Annie Laurie Pace was making ready for church.

Her Sunday frock of dark blue serge lay on the bed; her silk petticoat rustled as she stepped briskly about the room; and her heavy coat and gloves, and her hat with the ostrich plumes, were primly awaiting her need. All was durable about her clothing, and orderly within the room.

A very clean room it was, somewhat bare and bleak, with a ceiling too high for its size. The floor was uncarpeted, the walls white and without pictures. No unnecessary thing was in sight—not even a pretty foolish trinket on the dresser. Through the windows with their dark green shades Annie Laurie could look out into the dairy yard with its whitewashed houses. Beyond stretched the pastures in which grazed the fine herd that was the pride of her father, Simeon Pace.

Usually, Annie Laurie sang as she dressed for church. She had a warm full voice, with notes in it not unlike the whistle of an oriole. But this morning no song came from her lips. She had a set, almost stern look; her chin came out a little farther than was necessary, and there was battle in her eye.

Her aunts, dressing in the next room, spoke of it.

“Annie Laurie is not herself,” declared Miss Adnah to Miss Zillah. “I can see that she is terribly put about. I do hope and pray that we haven’t made a mistake in letting her leave the district school and go in with Carin Carson and that other girl. It looks to me as if Mrs. Carson was the only person that wanted her—except, perhaps, the governess, Miss Parkhurst—and staying where we’re not wanted is not a thing that we could ever put up with, we Paces.”

“Don’t worry about Annie Laurie, sister,” replied Miss Zillah, setting her queer lid-like hat on her short gray curls. “She made the change of her own free will, remember. She’s run up against a stone wall for the first time in her life, and I’ll be interested to see whether she climbs over or burrows under it. Those two girls she’s studying with don’t like her—or at least they don’t like to have her intruding on them. I don’t know as I blame them very much. There they were, enjoying each other’s society, and in comes a stranger and thrusts them apart, you may say. Annie Laurie is as unlike them as she can be—quite of a different class, indeed.”

Miss Adnah snapped the fasteners of her gloves sharply.

“What do you mean by a different class, sister?” she said reprovingly. “Is it possible you consider the Paces inferior to anyone in this community?”

“Now, Adnah dear, I didn’t say anything about inferiority. I spoke of a difference. What the Paces know, they’ve mostly taught themselves; and what they have, they’ve honestly earned. They’re proud of it. But they’re no prouder of being what they are—well-to-do, reliable, respectable members of the community—than the Carsons are of being highly cultivated, rich, much-traveled gentle-folk, or the McBirneys of being industrious, independent mountain people. The truth is, Adnah, if there were fewer kinds of pride in this community, and less of each kind, it would be a better thing.”“The team is up, aunts,” called Annie Laurie in her clear voice.

“Very well, child; we are ready,” came the reply.

Of course they were ready. It was seldom, indeed, that anyone in that house kept anyone else waiting. Simeon Pace, holding his fine large grays in check, knew almost to a second how long before the front door would open and three tall, upright figures emerge. And this morning was no exception. At the right instant his sisters, in their well-preserved cloaks, came out together, followed by his daughter. The door was locked, the key placed in the crotch of the sycamore, the aunts were helped to their places by Annie Laurie’s strong arms and then she swung herself into the seat beside her father, and took the reins from his hands. As she did so, she happened to hit her father’s left arm, which gave forth a sound like the rattling of an eave trough in the wind.

And truth to tell, it was made of the same material, for where Simeon Pace’s muscular member of flesh and blood had once swung, there now was an unjointed tin substitute for it, hollow as a drum. An ill-advised visit to a sawmill five years before was responsible for this defect, which indeed, might have been all but concealed had Mr. Pace been willing to buy one of the excellent modern imitations of an arm. His sisters and his daughter continually urged him to do this, but Simeon said that his tin arm had helped him when his trouble was new, and that he refused to throw it on the trash heap as a reward for faithful service. It was nothing to him that his gestures startled nervous folk. He remained loyal to his battered, awkward tin convenience, and seemed to take an innocent joy in waving it in the air, offering it as a support to old ladies, and sawing it up and down when he became excited. All the Paces were independent and Simeon was the most independent of them all.

He led his women folk well up to the front of the church and eyed them with critical kindness as they filed past him into the pew, confident that their thoughts would not wander from the preacher’s words during the service. So it was good for his fatherly satisfaction that he did not look into his daughter’s mind, for barely a sentence of the sermon did she hear that day. Her thoughts were slipping back and forth like shuttles in a loom. The past week in Mrs. Carson’s home has been a strange—and in some ways, a distressing—one. True, never had she learned so much in so short a space of time. If she asked a question everyone tried to answer it. Little as the other two girls had seemed to like her, when it came to a question of ideas, they paid instant and warm attention. An idea was an idea with them, and entitled to respect.

If the combined wit of Miss Parkhurst and her pupils failed to supply a good answer to an inquiry, plenty of books were at hand to consult, and as a last reference, there were Mr. and Mrs. Carson, who seemed to have been almost everywhere and to know something about almost everything. As Annie Laurie had heard them talk, speaking with interest about all manners of people, her little local standards began to vanish like mist before the sun. For the first time it was borne in upon her that Lee, North Carolina, was not the center of civilization. All the world, it appeared, was full of interest—full of good neighborly folk. All one had to do was to learn their language to find out how very nice they really were. It was such a new and brilliant idea to Annie Laurie that it almost dazzled her.

She had been used to thinking herself a bright girl—a girl who could keep at the head of her classes—so it was but natural in those first angry hours when she raged at the cold reception Carin and Azalea had given her, that she should have thought: “Just wait till we get down to lessons, and then I’ll show them.”

But to her surprise, she had not been able to “show them.” Carin and Azalea did not attack their studies so fiercely as she did. They seemed to make more of a game of them and less of a task. They laughed over things that puzzled her. But for all that they were clever, and it did not seem strange to them that Annie Laurie should be clever too. Her cleverness, as they knew, was Mrs. Carson’s excuse for asking her to join them. After that first chilly day they had been polite enough. But they somehow put her in the wrong. She felt awkward and strange. She fatally said the wrong thing—or the right thing in the wrong place. Even her clothes had seemed stiff and unlovely beside theirs, though they were of good material and honestly and thoroughly made. However, as Annie Laurie had more than once reflected, their clothes were made for them by their mothers, who asked nothing better than to see them looking their best. That Mary McBirney was not really Azalea’s mother made no difference—she loved Azalea almost as much, judging from what Azalea said.

Annie Laurie stole a glance at her two excellent aunts—always so really kind and just to her—but rather stern, like her father. The Paces seldom laughed; they almost never kissed each other; they said what they thought—and they quite lacked that pretty foolishness which Mrs. Carson sometimes indulged in with Carin.

Annie Laurie could remember that her own mother had been something like Mrs. Carson. It was she who had given her the name after the sweet old song. She had laughed and danced and sung, and the aunts had not quite liked it, although they mourned her deeply when she died, still in her youth. And they had treasured as keepsakes the things which had been hers.

But what was the preacher saying all this time? Something about Ananias and the doom which overtook him because of his lies. It was not a subject in which she could feel much interest. Sometimes, up at her house they suffered from too much truth telling—hard, cold truth telling—but not a soul of them would have been guilty of a lie.

“Plant a lie in the garden of your soul,” said the minister, “and it will flourish worse than any poisonous weed. And do not think that you can uproot it when you will, for it will grow and grow, till it is stronger than you, and not all your prayers and tears can tear it out of your life.”

