“DEAR MRS. LANGLEY, the little lamb is white as snow again, a perfect darling,--_fleckless_ as the books would say. I had to kiss its little head when I had finished, it was such a cutey. As I ought really to be studying up to my ears to keep up with the little cash-girls of the ABC class, I will send this note by my brother instead of disturbing you. I will keep my eye on the image from this time on. Yours faithfully, ANNA.” As she finished the letter, Mrs. Phelps came in. Anna knew by her face that she had some exciting or shocking bit of news to relate, and her heart sank. Quite likely the report of her visit to the parsonage was all over the place! “Have you heard about the Lorraines?” she asked. “The Lorraines?” repeated Anna. “Yes, Anna. Do you happen to know where Mr. Lorraine is?” Mrs. Phelps asked eagerly. “In heaven I trust,” Anna murmured with charitable intent. “Not at all and never will be unless he mends his ways. He’s behind the bars. He is serving a sentence of ten years in prison for embezzlement!” cried Mrs. Phelps almost triumphantly. CHAPTER V “O Anna,” cried her mother as soon as the girl had seated herself, “have you heard about the people who have moved in where the Converses moved out?” “Why, Jenny, that’s the house where Reuben was born and brought up,” observed Seth Miller. “It was before we knew Reuben or had any suspicion there was such a person, and we get in the way of thinking he always lived at Miss Penny’s; but I mistrust he had a good home and indulgent parents until his ma died, and his pa, who was one of them musical geniuses, took to drink.” “Yes, ma, I heard about the Lorraines. Mrs. Phelps told Miss Penny last night,” returned Anna who always spent Sunday afternoon at her own home, which was diagonally across the way from Miss Penny’s. The girl was pale to-day and leaned listlessly back in her chair in a way that was foreign to her wonted lively self. Her mother had noticed in church that Anna, who was always thin, had grown intensely so within the last fortnight and had hastened to get the dinner dishes out of the way before her daughter should rush in and take the task off her hands. “It was all in the papers last spring,” said Miller. “They was chock full of it for a spell, and the queer part of it was that the denouncement of the hull thing came right at the same time Wat Graham was arrested over at Wenham. If it hadn’t ’a been for Wat’s brother-in-law, Mudge, going bail for him and helping settle with the creditors, why Wat himself might ’a been in the cell next to Mr. Lorraine.” “Why, Pa Miller! Wat Graham’s in another class altogether,” protested Anna.