“Why Anna Miller! She was born on Christmas-day--O my dear child, it must have been twenty-five years ago this next Christmas day, for I was fifty myself at the time and I am seventy-five now. That was the year I had my plum-coloured moreen--you remember the under side of the cushion in grandma’s old chair up in Reuben’s room? Sarah Pettingill made it, and I wore it to the Christmas tree for the first time and word came while we were there that Mr. Langley had the finest gift in the world--a little daughter. Some of the ladies wanted him to call her Christmas and he said he’d like to have her named Carol, but she was called for his wife after all. Her maiden name was May.” Mrs. Langley was so little a personality in the mind of the girl that it seemed incongruous in her to have had a maiden name. As she would have asked a careless question in regard to her, however, she looked up to see Miss Penny’s face drawn with dismay. “Dear me, I know I am old, but I didn’t think I was losing my memory,” Miss Penny cried. “It comes to me all of a sudden that I wore that plum-coloured dress to the child’s funeral. I remember distinctly my mother’s telling me that plum-colour was next door to purple and that purple was light mourning and quite suitable for a young person’s funeral.” “But you could have worn it to both,” declared Anna. “You keep your clothes so well that it probably looked new for the funeral.” “But Anna, my aunt Penny died the February after that dress was made and mother and I coloured it black for the funeral. And she died twenty-five years ago the tenth of February.” “Then it couldn’t be the Christmas that Ella May was born that you had it, but the one before her death. I’m glad it wasn’t, for I don’t like her to be so old.” “But if the little thing wasn’t born that year, I’m sure I don’t know when she _was_ born,” remarked Miss Penny plaintively. “We’ll have to find out,” said Anna cheerfully. “Anyhow, I’m glad it wasn’t the twenty-second of September. I got to thinking of it at church and it sort of--got on my nerves.” Returning to her work, she couldn’t get Mr. Langley and the mysterious, lamentable alteration in him off her mind. Ella May might have nothing to do with it--and then again she might. In any event, the first thing to be done was to learn the age of the child at the time of her death. She was just wondering whether she had time to go over to the cemetery that afternoon, when Miss Penny called her. Going into the parlour, she found Mrs. Phelps, their next-door neighbour. “O Anna, what do you think?” cried Miss Penny in great excitement. “Mrs. Phelps says that Ella May Langley was only three days old when she died. She can prove it!” CHAPTER II Anna Miller gasped. But she recovered herself immediately.