This was what the village people whispered, and none knew the truth of the whisperings better than the ladies in question, or shrank more from having their affairs canvassed by those whom they looked down upon, even if the glory of their house was departed. Mrs. Richards and her elder daughters, Miss Asenath and Eudora, were very proud, very exclusive, and but for the existence of Anna, few of the villagers would ever have crossed their threshold. Anna was a favorite in the village, and when confined to her room for weeks, as she sometimes was, there were more anxious enquiries concerning her than would have been bestowed on Asenath and Eudora had they both been dying. And yet in her early girlhood she too had been cold and haughty, but since the morning when she had knelt at her father’s feet, and begged him to revoke his cruel decision, and say she might be the bride of a poor missionary, Anna had greatly changed, and the father had sometimes questioned the propriety of separating the hearts which clung so tenaciously together. But it was then too late to remedy the mistake. The young missionary had married another, and neither the parents nor the sisters ever forgot the look of anguish which stole into Anna’s face, when she heard the news. She had told him to do so, it is true, for she knew a missionary to be strictly useful must have a wife. She had thought herself prepared, but the news was just as crushing when it came, accompanied though it was with a few last lines from _him_, such as a husband might write to the woman he had loved so much, and only given up because he must. Anna kept this letter yet, reading it often to herself, and wondering, if through all the changes which fourteen years had wrought, the missionary remembered her yet, and if they would ever meet again. This was the secret of the numerous missionary papers and magazines scattered so profusely through the rooms at Terrace Hill. Anna was interested in everything pertaining to the work, though, it must be confessed, that her mind wandered oftenest to the city of mosques and minarets, where _he_ was laboring; and once, when she heard of a little grave made with the Moslem dead, the grave of darling Anna, named for her, she wept bitterly, feeling as if she, too, had been bereaved as well as the parents, across the Eastern waters. This was sweet Anna Richards, who, on the day of her brother’s expected arrival from Paris, dressed herself with unusual care and joined her mother and elder sisters in the parlor below. It was a raw, chilly evening, and a coal fire had been kindled in the grate, the bright blaze falling on Anna’s cheek, and lighting it up with something like the youthful bloom for which she had once been celebrated. The harsh expression of Miss Asenath’s face was softened down, while the mother and Eudora looked anxiously expectant, and Anna was the happiest of them all. Taken as a whole it was a very pleasant family group, which