This brought Ann’s unhappiness back to her, and she smiled sadly as she thought of her own tangled love-affair.

“I want you and my brother to be very happy.”

Fledra dropped her comb and looked soberly at the other.

“I’m not good enough for him,” she said, with a sigh; “but he loves me, and I love him more than the whole world put together, Sister Ann.”

The young face had grown radiant with idealized love and faith, and through the shining gray eyes, in which bits of brown shaded to golden, Ann could see the girl’s soul, pure and lofty.  She marked how it had grown, had expanded, under great love, and marveled.

“I know that, Dearest.  I wish I were as happy as you!”

The pathos in her tones, the sad lines about Ann’s sweet mouth, made Fledra grasp her hands in girlish impetuousness.

“He’ll come back to you, Sister Ann, some day,” she breathed.  “He thinks Pappy Lon ought to have us kids, and that’s what makes him work against you and Brother Horace.  He can’t stay away from you long.”

Ann shook her head mournfully.

“I fear he doesn’t love me, Fledra, or he couldn’t have done as he has.  Sometimes it seems as if I must send for him; for he isn’t bad at heart.”  She rested her eyes on Fledra’s face imploringly.  “You think, don’t you, Dear, that when a woman loves a man as I love him her love in the end will help him?”

Fledra thought of her own mad affection for Horace, of his love for her, and of how her longing for him stirred the very depths of her soul, uplifting and refreshing it.  She nodded her head.

“He’ll come back to her, all right,” she murmured after Ann had gone and she had thrown herself on the bed.  “Floyd will get well, and Horace and I—­” She dropped asleep, and the morning had fully dawned before she opened her eyes to another day.

* * * * *

Then, as Fledra sat up in bed, brushed back the curls from her face, and with the eagerness of a child thought over the happy yesterday, suddenly her eyes fell upon an envelop, lying on the carpet just beneath her window.  It had not been there the night before.  She slipped to the floor, picked up the sealed letter with her name on it, and climbed into bed again, while examining it closely.  With a mystified expression upon her face, she tore open the envelop.  Unfolding one of the two letters, inclosed, she read: 

“Flea Cronk.—­

“This is to tell ye that if ye don’t come back with me and Lem, we’ll kill that guy Shellington and Flukey.  Flukey can stay there if he wants to, if you come.  Make up yer mind, and don’t ye tell any man that I writ this letter.  Come to Lem’s scow in the river, or ye know what I does to Flukey.

“LonCronk.”

Fledra folded up the letter and opened the other one dazedly.  It was written with a masterly pen-stroke, and the girl, without reading it, looked at the signature.  It was signed, “Everett Brimbecomb.”  Her eyes flashed back to the beginning, and she read it through swiftly: