“Shoo, ye varmints,” he was saying, as the fat balls of down, their lemon-colored bills wide open in faint baby quackings, went scuttling in a dozen different directions from between his feet. “You might know they would be wild creatures, they were hatched out in a thunderstorm!” The afternoon had been cheerful, but the evening was long and lonely, with Anna plunged into one of her blackest moods. Yet, though the hours dragged, they did not suffice for the mastering of to-morrow’s lesson. Geometry and history were Betsey’s two great difficulties, so great indeed that, with the college examinations coming nearer, they began vaguely to threaten real disaster. She sighed as she turned for the tenth time to the worn page in her textbook, dealing with the volume of the frustum of a pyramid. She knew the drawing and the text drearily by heart, but would she ever understand it? Would the looming bulk of this misshapen figure grow bigger and bigger until it blocked her road to higher education? As she crept away to bed she was thinking that it was only that morning that Aunt Susan had left her, proclaiming to the last Betsey’s mistaken foolishness in remaining behind. Perhaps, after all, Aunt Susan had been right! She awoke next morning still depressed, more discouraged than ever when her eye fell upon the cover of her geometry book. It would be a good plan to set off for school early, she decided, and go around by Somerset Lane for a cheering moment of talk with Miss Miranda. Her heart felt lighter as soon as she thought of it. As she turned in at the gate her glance swept the field across the way, but found it empty. No sturdy white horse was plowing it to-day, no erect, copper-haired figure was visible, only rows of furrows, drying in the sun. The little house, also, seemed unusually quiet as she first rang at the bell, then went across the grass to knock at the kitchen door. She could hear Mr. Reynolds tinkering in the shop, she could see Michael’s bent back where he was toiling alone in the garden. She saw, presently, when the door opened, the unattractive face of a totally strange woman who was apparently presiding over Miss Miranda’s kitchen. In the fewest and shortest words possible the stranger explained to Betsey that Miss Miranda was gone. “Gone? Gone where? For how long?” cried Elizabeth in unbearable disappointment. But she received no answer for the woman had already closed the door. CHAPTER IV THE DOOR IN THE WALL