And every person in the village, almost, from Granny Minns to the Martins' youngest and naughtiest child, received a valentine, a very ugly and insulting valentine, too, from that place in California where The Woman had gone to spend the Winter!
At first the universality of the insult was not recognised, as each person strove to conceal his own personal injury. But neighbour began to confide in neighbour till at last the whole evil scheme was uncovered.
No one had seemed insignificant enough to be overlooked, no one was high enough to be immune. Even Mrs. Sutherland and the ministers were not slighted. Dr. McGarry's was a picture of a quack giving bread pills to old women and babies, and he roared and laughed long and loud over it, and showed it to every one in spite of his sister.
The Methodist minister's, the Baptist minister's, and Mr. Sinclair's were all exactly alike, violent-looking preachers with gusts of texts flying from their wide-open mouths, and sly rhymes concerning their denominational differences. The pretty little school teacher's was so mean that she couldn't go to school the next day, she cried so hard; and Mrs. Sinclair said that, of course, one should be above these things, but as far as she was concerned, she felt she needed all the Christian grace she possessed to forgive the unscrupulous person who had sent hers.
At first it did not seem possible that Mrs. Johnnie Dunn, that sensible, practical woman, could be the guilty party. At the very worst, her friends felt, she might have told the names of the people in the village, and some foolish mischief-maker—there were all kinds of folks in the States—had done the rest. But as each valentine was revealed it grew plainer that only some one intimately acquainted with the life of Orchard Glen could have chosen with such evil sagacity.
Who, for instance, outside Orchard Glen, knew that young Mrs. Martin had been a perfect martinet in her teaching days, but had now lost all her old power with the rod, and her children were the terror of the village? And who but a neighbour could have known that Granny Minns scolded Mitty all day long and pretended she was much more feeble than she really was? And who could have such an intimate knowledge of the flirtations of Tilly Holmes, and the dual organist's position held by Martha Henderson and Minnie McKenzie, and the coolness between Mr. Wylie and Mr. Sinclair since the night of the Piper's mistake?
It was Marmaduke who finally convinced the public mind that The Woman must be the perpetrator of the valentines; not a difficult case to prove.
He and Trooper had received quite the worst and most insulting of all the mail bag and Trooper's was particularly stinging. Marmaduke declared there was something in it that showed beyond doubt that it must have been The Woman, but Trooper did not like to say so, seeing that she was his aunt. But couldn't they see the postmark? And didn't every one know that she was visiting her sister in El Monte?
All the storms of the Winter were as a summer calm besides the gale the valentines raised. Nobody talked about anything else. They would just wait till The Woman came home in the Spring and then they would show her that she could not insult her neighbours like that and her away wintering in the South as if she were a millionairess!
The valentines was still the chief subject under discussion when The Woman came back in April.