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FURTHER CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA

if I avoided Mr. Fenwick like that he would think I still cherished bitterness against him, and he wouldn’t make any advances towards a reconciliation. Wilhelmina means well, but she hasn’t a great deal of sense.

Cecil Fenwick seemed to be a great favorite with everybody, young and old. He was very rich, too, and Wilhelmina declared that half the girls were after him.

“If it wasn’t for you, Miss Holmes, I believe I’d have a try for him myself, in spite of his gray hair and quick temper — for Mrs. Maxwell says he has a pretty quick temper, but it’s all over in a minute,” said Wilhelmina, half in jest and wholly in earnest.

As for me, I gave up going out at all, even to church. I fretted and pined and lost my appetite and never wrote a line in my blank book. Nancy was half frantic and insisted on dosing me with her favorite patent pills. I took them meekly, because it is a waste of time and energy to oppose Nancy, but, of course, they didn’t do me any good. My trouble was too deep-seated for pills to cure. If ever a woman was punished for telling a lie I was that woman. I stopped my subscription to the Weckly Advocate because it still carried that wretched porous plaster advertisement, and I couldn’t bear to see it. If it hadn’t been for that I would never have