de in neighbour till at last the whole evil scheme was
uncovered.

No one had seemed insignificant enough to be overlooked, no one was
high enough to be immune. Even Mrs. Sutherland and the ministers were
not slighted. Dr. McGarry's was a picture of a quack giving bread
pills to old women and babies, and he roared and laughed long and loud
over it, and showed it to every one in spite of his sister.

The Methodist minister's, the Baptist minister's, and Mr. Sinclair's
were all exactly alike, violent-looking preachers with gusts of texts
flying from their wide-open mouths, and sly rhymes concerning their
denominational differences. The pretty little school teacher's was so
mean that she couldn't go to school the next day, she cried so hard;
and Mrs. Sinclair said that, of course, one should be above these
things, but as far as she was concerned, she felt she needed all the
Christian grace she possessed to forgive the unscrupulous person who
had sent hers.

At first it did not seem possible that Mrs. Johnnie Dunn, that
sensible, practical woman, could be the guilty party. At the very
worst, her friends felt, she might have told the names of the people in
the village, and some foolish mischief-maker--there were all kinds of
folks in the States--had done the rest. But as each valentine was
revealed it grew plainer that only some one intimately acquainted with
the life of Orchard Glen could have chosen with such evil sagacity.

Who, for instance, outside Orchard Glen, knew that young Mrs. Martin
had been a perfect martinet in her teaching days, but had now lost all
her old power with the rod, and her children were the terror of the
village? And who but a neighbour could have known that Granny Minns
scolded Mitty all day long and pretended she was much more feeble than
she really was? And who could have such an intimate knowledge of the
flirtations of Tilly Holmes, and the dual organist's position held by
Martha Henderson and Minnie McKenzie, and the coolness between Mr.
Wylie and Mr. Sinclair since the night of the Piper's mistake?

It was Marmaduke who finally convinced the public mind that The Woman
must be the perpetrator of the valentines; not a difficult case to
prove.

He and Trooper had received quite the worst and most insulting of all
the mail bag and Trooper's was particularly stinging. Marmaduke
declared there was something in it that showed beyond doubt that it
must have been The Woman, but Trooper