Page:Anne of the Island (1920).djvu/193

 until I earn enough to finish my course. And by that time all my old class will have graduated and Patty’s Place will be out of the question. But there! I’m not going to be a coward. I’m thankful I can earn my way through if necessary.”

“Here’s Mr. Harrison wading up the lane,” announced Davy, running out. “I hope he’s brought the mail. It’s three days since we got it. I want to see what them pesky Grits are doing. I’m a Conservative, Anne. And I tell you, you have to keep your eye on them Grits.”

Mr. Harrison had brought the mail, and merry letters from Stella and Priscilla and Phil soon dissipated Anne’s blues. Aunt Jamesina, too, had written, saying that she was keeping the hearth-fire alight, and that the cats were all well, and the house plants doing fine.

“The weather has been real cold,” she wrote, “so I let the cats sleep in the house—Rusty and Joseph on the sofa in the living-room, and the Sarah-cat on the foot of my bed. It’s real company to hear her purring when I wake up in the night and think of my poor daughter in the foreign field. If it was anywhere but in India I wouldn’t worry, but they say the snakes out there are terrible. It takes all the Sarah-cats’s purring to drive away the thought of those snakes. I have enough faith for everything but the snakes. I can’t think why Providence ever made them. Sometimes I don’t think He did. I’m inclined to believe the Old Harry had a hand in making them.”

Anne had left a thin, typewritten communication till