“She’s so intense,” sighed Lynda; “she’s just courting suffering.  She lavishes everything on them she loves and grieves like one without hope when things go against her.”

“She’s the most dramatic little imp.”  Truedale laughed reminiscently as he spoke—­he had seen Ann in two or three school performances.  “I shouldn’t wonder if she had genius.”

Betty looked serious when she heard this.  “I hope not!” was all she said, and from then on she watched Ann with brooding eyes; she urged Lynda to keep her much out of doors in the companionship of Bobbie and Billy who were normal to a relieving extent.  Ann played and enjoyed the babies—­she adored Billy and permitted him to rule over her with no light hand—­but when she could, she read poetry and talked of strange, imaginative things with the few girls in whose presence she became rapt and reverent.

Brace was the only one who took Ann as a joke.

“She’s working out her fool ideas, young,” he comforted; “let her alone.  A boy would go behind some barn and smoke and revel in the idea that he was a devil of a fellow.  Annie”—­he, alone, called her that—­“Annie is smoking her tobacco behind her little barns.  She’ll get good and sick of it.  Let her learn her lesson.”

“That’s right,” Betty admitted, “girls ought to learn, just as boys do—­but if I ever find Bobbie smoking—­”

“What will you do to him, Betty?”

“Well, I’m not sure, but I do know I’d insist upon his coming from behind barns.”

And that led them all to consider Ann from the barn standpoint.  If she wanted the tragic and sombre she should have it—­in the sunlight and surrounded with love.  So she no longer was obliged to depend on the queer little girls who fluttered like blind bats in the crude of their adolescent years.  Lynda, Betty, Truedale, and Brace read bloodcurdling horrors to her and took her to plays—­the best.  And they wedged in a deal of wholesome, commonplace fun that presently awoke a response and developed a sense of humour that gave them all a belief that the worst was past.

“She has forgotten everything that lies back of her sickness,” Lynda once said to Betty; “it’s strange, but she appears to have begun from that.”

Then Betty made a remark that Lynda recalled afterward: 

“I don’t believe she has, Lyn.  I’m not worried about Ann as you and Con are.  Her Lady Macbeth pose is just plain girl; but she has depths we have never sounded.  Sometimes I think she hides them to prove her gratitude and affection, and because she is so helpless.  She was nearly five when she came to you, Lyn, and I believe she does remember the hills and her mother!”

“Why, Betty, what makes you think this?” Lynda was appalled.

“It is her eyes.  There are moments when she is looking back—­far back.  She is trying to hold to something that is escaping her.  Love her, Lyn, love her as you never have before.”