d and pencil. Effie crossed the room and
stood at attention while Felicia wrote. When she had read the words on
the pad she gave one look at Annie, then another at Felicia, who nodded.

Effie courtesied before Annie like a fairy dancer. "Good morning. I hope
you are well," she said. Then she courtesied again and said, "Thank you,
I am very well." Her pretty little face was quite eager with love and
pleasure, and yet there was an effect as of a veil before the happy
emotion in it. The contrast between the awful, level voice and the grace
of motion and evident delight at once shocked and compelled pity. Annie
put her arms around Effie and kissed her.

"You dear little thing," she said, quite forgetting that Effie could not
hear.

Felicia Hempstead got speedily to work, and soon Effie's effects were
packed and ready for transportation upon the first express to Lynn
Corners, and Annie and the little girl had boarded the trolley thither.

Annie Hempstead had the sensation of one who takes a cold plunge--half
pain and fright, half exhilaration and triumph--when she had fairly
taken possession of her grandmother's house. There was genuine girlish
pleasure in looking over the stock of old china and linen and ancient
mahoganies, in starting a fire in the kitchen stove, and preparing a
meal, the written order for which Effie had taken to the grocer and
butcher. There was genuine delight in sitting down with Effie at her
very own table, spread with her grandmother's old damask and pretty
dishes, and eating, without hearing a word of unfavorable comment upon
the cookery. But there was a certain pain and terror in trampling upon
that which it was difficult to define, either her conscience or sense of
the divine right of the conventional.

But that night after Effie had gone to bed, and the house was set to
rights, and she in her cool muslin was sitting on the front-door step,
under the hooded trellis covered with wistaria, she was conscious of
entire emancipation. She fairly gloated over her new estate.

"To-night one of the others will really have to get the supper, and wash
the dishes, and not be able to say she did it and I didn't, when I
did," Annie thought with unholy joy. She knew perfectly well that her
viewpoint was not sanctified, but she felt that she must allow her
soul to have its little witch-caper or she could not answer for the
consequences. There might result spiritual atrophy, which would be much
more disastro