Miss Adnah was washing dishes in her spotless kitchen when the inner door burst open and a wild-eyed Annie Laurie stood before her.

“Child!” gasped Miss Adnah.

Annie Laurie stood panting breathlessly, her hands on her sides, her eyes blazing.

“Well, you said I wasn’t to let myself be put upon,” she managed to say at length. “So I didn’t. I had my say. I’m through!”

“What have you done?”

“I’m through,” she went on shrilly. “To-morrow I’ll go back to the district school. The other thing wasn’t for me.”

The anger in her eyes began to give way in misery. Miss Adnah stared at her, trying for once to get at the girl’s point of view. Then came the frantic ringing at the bell.

“Mercy on us,” cried Miss Adnah, “what can that mean?”

“Don’t go, aunt. Don’t you go. It’s Azalea McBirney. She followed me. You mustn’t—”“Stand out of my way, Ann. How can you put yourself between me and the door? When the bell rings, it is to be answered. I do not approve of your actions, allow me to say.”

But just then the breathless voice of Azalea was heard in the hall. Miss Zillah had got to the door before them, and had admitted her.

“Don’t try to talk, my dear,” they heard Miss Zillah saying. “Whatever it is, it can wait till you get your breath. Come in, please, and sit down.”

In the kitchen, Annie Laurie was declaring that whatever came she would not go into the parlor.

“I won’t talk the matter over, that’s all,” she said. “It’s no use for you to try to make me go in there.”

Miss Adnah moved back from her niece with a look of displeasure.

“You’d better quiet down, Ann,” she said severely. “I can’t imagine what you’ve done or what’s been done to you, but I do feel certain that you are making a mountain out of a molehill.”

At that moment something bobbed up at the window and then bobbed down again.“Mercy, what’s that?” cried Miss Adnah.

“A head,” said Annie Laurie disgustedly.

“A head! Whose?”

“Hi Kitchell’s. He must have seen us running and followed.”

“The inquisitive little imp! A pretty sight the three of you must have made. Never have I heard such goings on in the house of Simeon Pace. Let me pass, Ann. I must look into this matter.”

Annie Laurie never yet had disobeyed when her aunt spoke in that manner, and she stood aside, lifting her eyebrows with annoyance at the “Ann” which was the sign of Miss Adnah’s displeasure. She began to grow a little calmer, but at the same time the feeling of heaviness at her heart increased. It actually seemed as if it had turned into a stone and was dragging her down. And worse still, there was a hand of iron at her throat. That sharp despair of the young was upon her—that foolish despair, which sees no way out of hard circumstance.

Meantime Miss Adnah had gone on into the hall. She had meant to make her way at once into that grim parlor upon which her best efforts at cleanliness were so rigorously expended, but the sound of voices made her pause. She heard a girl’s excited voice broken by tears.

“Oh, you’re Annie Laurie’s aunt, aren’t you?” said the voice. “Which aunt, please? Her aunt Zillah? Oh, yes. She has told me about you. Oh, Miss Pace, it’s so dreadful! We’ve broken Annie Laurie’s heart, that’s what we’ve done. We didn’t intend it, you know. It came about because—may I tell you everything?”

“Yes, tell me everything,” answered Miss Zillah.

“Of course Zillah will be soft with her,” thought Miss Adnah. “She’s soft with everybody. I’d like to go in and shake her—upsetting Annie Laurie like that.”

There were long panes of glass running down beside the front hall door, and at this moment the ferret face of Hi Kitchell, seamed with anxiety, peered in one of them. This was really too much for Miss Adnah. She rushed to the door and threw it open, sending Hi off backward into the althea bush. It was no trick at all for Miss Adnah to stoop and pick him up as if he were a slug.

“What do you mean, you unmannerly, prying boy?” she demanded. “Peeking in folk’s windows, like you were a wild Indian!”

“Tell me what you’re doing to Azalea,” squealed Hi defiantly. “Azalea’s all right, ma’am. I don’t want anything done to her.”

