Taken alone there was nothing particularly disagreeable in the three words “_that Lee girl_;” but spoken by Ada Montrose they sounded insultingly, and every time she uttered them, I felt my blood boil, for _I_, too, was a _Lee girl_, and I was sure she included me in the same contemptuous category. As Herbert had said, I did not think the disappointment would break her heart. She was too angry for that, and I believe now, as I did then, that most of her feeling arose from the mortification of knowing that a “poor country girl,” as she called Anna, was preferred to herself. For half an hour or more Tom Wilson and my aunt conversed together, she asking him at least a dozen times “if he did not think Herbert could be induced to return.” At last, with quivering lips and flushed cheeks, as if it cost her pride a great effort, she said, “Of course I mean _Anna_, too, when I speak of Herbert’s return. She is his wife, you say, and though I might, perhaps, wish it otherwise, it cannot now be helped, and if he only would come back to me, I should love her for his sake.” In my heart I blessed her for these words, and mentally resolved to leave no argument untried, which might bring the fugitives back. But it could not be. Herbert was decided, he said. He meant to be a farmer and live in the country, adding what he knew would silence his mother sooner than aught else he could say, “that temptations for him to drink were far greater in the city than in the country, and it was for this reason partly that he preferred living in the latter place.”