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Thrush Hill, Oct. 5, 18–.

It is all settled at last, and in another week I shall have left Thrush Hill. I am a little bit sorry and a great bit glad. I am going to Montreal to spend the winter with Alicia.

Alicia–it used to be plain Alice when she lived at Thrush Hill and made her own dresses and trimmed her own hats–is my half-sister. She is eight years older than I am. We are both orphans, and Aunt Elizabeth brought us up here at Thrush Hill, the most delightful old country place in the world, half smothered in big willows and poplars, every one of which I have climbed in the early tomboy days of gingham pinafores and sun-bonnets.

When Alicia was eighteen she married Roger Gresham, a man of forty. The world said that she married him for his money. I dare say she did. Alicia was tired of poverty.

I don’t blame her. Very likely I shall do the same thing one of these days, if I get the chance–for I too am tired of poverty.

When Alicia went to Montreal she wanted to take me with her, but I wanted to be outdoors, romping in the hay or running wild in the woods with Jack.

Jack Willoughby–Dr. John H. Willoughby, it reads on his office door–was the son of our nearest neighbour. We were chums always, and when he went away to college I was heartbroken.

The vacations were the only joy of my life then.

I don’t know just when I began to notice a change in Jack, but when he came home two years ago, a full-fledged M.D.–a great, tall, broad-shouldered fellow, with the sweetest moustache, and lovely thick black hair, just made for poking one’s fingers through–I realized it to the full. Jack was grown up. The dear old days of bird-nesting and nutting and coasting and fishing and general delightful goings-on were over forever.

I was sorry at first. I wanted “Jack.” “Dr. Willoughby” seemed too distinguished and far away.

I suppose he found a change in me, too. I had put on long skirts and wore my hair up. I had also found out that I had a complexion, and that sunburn was not becoming. I honestly thought I looked pretty, but Jack surveyed me with decided disapprobation.

“What have you done to yourself? You don’t look like the same girl. I’d never know you in that rig-out, with all those flippery-trippery curls all over your head. Why don’t you comb your hair straight back, and let it hang in a braided tail, like you used to?”

This didn’t suit me at all. When I expect a compliment and get something quite different I always get snippy. So I said, with what I intended to be crushing dignity, “that I supposed I wasn’t the same girl; I had grown up, and if he didn’t like my curls he needn’t look at them. For my part, I thought them infinitely preferable to that horrid, conceited-looking moustache he had grown.”

“I’ll shave it off if it doesn’t suit you,” said Jack amiably.

Jack is always so provokingly good-humoured. When you’ve taken pains and put yourself out–even to the extent of fibbing about a moustache–to exasperate a person, there is nothing more annoying than to have him keep perfectly angelic.

But after a while Jack and I adjusted ourselves to the change in each other and became very good friends again. It was quite a different friendship from the old, but it was very pleasant. Yes, it was; I will admit that much.

I was provoked at Jack’s determination to settle down for life in Valleyfield, a horrible, humdrum, little country village.

“You’ll never make your fortune there, Jack,” I said spitefully. “You’ll just be a poor, struggling country doctor all your life, and you’ll be grey at forty.”

“I don’t expect to make a fortune, Kitty,” said Jack quietly. “Do you think that is the one desirable thing? I shall never be a rich man. But riches are not the only thing that makes life pleasant.”