Annie Laurie wondered why he should be talking like that to those friendly, good neighbors, who seemed to be doing the best they could’ from morning till night. She wished he would talk about something that would help her through the coming week, for she dreaded going back with those girls who did not like her. Why couldn’t preachers know what was going on in the back of one’s mind? She looked up wearily and met the gaze of “that Disbrow boy,” as her aunts always called Sam Disbrow, the son of the undertaker. For some reason they did not like him. They “had no use for the whole kit and b’ilin’ of Disbrows.” Yet, someway, Annie Laurie, though she had grown up with this sentiment ringing in her ears, thought Sam Disbrow rather a nice boy. At this moment he seemed to be as impatient as she was at the way the minister was scolding about liars. Evidently liars failed to interest Sam, also.

It happened that Annie Laurie and Sam were near together as the people came out of church, and while the rest stood talking in the bright winter sunshine, they talked, too.

“How are you liking it at your new school, Annie Laurie?” he inquired.

The girl flushed hotly—it was easy for a person with such white skin as Annie Laurie’s to blush. Sam knew this and made allowances, but he saw there was something more than ordinary the matter. He looked at her a moment, half closing his eyes, and turning his head a little on one side in a way he had.

“They’ve been snubbing you—those girls!” he declared. “I knew they would—knew it as well as anything.”

“I don’t see how you could know that,” said Annie Laurie with a sudden feeling that she ought not say anything against Carin and Azalea. “They’re the nicest girls I ever knew; the nicest girls anywhere about here. If I haven’t been able to—to make them understand me, it’s my own fault, I suppose.”“Nonsense!” cried Sam. “They’re not nice if they’ve been making you unhappy. How can you let them do it? No fellow could put it over me, now, I tell you. If he didn’t treat me fair and square, I’d have it out with him. We’d soon see who was the best man.”

“Girls don’t do things that way, Sam.”

“I know they don’t. They sit around and mope and sniff and feel mean, instead of making a good healthy row. I didn’t think you were such a hypocrite.”

“Hypocrite?” gasped the girl, too surprised to feel angry. “How am I a hypocrite, Sam?”

“Because you’re pretending to be contented when you aren’t. You probably act as if you liked those girls. And you don’t—you can’t—if they’re snubby. I say, stir up a fuss. Have a row. Tell ’em what you think of ’em. That will clear the air.”

“I’m under too many obligations to Mrs. Carson to do a thing like that, Sam.”

“Obligations!” snorted Sam. “Nobody is under obligations to be a doormat.”

All the way home the girl kept thinking of what Sam Disbrow had said to her. She would have liked to talk the whole matter over with her Aunt Zillah, but something held her back from complaining of the girls. Deep down within her was the feeling that if only she could manage right, they would yet be friends, true, “forever and forever” friends. If that should prove to be so, it wouldn’t do for this one and that one to be remembering that she had criticised them.

And yet, how they had tormented her with their way of seeing and yet not seeing her, and answering and yet not answering. And she was lonely—desperately lonely. She longed to see the gleam come in the girls’ eyes when they looked at her, which they turned upon each other. All the long, quiet Sunday afternoon she thought of it, though she tried to read. She knew Azalea and Carin were together, for she had heard them planning a horseback ride, while she was alone, and as she told herself sadly, likely to be alone every Sunday, since she knew no one she really wished to be with—save those two, of course.

She had an hour of trying to hate them, but she failed miserably. For all they had made her suffer, she could not get as far as hating them. She failed to sleep well that night. Her mind whirled like a merry-go-round, always bringing back the same thoughts and persons. Azalea and Carin, Carin and Azalea. The bright and charming faces kept returning, but never once did they seem to bear the smiles of friendship and understanding.

Naturally she was far from being herself when she went down to breakfast the next morning, and when her Aunt Adnah said, “You see to it, Ann, that you’re not put upon there at Mrs. Carson’s,” her patience snapped like a wind-filled bag.

“Oh, please leave me alone, Aunt Adnah,” she cried hotly. “I’ll take care of myself all right.”

“My dear, my dear,” murmured Miss Zillah, “ought you to be speaking like that to your Aunt Adnah?”

Annie Laurie knew very well that she ought not, and she was morally certain that if Carin and Azalea could have heard her, they would have cried: “There, see! You call her a nice girl?”

