had forgotten him. But now,
sitting on the old doorstep, where she had often sat in her courting
days, with Peter lounging on a broad stone at her feet, something tugged
at her heartstrings. She looked over the valley to the light in the
kitchen of the Wright farmhouse, and pictured Peter sitting there,
lonely and uncared for, with naught but the cold comfort of his own
providing.

"Well, he should have got married," she said snappishly. "I am not going
to worry because he is a lonely old bachelor when all these years I have
supposed him a comfy Benedict. Why doesn't he hire him a housekeeper,
at least? He can afford it; the place looks prosperous. Ugh! I've a fat
bank account, and I've seen almost everything in the world worth