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Besides Miss Marshall, the new music teacher fell to Cyrilla’s share. Mary drew Mrs. Plunkett and the dressmaker, and Carol drew Mrs. Johnson and old Mr. Grant. For the next two hours the girls wrote busily, forgetting all about the rainy day, and enjoying their epistolary labours to the full. It was dusk when all the letters were finished.

“Why, hasn’t the afternoon gone quickly after all!” exclaimed Carol. “I just let my pen run on and jotted down any good working idea that came into my head. Cyrilla Blair, that big fat letter is never for Miss Marshall! What on earth did you find to write her?”

“It wasn’t so hard when I got fairly started,” said Cyrilla, smiling. “Now, let’s hunt up Nora Jane and send the letters around so that everybody can read his or hers before tea-time. We should have a choice assortment of smiles at the table instead of all those frowns and sighs we had at dinner.” Miss Emily Marshall was at that moment sitting in her little back room, all alone in the dusk, with the rain splashing drearily against the windowpanes outside. Miss Marshall was feeling as lonely and dreary as she looked–and as she had often felt in her life of sixty years. She told herself bitterly that she hadn’t a friend in the world–not even one who cared enough for her to come and see her or write her a letter now and then. She thought her boarding-house acquaintances disliked her and she resented their dislike, without admitting to herself that her ungracious ways were responsible for it. She smiled sourly when little ripples of laughter came faintly down the hall from the front room where The Trio were writing their letters and laughing over the fun they were putting into them.

“If they were old and lonesome and friendless they wouldn’t see much in life to laugh at, I guess,” said Miss Marshall bitterly, drawing her shawl closer about her sharp shoulders. “They never think of anything but themselves and if a day passes that they don’t have ‘some fun’ they think it’s a fearful thing to put up with. I’m sick and tired of their giggling and whispering.”

In the midst of these amiable reflections Miss Marshall heard a knock at her door. When she opened it there stood Nora Jane, her broad red face beaming with smiles.

“Please, Miss, here’s a letter for you,” she said.

“A letter for me!” Miss Marshall shut her door and stared at the fat envelope in amazement. Who could have written it? The postman came only in the morning. Was it some joke, perhaps? Those giggling girls? Miss Marshall’s face grew harder as she lighted her lamp and opened the letter suspiciously.

“Dear Miss Marshall,” it ran in Cyrilla’s pretty girlish writing, “we girls are so lonesome and dull that we have decided to write rainy-day letters to everybody in the house just to cheer ourselves up. So I’m going to write to you just a letter of friendly nonsense.”

Pages of “nonsense” followed, and very delightful nonsense it was, for Cyrilla possessed the happy gift of bright and easy letter-writing. She commented wittily on all the amusing episodes of the boarding-house life for the past month; she described a cat-fight she had witnessed from her window that morning and illustrated it by a pen-and-ink sketch of the belligerent felines; she described a lovely new dress her mother had sent her from home and told all about the class party to which she had worn it; she gave an account of her vacation camping trip to the mountains and pasted on one page a number of small snapshots taken during the outing; she copied a joke she had read in the paper that morning and discussed the serial story in the boarding-house magazine which all the boarders were reading; she wrote out the directions for a new crocheted tidy her sister had made–Miss Marshall had a mania for crocheting; and she finally wound up with “all the good will and good wishes that Nora Jane will consent to carry from your friend, Cyrilla Blair.”