se all the church people must hear
her. Ours is the only noisy house on this street. You hear what she's
playing now, don't you?"

Mrs. Kronborg rose from browning her coffee. "Yes; it's the Blue Danube
waltzes. I'm familiar with 'em. If any of the church people come at you,
you just send 'em to me. I ain't afraid to speak out on occasion, and I
wouldn't mind one bit telling the Ladies' Aid a few things about
standard composers." Mrs. Kronborg smiled, and added thoughtfully, "No,
I wouldn't mind that one bit."

Anna went about with a reserved and distant air for a week, and Mrs.
Kronborg suspected that she held a larger place than usual in her
daughter's prayers; but that was another thing she didn't mind.

Although revivals were merely a part of the year's work, like
examination week at school, and although Anna's piety impressed her very
little, a time came when Thea was perplexed about religion. A scourge of
typhoid broke out in Moonstone and several of Thea's schoolmates died of
it. She went to their funerals, saw them put into the ground, and
wondered a good deal about them. But a certain grim incident, which
caused the epidemic, troubled her even more than the death of her
friends.

Early in July, soon after Thea's fifteenth birthday, a particularly
disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone in an empty box car. Thea
was sitting in the hammock in the front yard when he first crawled up to
the town from the depot, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking
under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with rusty screening
nailed over one end. He had a thin, hungry face covered with black hair.
It was just before suppertime when he came along, and the street smelled
of fried potatoes and fried onions and coffee. Thea saw him sniffing the
air greedily and walking slower and slower. He looked over the fence.
She hoped he would not stop at their gate, for her mother never turned
any one away, and this was the dirtiest and most utterly
wretched-looking tramp she had ever seen. There was a terrible odor
about him, too. She caught it even at that distance, and put her
handkerchief to her nose. A moment later she was sorry, for she knew
that he had noticed it. He looked away and shuffled a little faster.

A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped in an empty shack
over on the east edge of town, beside the ravine, and was trying to give
a miserable sort of show there. He told the boys who went to see