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If it had not rained on a certain May morning Valancy Stirling’s whole

life would have been entirely different. She would have gone, with the

rest of her clan, to Aunt Wellington’s engagement picnic and Dr. Trent

would have gone to Montreal. But it did rain and you shall hear what

happened to her because of it.

Valancy wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding

dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes,

when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community

and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to

get a man.

Deerwood and the Stirlings had long since relegated Valancy to hopeless

old maidenhood. But Valancy herself had never quite relinquished a

certain pitiful, shamed, little hope that Romance would come her way

yet—never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the

fact that she was twenty-nine and unsought by any man.

Ay, _there_ lay the sting. Valancy did not mind so much being an old

maid. After all, she thought, being an old maid couldn’t possibly be as

dreadful as being married to an Uncle Wellington or an Uncle Benjamin,

or even an Uncle Herbert. What hurt her was that she had never had a

chance to be anything but an old maid. No man had ever desired her.

The tears came into her eyes as she lay there alone in the faintly

greying darkness. She dared not let herself cry as hard as she wanted

to, for two reasons. She was afraid that crying might bring on another

attack of that pain around the heart. She had had a spell of it after

she had got into bed—rather worse than any she had had yet. And she was

afraid her mother would notice her red eyes at breakfast and keep at

her with minute, persistent, mosquito-like questions regarding the

cause thereof.

“Suppose,” thought Valancy with a ghastly grin, “I answered with the

plain truth, ‘I am crying because I cannot get married.’ How horrified

Mother would be—though she is ashamed every day of her life of her old

maid daughter.”

But of course appearances should be kept up. “It is not,” Valancy could

hear her mother’s prim, dictatorial voice asserting, “it is not

_maidenly_ to think about _men_.”

The thought of her mother’s expression made Valancy laugh—for she had a

sense of humour nobody in her clan suspected. For that matter, there

were a good many things about Valancy that nobody suspected. But her

laughter was very superficial and presently she lay there, a huddled,

futile little figure, listening to the rain pouring down outside and

watching, with a sick distaste, the chill, merciless light creeping

into her ugly, sordid room.

She knew the ugliness of that room by heart—knew it and hated it. The

yellow-painted floor, with one hideous, “hooked” rug by the bed, with a

grotesque, “hooked” dog on it, always grinning at her when she awoke;

the faded, dark-red paper; the ceiling discoloured by old leaks and

crossed by cracks; the narrow, pinched little washstand; the

brown-paper lambrequin with purple roses on it; the spotted old

looking-glass with the crack across it, propped up on the inadequate

dressing-table; the jar of ancient potpourri made by her mother in her

mythical honeymoon; the shell-covered box, with one burst corner, which

Cousin Stickles had made in her equally mythical girlhood; the beaded

pincushion with half its bead fringe gone; the one stiff, yellow chair;

the faded old motto, “Gone but not forgotten,” worked in coloured yarns

about Great-grand-mother Stirling’s grim old face; the old photographs

of ancient relatives long banished from the rooms below. There were

only two pictures that were not of relatives. One, an old chromo of a

puppy sitting on a rainy doorstep. That picture always made Valancy

unhappy. That forlorn little dog crouched on the doorstep in the

driving rain! Why didn’t _some one_ open the door and let him in? The

other picture was a faded, passe-partouted engraving of Queen Louise

coming down a stairway, which Aunt Wellington had lavishly given her on

her tenth birthday. For nineteen years she had looked at it and hated

it, beautiful, smug, self-satisfied Queen Louise. But she never dared

destroy it or remove it. Mother and Cousin Stickles would have been

aghast, or, as Valancy irreverently expressed it in her thoughts, would

have had a fit.

Every room in the house was ugly, of course. But downstairs appearances

were kept up somewhat. There was no money for rooms nobody ever saw.

Valancy sometimes felt that she could have done something for her room

herself, even without money, if she were permitted. But her mother had

negatived every timid suggestion and Valancy did not persist. Valancy

never persisted. She was afraid to. Her mother could not brook

opposition. Mrs. Stirling would sulk for days if offended, with the

airs of an insulted duchess.

The only thing Valancy liked about her room was that she could be alone

there at night to cry if she wanted to.

But, after all, what did it matter if a room, which you used for

nothing except sleeping and dressing in, were ugly? Valancy was never

permitted to stay alone in her room for any other purpose. People who

wanted to be alone, so Mrs. Frederick Stirling and Cousin Stickles

believed, could only want to be alone for some sinister purpose. But

her room in the Blue Castle was everything a room should be.

Valancy, so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life,

was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-dreams. Nobody

in the Stirling clan, or its ramifications, suspected this, least of

all her mother and Cousin Stickles. They never knew that Valancy had