“It was sunset when I came home, a warm, purple sunset, such as always reminds me of Dora in her mature beauty. There was a stillness in the air, and from the trees which skirt the hillside leading to the town the katydids were biping their clamorous notes. I used to like to hear them when a boy, and many’s the time I’ve stood with _Anna_ listening to them by the west door at home; but now there was a sadness in their tones as if they were saying, ‘Dora’s gone; Dora’s gone,’ while the opposite party responded, ‘And Anna too; and Anna too.’ “I had not wept for Anna since the hour when I first knew she was lost forever, but to-night in the gathering twilight, with the music of my boyhood sounding in my ears, the long ago came back to me again, bringing with it the beautiful blue-eyed girl over whose death there hangs so dark a mystery, and there was a moisture in my eyes, and a tear which dropped on Major’s mane, and was shed for Anna dead as well as for Dora gone. When I reached the office, I found upon the slate a handwriting which I knew to be Johnnie Russell’s, and for a moment I felt tempted to kiss it, because _he_ is Dora’s nephew. This is what he had written: “‘Mother’s toock ravin’ with one of her headaches, cause auntie’s gone, and there’s nobody to tend to the young ones. Gawly, how they’ve cut up, and she wants you to come with some jim-cracks in a phial. Yours, with regret, JOHN RUSSELL, JR.’ “I like that boy, so outspoken and truthful, but Dora will be shocked at his language. And so my services were needed at the big house over the way. Usually I like to go there, but now Dora is gone it is quite another thing, for with all my daily discipline of myself, I dislike Mrs. Russell. I have struggled against it, prayed against it, but as often as I see her face and hear her voice, the old dislike comes back. There’s nothing real about her except her selfishness and vanity. Were she raving with fever, I verily believe her hair would be just as elaborately curled, her handsome wrapper as carefully arranged, and her heavy bracelets clasped as conspicuously around the wrists as if in full dress for an evening party. To-night I found her in just this costume, with a blue scarf thrown round her, as she reclined upon the pillow. I knew she was suffering, from the dark rings beneath her eyes, and this roused my sympathy. She seems to like me as a physician, and asked me to stop after I had prescribed for her. Naturally enough she spoke of Dora, whom she missed so much, she said, and then with a little sigh continued: “‘It is not often that I talk familiarly with any but my most intimate friends, but you have been in our family so much, and know how necessary Dora is to us, that you will partially understand what a loss it would be to lose my sister entirely.’