“Have you named all the characters?” asked Diana wistfully.  “If you hadn’t I was going to ask you to let me name one—­just some unimportant person.  I’d feel as if I had a share in the story then.”

“You may name the little hired boy who lived with the Lesters,” conceded Anne.  “He is not very important, but he is the only one left unnamed.”

“Call him Raymond Fitzosborne,” suggested Diana, who had a store of such names laid away in her memory, relics of the old “Story Club,” which she and Anne and Jane Andrews and Ruby Gillis had had in their schooldays.

Anne shook her head doubtfully.

“I’m afraid that is too aristocratic a name for a chore boy, Diana.  I couldn’t imagine a Fitzosborne feeding pigs and picking up chips, could you?”

Diana didn’t see why, if you had an imagination at all, you couldn’t stretch it to that extent; but probably Anne knew best, and the chore boy was finally christened Robert Ray, to be called Bobby should occasion require.

“How much do you suppose you’ll get for it?” asked Diana.

But Anne had not thought about this at all.  She was in pursuit of fame, not filthy lucre, and her literary dreams were as yet untainted by mercenary considerations.

“You’ll let me read it, won’t you?” pleaded Diana.

“When it is finished I’ll read it to you and Mr. Harrison, and I shall want you to criticize it severely.  No one else shall see it until it is published.”

“How are you going to end it—­happily or unhappily?”

“I’m not sure.  I’d like it to end unhappily, because that would be so much more romantic.  But I understand editors have a prejudice against sad endings.  I heard Professor Hamilton say once that nobody but a genius should try to write an unhappy ending.  And,” concluded Anne modestly, “I’m anything but a genius.”

“Oh I like happy endings best.  You’d better let him marry her,” said Diana, who, especially since her engagement to Fred, thought this was how every story should end.

“But you like to cry over stories?”

“Oh, yes, in the middle of them.  But I like everything to come right at last.”

“I must have one pathetic scene in it,” said Anne thoughtfully.  “I might let Robert Ray be injured in an accident and have a death scene.”

“No, you mustn’t kill Bobby off,” declared Diana, laughing.  “He belongs to me and I want him to live and flourish.  Kill somebody else if you have to.”

For the next fortnight Anne writhed or reveled, according to mood, in her literary pursuits.  Now she would be jubilant over a brilliant idea, now despairing because some contrary character would not behave properly.  Diana could not understand this.

“Make them do as you want them to,” she said.

“I can’t,” mourned Anne.  “Averil is such an unmanageable heroine.  She will do and say things I never meant her to.  Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.”