“Well, she wasn’t invited here any more than you,” snapped Miss Adnah, dropping him on the brick walk. “You run home and leave us to conduct our own affairs. Hear?”

“Oh, aunt!” Annie Laurie whispered agonizingly, “Azalea will hear you.”

“Why didn’t you stay in the kitchen, miss? You seemed very anxious not to leave it a few minutes ago. I won’t have boys looking in my windows.”

“But it’s only Hi. He’s crazy about Azalea—like her little brother, you know. Azalea will think we’re dreadful.”

“Dreadful? We may be a terror to evil doers—well, hear that telephone, will you? Ringing like mad. Never did I know such a morning. No, I’ll answer it, Ann. Hello! Hello! Yes. The Pace residence. Who? Carin Carson. Very well, what is it? Yes, Ann is home. All right? Of course she’s all right. Why shouldn’t she be? You want to speak to her? She’s busy just now.”“Oh, oh, don’t speak like that, aunt,” implored Annie Laurie. “Not in that tone of voice. Let me have the telephone, Aunt Adnah, please—please. I was bad, honestly, aunt—not at all the way I ought to have been. Carin’s sorry, I reckon.”

But Miss Adnah had hung up the receiver, and she turned toward Annie Laurie with a stormy look in her eye.

“I reckon I did you an injustice, Ann. It must have been something pretty bad they did to you. You can back down as much as you please, but for my part I mean to teach them that if they think they can fool with the Paces, they are making a mistake.”

“But my child,” the clear tones of Miss Zillah could be heard saying from the drawing room meantime, “why didn’t you like Annie Laurie? She seems the nicest sort of a girl to me. I’ve taken care of her—I and my sister, that is—since she was a little one, and she’s all that a daughter should be to us. Of course I realize that we may not have succeeded in taking her mother’s place to her. That was hardly to have been expected. But we have done the best we could for her, and when we saw her coming on in school so splendidly, and realized that she was likely to do something fine, we were very proud indeed. I can’t tell you how grateful we were to Mrs. Carson for giving her a chance for special instruction, and for being in with girls like you and Miss Carin. But we saw from the first that something was going wrong. The child seemed too excited to eat. Once or twice I’ve heard her cry out in the night—she sleeps next me, and after she’s asleep I open the door between our rooms so as to hear if anything goes wrong.”

“And a very silly habit it is,” muttered Miss Adnah from the hall.

“Oh, don’t say any more, Miss Pace,” Azalea broke in with a sob in her voice. “If anybody in this world ought to have been good to Annie Laurie it is myself, for I haven’t any mother, either, you know, though of course Mrs. McBirney is as good to me as any mother could be. I can’t explain the way we’ve acted. It all came about from Carin and myself having some lovely secrets together, and games we liked to play that we didn’t want to share with any one. And we were writing poems, and Carin was painting me. We were happy in each other all the time. Then Annie Laurie came and—and we didn’t know her. It wouldn’t have made any difference who the girl was that broke in on us, we wouldn’t have liked it. Mrs. Carson said we were getting selfish and snobbish, and I suppose we were. And Annie Laurie was proud, too—and—and well, a little—”

“Say it, my dear. I am not laboring under the delusion that Annie Laurie is wearing a halo on her head.”

“Well, sulky. So she didn’t give us a chance to see the—the nice side which she simply must have since you love her so. And we wouldn’t show ours to her. We were all stupid, I think. But of course we didn’t have an idea how she really felt until this morning when she got so angry. And then I was—was just paralysed.”

“You talk very well, my child, for a person suffering with paralysis. I can see very well how it came about, however. Now may I ask why you came here?”

“To say how sorry we were—and to beg Annie Laurie to come back with us.”

“But have you the right to do this? Did Mrs. Carson tell you to come?”

Azalea, who had been sitting on the very edge of Miss Zillah’s horsehair sofa, now got to her feet, her face flaming till it was almost as red as her knitted reefer.

“No,” she said frankly. “She—she didn’t tell me to come, Miss Pace. I just ran after Annie Laurie as hard as I could.”

“And very sweet it was of you, my dear. It shows you have a generous heart, and that you couldn’t imagine Mrs. Carson or her daughter would feel any differently from you. But you can see for yourself that I must wait till I hear from them.”

“We have heard from them,” cried Annie Laurie eagerly from the hall. “Carin telephoned, Aunt Zillah; but Aunt Adnah wouldn’t let her talk.”

“I should think not, indeed,” came the voice of Aunt Adnah.

“Oh, come in, Annie Laurie, please,” cried Azalea, running toward the hall door.

Annie Laurie made a motion as if for flight, then brought herself up sharply, and faced Azalea. Miss Zillah had arisen and stood smiling and trembling a trifle, too, like a rose bush softly shaken by the wind. Her lips moved slightly, and Annie Laurie, flashing a glance at her as she came into the room, understood that Aunt Zillah was putting up one of her gentle supplications for peace.

“Oh, Annie Laurie,” Azalea burst forth, “I’ve come to ask you to forgive me. You really, really must. I had no idea how you were feeling. I’m terribly unhappy about it. Don’t you think you can forgive me?”

“What is there for me to forgive?” asked Annie Laurie. “You didn’t want me—you and Carin—and you showed it. That’s all there is to it. I shan’t bother you any more.”

“Well, I want you now,” declared Azalea. “You can see yourself that it would be impossible for Carin and me to be happy with you leaving that way, all hurt and angry. I don’t blame you a bit, really. Except, of course, I think you shut up like a clam when you saw that we didn’t like a third person in the classes. It wasn’t that we objected to you in particular. We were selfish, that’s all, and fond of our own good times; but it won’t be like that again, honestly it won’t. Your aunt says I mustn’t speak for Carin and Mrs. Carson, and I see that I mustn’t, but I know so well that I am saying just what they would want me to say, that I can’t keep still.” She turned toward Miss Zillah, and caught the worn hand of the woman in hers. “Truly,” she said, “they’d be saying just what I am, if they were here.”

“That boy again!” exploded Miss Adnah from the hall. “He’s looking in the hall window again.”

“It’s only poor Hi,” explained Azalea. “You see, he’s always afraid something is going to happen to me.”

“Well, if I had my way, it would,” snapped Miss Adnah.

“Oh, sister, sister,” murmured Miss Zillah.

And just then the eyes of Azalea and Annie Laurie met. There was a flash between them and then something exploded—exploded in helpless laughter. Miss Zillah, unable to believe her senses, called faintly, “Adnah! Adnah!” And Adnah, on the point of making another sortie into the yard for the prying Hi, answered her appeal, and came to the parlor. There she saw the two girls in convulsions of laughter, and Zillah stiff and incredulous on the piano stool. Miss Adnah surveyed the scene for a moment in wrath.“Come, Zillah,” she commanded, and dragged her sister from the room.

The girls heard the kitchen door slam behind the two, and rocked again with painful mirth.

“Oh, oh,” half-sobbed Annie Laurie at length, “how ridiculous we’ve been!”

“Dreadful,” agreed Azalea. “I’m just as ashamed of myself as I can be. Can’t I go and apologize to your aunts?”

“Not on any account,” said Annie Laurie firmly. “They’ll never understand. Never! You couldn’t expect them to.”

“Will you come back with me, Annie Laurie? We’re bound to like each other now after we’ve laughed together like that.”

Annie Laurie gave a final gurgle.

“I know,” she said. “Let’s go out and tell Hi.”

“No, just let’s walk out together, arm in arm. That will make it all right. Let’s never, never tell anyone what happened.”

“Very well, then. And you think I ought to go back?”

“I know it. You must go on Carin’s account and on mine—just prove we’re not so horrid as you thought us.”

The telephone rang again. They could hear Miss Zillah begging to be allowed to answer it and Miss Adnah refusing. So Annie Laurie took down the receiver.

