“Like--like to!” Little Anne corrected herself with no small adroitness for a person of her age. “Do you suppose I could now? I’ve tried Peter-two’s typewriter. It doesn’t go fast with one finger, my way, and the letters get kind of snarled before each other and behind each other; not the way they ought to stand in the word, but maybe if I practised lots! I can read ’most anything that isn’t too queer subjec’s; reading never bothers me dreadfully. Maybe you’d spell the worst words?” “I’ll wait for you, little Anne!” promised Richard. “I’ll have to have somebody else here while I’m waiting, but when you’re older I’ll toss her lightly out of the window and open the door for you, bowing deeply while you enter to take command of my typewriter, my books, my work, and me.” “Well,” sighed little Anne, “I s’pose you have to wait! But I’ll be eight in a little while and Mother says the older you grow the faster the years whisk by. After my birthday Christmas is awf’ly long coming, and it does seem a good while in winter before Easter, and the last part of school’s kind of slow, but summer goes pretty fast. Maybe it won’t seem so very, very long before I can help you?” “It won’t!” Richard assured her. “Especially if you come here a great deal in the meantime. Little Anne, is Miss Dallas with your sister?” “Yes, she is,” little Anne admitted, hesitantly. “She’s right there.” “Is she well?” asked Richard. “Not so very exactly,” little Anne said, reluctantly. “But you can’t be if you cry too much. It makes you feel as used up as anything to cry a great deal, _I_ think.” “Oh, it does! Is Anne crying a great deal, little Anne? Will you tell her that I beg her to put me entirely out of her mind, and that I am going on well?” cried Richard. “Well, yes, I will,” little Anne said. “But I don’t think it will stop her worrying over you. I heard her tell Joan that the poem I found just hunted her--or something; she meant she kept thinking about it.” “The poem you found? I don’t know it, little Anne. Where did you find it? Why does it haunt her?” asked Richard. “Upstairs in your hall, quite long ago; about Fourth of July time. A poem you’d written yourself. It was sort of hard for Anne to read it. She thought first she had to copy it; then she didn’t. She made me put it back just ’xactly where I found it,” little Anne explained. Richard gasped and fell back in his chair.