Free The Blythes Are Quoted by L. M. Montgomery

power to avenge my suffering on somebody.”
    “You poor kid,” said Henry pityingly. Curtis felt only sickening aversion.
    “That was my life for twenty years. Then I fell from the loft. I was paralyzed at first. For months I couldn’t move. Then I found I could. But I wouldn’t. An idea had come to me. I had found a way to punish ... and rule them. Oh, how I laughed when I thought of it!”
    Alice laughed again. Curtis remembered that he had never heard her laugh before. There was something unpleasant in it which reminded him of the haunted nights. And yet it vaguely resembled Lucia’s laughter. The thought was hateful to him.
    “My idea worked well. I was afraid I could not deceive the doctors. But it was easy ... so easy. I could never have believed it was so easy to fool supposedly intelligent and educated people. How I laughed to myself as they consulted over me with solemn faces! I never complained, I must be patient, saintly, heroic. Uncle Winthrop had several specialists. He had to spend some money on his despised niece at last ... as much as would have sufficed to send me to Queen’s. They were all easy to hoodwink except Dr. Blythe. I always felt that he ... a plain country doctor in consultation with men from Montreal and New York ... was vaguely suspicious. He always has been. So I said no more doctors.
    “The household waited on me hand and foot. Oh, how I gloried in feeling such power over them ... I whom they had disdained. I had never been of any importance to them.”
    “You were of importance to me,” said Henry.
    “Was I really? You hid it well.”
    “I suppose you would never have thought of a hired boy presuming to fall in love with a Field!”
    “I wish Uncle Winthrop had known. He would have taken the hide off you.”
    “Oh, no, he wouldn’t. I could fight then as well as now. But of course he would have sent me away. And I couldn’t bear the thought of being parted from you.”
    “Really, I was of more importance than I knew,” said Alice sarcastically. “It was rather a pity you didn’t tell me. I might have ... recovered ... and married you to humiliate them. Well, at any rate, I was the most important person in the house now. Lucia came home to wait on me. She thought it her ‘duty.’ Lucia always took herself very seriously.”
    Curtis made a quick movement but Henry put out a restraining hand. Alice shot a malicious glance at him.
    “People said my patience was angelic. They began to call me the angel of Mowbray Narrows. I never heard that Dr. Blythe did so, though. Once I did not speak a word for four days. The household was terribly alarmed. And I made Lucia rub my back and shoulders every night for half an hour. It was excellent exercise for her and amused me. Some days I pretended to suffer horribly. Had the room darkened, moaned occasionally for hours. I had those attacks whenever I thought Lucia needed a little discipline.
    “Then I discovered that Alec wanted to marry Edna Pollock.”
    “Why should you have cared if he did?”
    “Why, it wouldn’t have suited me at all. Lucia would be free to go then ... and Edna Pollock would not have waited on me properly. Besides, a Pollock was not good enough for a Field. I have my share of the family pride, after all, you see, my dear Mr. Burns. Then the idea of playing spook came to me.”
    “Ah, now we’re coming to the interesting part,” said Henry. “How in the name of the Old Nick did you manage those stunts, locked in your room?”
    “There is a closet in my room ... and its back wall is not plastered. It is merely a partition of boards between the closet and the alcove where the garret stairs are. When I was a child I discovered that two of those boards could be easily and noiselessly slipped back. I kept it a secret ... I liked to know something nobody else of all the wise Fields knew.”
    “Fancy, now,” said Henry, as if he rather admired her cleverness in keeping a secret.
    “It was very easy to slip in