Page:Anne of the Island (1920).djvu/102

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86
ANNE OF THE ISLAND

the extreme. Relations between these two old schoolmates continued to be thus strained for nearly a year! Then Charlie transferred his blighted affections to a round, rosy, snub-nosed, blue-eyed, little Sophomore who appreciated them as they deserved, whereupon he forgave Anne and condescended to be civil to her again; in a patronizing manner intended to show her just what she had lost.

One day Anne scurried excitedly into Priscilla’s room.

“Read that,” she cried, tossing Priscilla a letter. “It’s from Stella—and she’s coming to Redmond next year—and what do you think of her idea? I think it’s a perfectly splendid one, if we can only carry it out. Do you suppose we can, Pris?”

“I’ll be better able to tell you when I find out what it is,” said Priscilla, casting aside a Greek lexicon and taking up Stella’s letter. Stella Maynard had been one of their chums at Queen’s Academy and had been teaching school ever since.

“But I’m going to give it up, Anne dear,” she wrote, “and go to college next year. As I took the third year at Queen’s I can enter the Sophomore year. I’m tired of teaching in a back country school. Some day I’m going to write a treatise on ‘The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm.’ It will be a harrowing bit of realism. It seems to be the prevailing impression that we live in clover, and have nothing to do but draw our quarter’s salary. My treatise shall tell the truth about us. Why, if a week should pass without some one tell-