“How can you ever forgive my abominable carelessness?  I intended to answer immediately after our guests left, but Mr. Avery and I were invited to a little house-party in the country, and I thought a few days wouldn’t make any difference to you.  Then, after our return, so many things interfered and the days slipped by so fast, that the month was nearly gone before I realized it.  But then I always have been such a poor correspondent.

“I hope that it hasn’t inconvenienced you any, and that you have been having a good visit with Miss Barbara.  You know my unfortunate way of doing things, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me, like the darling you always were.

“We shall look for you to-morrow on the six o’clock train.  Don’t
disappoint us, for we both shall be at the station to meet you.

“Devotedly,
“MARGUERITE.”

Judith read the letter aloud to the girls and then dropped it in the fire, watching it without a word, as it curled up in the flame.  How long she had waited for that careless little letter!  How anxiously she had hoped for it!  A few days sooner it would have brought untold happiness.  Now it was only a hollow mockery.  Well, it was all over now.  Her hopes were in ashes like the letter.  How high they had burned!  And the little evening gown she had taken such pleasure in making—­there would never be any occasion fit for its wearing in Westbrooke.  She might as well fold it away.  The letter had come too late.  And she was asked to forgive it—­the disappointment that would sting all her life long—­simply because it was Daisy’s way.

The silence was growing uncomfortable.  Amy kept casting frightened glances at her sister’s white, tense face.  “Oh, dear,” she sighed, finally, “if this had only been in a story it wouldn’t have ended so dreadfully.  Something nice would have happened just at the last minute to make up for the disappointment.”

“But it isn’t in a story,” said Judith, slowly, rising to leave the room.  “And nothing can compensate for such a disappointment.  It will hurt always.”

As the door closed behind her the girls exchanged sympathizing glances.  “If there had even been a good reason,” sighed Lillian, “but it was only carelessness.  And the trouble of it is, the world is full of Daisy Averys.”

ANN’S OWN WAY

“Ann!  Ann!  Have you been home yet to feed the chickens?” The call came from the doorway of a big old farmhouse, where a pleasant-faced woman stood looking out over the October fields.

The answer floated down from an apple-tree near by, where a ten-year-old girl sat perched among its gnarled branches.  She had a dog-eared book of fairy tales on her knee, and was poring over it in such blissful absorption that she had forgotten there were such things in all the world as chickens to be fed.

“No’m, Aunt Sally, I haven’t done it yet, but I’ll go in a minute,” and she was deep into the story again.