“Yes, Mrs. Carson,” Azalea heard her say. “Yes, it’s Annie Laurie. Yes, Azalea is here. Forgive Carin? Yes, Mrs. Carson. I reckon it was my fault, too. Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault, whosever it was, ma’am. We’ve been bad, that’s all. Everybody is bad sometimes, I suppose. I never was so horrid before, though, honestly. You say Carin never was, either. Well, I’m coming back now. Azalea and I were just starting. What is it? Oh, yes, we’ll not talk of it. Very well, Mrs. Carson. Good-bye.”

She turned to Azalea.

“Come,” she said, “if we go right along we’ll be able to finish our South Sea Island study hour.”

She put her head in the kitchen door. “Good-bye, aunts,” she said. “Try to forget about it all. I’m going back.”

“Annie Laurie,” came the austere voice of her Aunt Adnah, “how can you?”

Annie Laurie ran in and threw her arms around her aunt’s neck.“Because I have to, auntie,” she said, “to be happy and—”

“And good,” broke in Aunt Zillah. She followed them out into the hall. Her pale face was shining, and her short curls bobbed about on her trembling head. She knew that her prayer for peace had been answered. It did not matter to her that it had come in gusts of laughter. Miss Zillah was not one to quarrel with ways and means.

As for the girls, they set out on the road with vigor. The air was full of life, the mountains were brown beneath their purple bloom, and the roadway was beginning to fill with folk driving in to market. Azalea and Annie Laurie knew almost every one—knew Mr. Disbrow, the undertaker, driving his black horses—which now were hitched to a somewhat rickety buggy—they knew “Haystack” Thompson, who was eating up the road with his great strides, his fiddle under his arm; they knew Elder Mills, twisted and tormented with rheumatism, who was about to “accept a call” in Florida, thus leaving vacant the pulpit of the Methodist church; they were well acquainted with the grocer, and the miller, and the postmaster, and the sheriff. From each they received a salutation, and from most of them an inquiry as to why they were not in school. Annie Laurie, used to the “yea and nay” of the Pace household, wondered what they ought to answer, and she was astonished that Azalea had no difficulty at all in finding a fit reply.

“Oh, we’ve been to school this morning,” she said smilingly. “And we’ve learned a hard lesson, too. Now we’re on our way back again.”

But they had got no more than half the way to The Shoals when the familiar surrey of the Carsons appeared, with Mrs. Carson sitting in it.

“Goodness,” cried Annie Laurie, “she’s coming for me! What trouble I have put everybody to.”

But Mrs. Carson didn’t seem to think that anybody was making her trouble. She wore that pleasant, dreamy smile of hers—her “moonlight” smile, as Carin called it, and her voice was as even and low as ever as she bade Benjamin turn the horses, and invited the girls to get in beside her.

“I thought I’d come to meet you,” she said blandly, and quite as if nothing had happened. They rode along together in silence for a while, almost wondering if anything unpleasant really had occurred, Mrs. Carson seemed so unconscious of it. But when they got out of the carriage at the house door she said:

“I’m so glad you’ve talked everything out. You’ll find it much better always, I believe—to talk things out. By the way, Carin is up in her studio. Lessons are to be up there this morning, for a change. Azalea, will you kindly show Annie Laurie the way? Your luncheon will be served there too. We thought we’d celebrate the formation of the Triple Alliance.

“What, ma’am?” said Azalea.

“The Three Girls’ Alliance,” smiled Mrs. Carson. “Drive back to town, please Ben. I must do my marketing.”

As she rode off, Annie Laurie looked at Azalea in a puzzled way.

“How quiet she is,” she said. “I can’t make her out. Nothing seems to matter to her, yet she’s always doing good. I never heard of anyone who did so much good. Can you understand her?”

Azalea shook her head.

“No—and yet a great sorrow, such as hers—it makes you still, I reckon. My mother—I call Mrs. McBirney my mother, you know—is still. Yet she has lost only one child, and little Molly died right in her arms. But Mrs. Carson lost her three sons in a theatre fire in Chicago, and it did something to her, I suppose. The heart went out of her, though not the goodness.”

