because the aforesaid Jacob Wheeler had selected the wrong sister upon whom to bestow his affections.  Be that as it might, Miss Rosetta certainly continued to render the course of Jacob Wheeler’s true love exceedingly rough and tumultuous.  The end of it was that Charlotte had gone quietly away one morning and married Jacob Wheeler without Miss Rosetta’s knowing anything about it.  Miss Rosetta had never forgiven her for it, and Charlotte had never forgiven the things Rosetta had said to her when she and Jacob returned to the Ellis cottage.  Since then the sisters had been avowed and open foes, the only difference being that Miss Rosetta aired her grievances publicly, in season and out of season, while Charlotte was never heard to mention Rosetta’s name.  Even the death of Jacob Wheeler, five years after the marriage, had not healed the breach.

Miss Rosetta took out her curl-papers, packed her valise, and caught the late afternoon train for Charlottetown, as she had threatened.  All the way there she sat rigidly upright in her seat and held imaginary dialogues with Charlotte in her mind, running something like this on her part:—­

“No, Charlotte Wheeler, you are not going to have Jane’s baby, and you’re very much mistaken if you think so.  Oh, all right—­we’ll see!  You don’t know anything about babies, even if you are married.  I do.  Didn’t I take William Ellis’s baby, when his wife died?  Tell me that, Charlotte Wheeler!  And didn’t the little thing thrive with me, and grow strong and healthy?  Yes, even you have to admit that it did, Charlotte Wheeler.  And yet you have the presumption to think that you ought to have Jane’s baby!  Yes, it is presumption, Charlotte Wheeler.  And when William Ellis got married again, and took the baby, didn’t the child cling to me and cry as if I was its real mother?  You know it did, Charlotte Wheeler.  I’m going to get and keep Jane’s baby in spite of you, Charlotte Wheeler, and I’d like to see you try to prevent me—­you that went and got married and never so much as let your own sister know of it!  If I had got married in such a fashion, Charlotte Wheeler, I’d be ashamed to look anybody in the face for the rest of my natural life!”

Miss Rosetta was so interested in thus laying down the law to Charlotte, and in planning out the future life of Jane’s baby, that she didn’t find the journey to Charlottetown so long or tedious as might have been expected, considering her haste.  She soon found her way to the house where her cousin lived.  There, to her dismay and real sorrow, she learned that Mrs. Roberts had died at four o’clock that afternoon.

“She seemed dreadful anxious to live until she heard from some of her folks out in Avonlea,” said the woman who gave Miss Rosetta the information.  “She had written to them about her little girl.  She was my sister-in-law, and she lived with me ever since her husband died.  I’ve done my best for her; but I’ve a big family of my own and I can’t see how I’m to keep the child.  Poor Jane looked and longed for some one to come from Avonlea, but she couldn’t hold out.  A patient, suffering creature she was!”