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106 your bells, Claude. I haven’t heard sleighbells since you used to bring me and Gladys home from school in stormy weather. Why don’t we stop for her tonight? She has furs now, you know!” Here Enid laughed. “All the old ladies are so terribly puzzled about them; they can’t find out whether your brother really gave them to her for Christmas or not. If they were sure she bought them for herself, I believe they’d hold a public meeting.”

Claude cracked his whip over his eager little blacks. “Doesn’t it make you tired, the way they are always nagging at Gladys?”

“It would, if she minded. But she’s just as serene! They must have something to fuss about, and of course poor Mrs. Farmer’s back taxes are piling up. I certainly suspect Bayliss of the furs.”

Claude did not feel as eager to stop for Gladys as he had been a few moments before. They were approaching the town now, and lighted windows shone softly across the blue whiteness of the snow. Even in progressive Frankfort, the street lights were turned off on a night so glorious as this. Mrs. Farmer and her daughter had a little white cottage down in the south part of the town, where only people of modest means lived. “We must stop to see Gladys’ mother, if only for a minute,” Enid said as they drew up before the fence. “She is so fond of company.” He tied his team to a tree, and they went up to the narrow, sloping porch, hung with vines that were full of frozen snow.

Mrs. Farmer met them; a large, rosy woman of fifty, with a pleasant Kentucky voice. She took Enid’s arm affectionately, and Claude followed them into the long, low sitting-room, which had an uneven floor and a lamp at either end, and was