“Oh, dear no,” agreed Annie Laurie, “not the goodness.”

They left their outer wraps in the vacant schoolroom, and then made their way up the wide mahogany stairs, with the gleaming white banisters and mahogany rail. Curious old prints lined the side of the wall, and Annie Laurie wanted to pause and look at them, but Azalea urged her on.

“If you stopped to look at every interesting thing in this house,” she said, “you’d never get anywhere.”

They went on past the floor where the bedrooms were, and then up a narrower flight of stairs to the third story.

“Half of this story is Carin’s,” explained Azalea. “The servants sleep in the other half.”

A tall, curious door, much paneled, with a shining brass knob, stood before them. There was also a knocker of brass, shaped like a lyre. Azalea rapped with it.

“Come in,” said the voice of Carin, and Azalea threw wide the door and motioned Annie Laurie to enter.

What she saw then she was never to forget. It was as bright to her, as different from anything she ever had seen, as the green Azores are to one who has ridden long upon the gray Atlantic. The room was paneled high in white, and above it, decorations of tropical flowers and parokeets made the wall gay. Muslin curtains hung at the dormer windows, beneath draperies of delicate green. Near the north window was Carin’s easel, with the unfinished portrait of Azalea upon it. Chairs of green wicker stood about; a huge divan was piled with dainty pillows; in the white wooden fireplace, with its tiles of parrots, palms and pagodas, a bright fire burned. Japanese rugs of gray and white lay on the floor, and in jars of pale green, or gray, were beautiful blossoming plants.

But exquisite as the room was, and deeply as it satisfied Annie Laurie’s beauty-starved heart, it was as nothing to the girl who was the center of it.

Carin stood awaiting them, her hands outstretched

In her crimson school frock, soft and graceful, her golden hair shining on her shapely head, her eyes full of tears of repentance, Carin stood awaiting them, her hands outstretched. It all seemed so different from what Annie Laurie knew of her, that at first she hesitated to go forward, but Carin came on, still with that look of solicitude in her face.

“Oh, Annie Laurie,” she said, “I see everything now. I see how I acted and how I made you feel. You’ll have to forgive me. I never was like that before. It was as if imps got inside me, and the worst of it was that I seemed to want to hang on to them. I knew I was wicked, but I liked to be that way. I just wouldn’t give up, though I was unhappy all the time. I told mother all about it, and she said that was the way it was when you got perverse. You liked it. Perversity seemed sweeter than anything. She said it was like being a drunkard. You enjoyed the thing that ruined you. I can see just what she meant. I’ll tell you now, Annie Laurie, that after the first day or two I found myself liking you, and I hated to admit it. I tried not to as hard as I could. I didn’t like mamma’s putting a girl in with us without talking it over, do you see? But I do like you—I had to. The whole trouble was that I couldn’t bear to give up. But you’ve made me, and now I’m well again. For it’s just like a spell of sickness, having a horrid, wicked idea like mine and holding on to it. Do you understand?”

Annie Laurie’s face had flushed softly; her eyes were misty, her handsome, large mouth slightly tremulous. She withdrew her hands from Carin’s, and put her arms close about her.

“When I say I forgive,” she said, “I do.”

“And do you say it?”

Annie Laurie laughed deep in her throat—and again her voice reminded one of an oriole’s.

“I do say it,” she said. “Your mother called it the Triple Alliance—the Three Girls’ Alliance.”

“We must swear fealty!” cried Azalea. She ran to the table and brought back Howard Pyle’s “Robin Hood,” in which the story of the forester and his faithful crew is told in equally beautiful words and pictures.

“Swear!” she commanded. Carin, laughing somewhat uncertainly, dropped her slender white hand on it. Annie Laurie laid her firm brown one over it; Azalea placed on top her sensitive, odd hand, which always quivered when she cared about anything.

“We swear,” they said in chorus.

The door opened and Miss Parkhurst entered, her arms full of books.