“I never meant anything of the sort,” protested Azalea, coloring. “But of course, having picked me up by the roadside the way she did—like a poor stray kitten, you may say—perhaps she would like her relatives to see that I wasn’t—” Azalea hesitated again, with the mocking eyes of her friends on her. “That you weren’t _what_?” demanded Carin teasingly. But Annie Laurie interrupted with one of the practical remarks for which she was celebrated. “It’s all very well for you girls to talk of going off to the mountains to teach school,” she said, “but have you any idea of where you’ll go and whom you’ll teach?” “We have a very clear idea,” answered Carin. “We’ll go back to Sunset Gap, where we were last summer, and where they need help about as badly as they can. I was talking with Azalea’s minister, Mr. Summers, and he says he doesn’t know of any place where the people are in greater need of schooling than they are there. You remember the place, Annie Laurie, don’t you? We stopped there overnight when we were on our camping trip. It took us a long time to get there by wagon, but this time we’ll take the train as far as Bee Tree and drive only the last fifteen miles. Mr. Summers says he knows a man who will meet us at the station.” “You’ve quite made up your mind to go, haven’t you?” asked Annie Laurie. “What a girl you are, to be laying out all these plans without telling anyone.” “Oh, I haven’t done much,” protested Carin, “only, when I happened to meet Mr. Summers, I talked it over with him. You see, there are men and women up there on Dundee mountain who don’t even know their letters, and teaching the children will be like carrying civilization to them,” said Carin earnestly, meaning very much more than she said but trusting her sympathetic friends to understand. “It’s the very kind of work that I want to do above everything else,” declared Azalea with an earnestness no less than that of her friend. “Oh, Annie Laurie, if we go, do come with us! You’d make the best teacher of us all. You’re so firm, and you always think out beforehand what you’re going to do.” “The best way for me to live up to that fine reputation,” retorted Annie Laurie, “is by staying at home. This is my last chance for learning to manage my dairy, for Sam Disbrow, who has been taking almost all of the responsibility, is leaving me next October for his two years at Rutherford Academy. I’m so happy to think he’s going, after all the disappointments and troubles he’s had.” “But couldn’t your Aunt Adnah look after the dairy for a couple of months? I thought she was a fine business woman,” Carin persisted.