Well, maybe she wasn’t a nice girl, but certainly she was an unhappy one.

She put her head up as high as she could comfortably carry it on her very slim neck and marched away to school. It was a wonderful winter morning—the sort that got into the blood of horses and made them prance. Perhaps it was in Annie Laurie’s blood, too, as she entered the schoolroom that morning. Miss Parkhurst had not yet come, and Carin and Azalea sat together laughing over some charts of the South Sea Isles. Miss Parkhurst had laid out an interesting course for them, all relating to the Archipelago; and geography, history, biography, poetry and fiction were to be woven together until the life of the “burning isles” appeared before them in a series of vivid mental pictures.

If Annie Laurie had been aware of the amount of explosive material in her brain and heart that morning, perhaps she would have had the discretion to remain at home. She really was about as dangerous as a keg of gunpowder, and it chanced that Carin’s first words were as a match to produce the inevitable explosion.

“I don’t suppose you’d care about reading Stevenson’s ‘Ebb Tide,’ would you, Annie Laurie? Not, I mean, as a part of the South Sea study?” She put the question in that cold, detached little voice which she had used from the first to the “new girl.” “We couldn’t expect a thorough person like yourself to enjoy such an unbusiness-like way of getting at things. I said to Miss Parkhurst that probably Azalea and I had better keep that for reading after hours, and during school we’ll study any old Smithsonian Institute reports you and she manage to look up.”

There was a little click in Annie Laurie’s throat, but no spoken word. Carin, looked up, saw the anger blazing in the girl’s eyes, and started to say that she was only joking; but before she could frame the words Annie Laurie found her tongue.

“Why wouldn’t I like to read Stevenson as well as you two?” she demanded. “Why do you make out that I try to do things in the hard and stupid way? You’ve certainly made them hard and stupid enough for me the past week. You’re supposed to have such fine manners, and Azalea is thought ‘so sweet.’ I haven’t seen your fine manner or her sweetness. I imagined it was going to be lovely here with you two—that my life would grow to be interesting when we three were friends. Well, perhaps it would—if we could be friends. But we can’t. First, because you won’t be—and second because I won’t. I’m through. I shouldn’t have come. I’m disgusted that I gave you a chance to snub me. I’m going now, and after this when you poke fun at me you’ll have to do it behind my back.”

“Why—why—Annie Laurie—” gasped Carin, “I didn’t know—”

But Annie Laurie already had left the room and was stalking down the corridor. Carin sank back in her chair and covered her face with her hands. As for Azalea, her book crashed to the floor.

“Oh, Carin,” she cried, “what have we done?”

Miss Parkhurst still was absent, but if she had been there, it is doubtful if the girls would have consulted her. The battle which had been threatening all week was on, and the victory at present was, oddly enough, with the fleeing enemy.

She was already out of the front door by the time Azalea had reached the hall; and once she was in the open, her dignity deserted her and she ran toward the gate as if fleeing from a lava stream. Azalea, who had stopped to snatch her cap and reefer, reached the gate only to see her racing along the road as fast as her long legs would carry her.

Meantime, Hi Kitchell, the boy who had traveled with Azalea in those old, half-forgotten days, and who was now happily settled with his mother and “the kids” in the cabin in which the Carsons had placed them, opened his sharp eyes to see two girls racing along the frozen road, stumbling over hard ruts, and then plunging on again. He knew them both—liked Annie Laurie and swore by Azalea. He saw the anger in the first girl’s face and the anxiety in Azalea’s every gesture. He couldn’t for the life of him see why, if Annie Laurie felt like that, she didn’t turn around and “baste” Azalea. But if she did he’d be on Azalea’s side all right enough.

Goodness, how they were running! He simply couldn’t stand not knowing what it all was about. He knew it was none of his business, but for all of that, a second later he was pelting down the road after them. He could run like a rabbit and it was not long before he overtook them.

But that was just at the moment when Annie Laurie reached her home and, dashing in, slammed the door behind her; and Azalea, panting on the doorstep, furiously rang the bell.