, but she remained. The bell tinkled again. There was a
pause, then it sounded for the third time.

Annie leaned against the window, faint and trembling. It was rather
horrible to continue such a fight between will and inclination, but she
held out. She would not have been herself had she not done so. Then she
saw Tom Reed's figure emerge from under the shadow of the door, pass
down the path between the sweet-flowering shrubs, seeming to stir up
the odor of the pinks as he did so. He started to go down the road;
then Annie heard a loud, silvery call, with a harsh inflection, from her
father's house. "Imogen is calling him back," she thought.

Annie was out of the room, and, slipping softly down-stairs and out into
the yard, crouched close to the fence overgrown with sweetbrier, its
foundation hidden in the mallow, and there she listened. She wanted to
know what Imogen and her other sisters were about to say to Tom Reed,
and she meant to know. She heard every word. The distance was not great,
and her sisters' voices carried far, in spite of their honeyed tones
and efforts toward secrecy. By the time Tom had reached the gate of
the parsonage they had all crowded down there, a fluttering assembly in
their snowy summer muslins, like white doves. Annie heard Imogen first.
Imogen was always the ringleader.

"Couldn't you find her?" asked Imogen.

"No. Rang three times," replied Tom. He had a boyish voice, and his
chagrin showed plainly in it. Annie knew just how he looked, how dear
and big and foolish, with his handsome, bewildered face, blurting out to
her sisters his disappointment, with innocent faith in their sympathy.

Then Annie heard Eliza speak in a small, sweet voice, which yet, to one
who understood her, carried in it a sting of malice. "How very strange!"
said Eliza.

Jane spoke next. She echoed Eliza, but her voice was more emphatic and
seemed multiple, as echoes do. "Yes, very strange indeed," said Jane.

"Dear Annie is really very singular lately. It has distressed us all,
especially father," said Susan, but deprecatingly.

Then Imogen spoke, and to the point. "Annie must be in that house," said
she. "She went in there, and she could not have gone out without our
seeing her."

Annie could fairly see the toss of Imogen's head as she spoke.

"What in thunder do you all mean?" asked Tom Reed, and there was a
bluntness, almost a brutality, in his voice which was refreshing.

"I do not think such forcible