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Sowing Seeds in Danny

by Nellie L. McClung · English · Gutenberg #4376 · 327,711 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Sowing Seeds in Danny

Author: Nellie L. McClung


        
Release date: August 1, 2003 [eBook #4376]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4376

Credits: Produced by University of Pennsylvania project "A
        Celebration of Women Writers" and by Gardner Buchanan.
        HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOWING SEEDS IN DANNY ***




Produced by University of Pennsylvania project "A
Celebration of Women Writers" and by Gardner Buchanan.
HTML version by Al Haines.









Sowing Seeds in Danny


by

Nellie L. McClung



This story is lovingly dedicated to my dear mother.

   "SO MANY FAITHS--SO MANY CREEDS,--
   SO MANY PATHS THAT WIND AND WIND
   WHILE JUST THE ART OF BEING KIND,--
   IS WHAT THE OLD WORLD NEEDS!"



People of the Story

MRS. BURTON FRANCIS--a dreamy woman, who has beautiful theories.

MR. FRANCIS--her silent husband.

CAMILLA ROSE--a capable young woman who looks after Mrs. Francis's
   domestic affairs, and occasionally helps her to apply her theories.

THE WATSON FAMILY, consisting of--

   JOHN WATSON--a man of few words who works on the "Section."

   MRS. WATSON--who washes for Mrs. Francis.

   PEARL WATSON--an imaginative, clever little girl, twelve years old,
      who is the mainstay of the family.

   MARY WATSON--a younger sister.

   TEDDY WATSON.

   BILLY WATSON.

   JIMMY WATSON.

   PATSEY WATSON.

   TOMMY WATSON.

   ROBERT ROBLIN WATSON, known as "Bugsey."

   DANIEL MULCAHEY WATSON--"Wee Danny."

   "Teddy will be fourteen on St. Patrick's Day and Danny
   will be four come March."

MRS. McGUIRE--an elderly Irishwoman of uncertain temper who lives
   on the next lot.

DR. BARNER--the old doctor of the village, clever man in his
   profession, but of intemperate habits.

MARY BARNER--his beautiful daughter.

DR. HORACE CLAY--a young doctor, who has recently come to the village.

REV. HUGH GRANTLEY--the young minister.

SAMUEL MOTHERWELL--a well off but very stingy farmer.

MRS. MOTHERWELL--his wife.

TOM MOTHERWELL--their son.

ARTHUR WEMYSS--a young Englishman who is trying to learn to farm.

JIM RUSSELL--an ambitious young farmer who lives near the Motherwells.

JAMES DUCKER--a retired farmer, who has political aspirations.



CONTENTS

     I.  Sowing Seeds in Danny
    II.  The Old Doctor
   III.  The Pink Lady
    IV.  The Band of Hope
     V.  The Relict of the Late McGuire
    VI.  The Musical Sense
   VII.  "One of Manitoba's Prosperous Farmers"
  VIII.  The Other Doctor
    IX.  The Live Wire
     X.  The Butcher Ride
    XI.  How Pearl Watson Wiped out the Stain
   XII.  From Camilla's Diary
  XIII.  The Fifth Son
   XIV.  The Faith that Moveth Mountains
    XV.  "Inasmuch"
   XVI.  How Polly Went Home
  XVII.  "Egbert and Edythe"
 XVIII.  The Party at Slater's
   XIX.  Pearl's Diary
    XX.  Tom's New Viewpoint
   XXI.  The Crack in the Granite
  XXII.  Shadows
 XXIII.  Saved
  XXIV.  The Harvest
   XXV.  Cupid's Emissary
  XXVI.  The Thanksgiving
 Conclusion: Convincing Camilla




Sowing Seeds in Danny



CHAPTER I

SOWING SEEDS IN DANNY

In her comfortable sitting room Mrs. J. Burton Francis sat, at peace
with herself and all mankind. The glory of the short winter afternoon
streamed into the room and touched with new warmth and tenderness the
face of a Madonna on the wall.

The whole room suggested peace. The quiet elegance of its furnishings,
the soft leather-bound books on the table, the dreamy face of the
occupant, who sat with folded hands looking out of the window, were all
in strange contrast to the dreariness of the scene below, where the one
long street of the little Manitoba town, piled high with snow,
stretched away into the level, white, never-ending prairie. A farmer
tried to force his tired horses through the drifts; a little boy with a
milk-pail plodded bravely from door to door, sometimes laying down his
burden to blow his breath on his stinging fingers.

The only sound that disturbed the quiet of the afternoon in Mrs.
Francis's sitting room was the regular rub-rub of the wash-board in the
kitchen below.

"Mrs. Watson is slow with the washing to-day," Mrs. Francis murmured
with a look of concern on her usually placid face. "Possibly she is not
well. I will call her and see."

"Mrs. Watson, will you come upstairs, please?" she called from the
stairway.

Mrs. Watson, slow and shambling, came up the stairs, and stood in the
doorway wiping her face on her apron.

"Is it me ye want ma'am?" she asked when she had recovered her breath.

"Yes, Mrs. Watson," Mrs. Francis said sweetly. "I thought perhaps you
were not feeling well to-day. I have not heard you singing at your
work, and the washing seems to have gone slowly. You must be very
careful of your health, and not overdo your strength."

While she was speaking, Mrs. Watson's eyes were busy with the room, the
pictures on the wall, the cosey window-seat with its numerous cushions;
the warmth and brightness of it all brought a glow to her tired face.

"Yes, ma'am," she said, "thank ye kindly, ma'am. It is very kind of ye
to be thinkin' o' the likes of me."

"Oh, we should always think of others, you know," Mrs. Francis replied
quickly with her most winning smile, as she seated herself in a
rocking-chair. "Are the children all well? Dear little Danny, how is
he?"

"Indade, ma'am, that same Danny is the upsettinest one of the nine, and
him only four come March. It was only this morn's mornin' that he sez
to me, sez he, as I was comin' away, 'Ma, d'ye think she'll give ye pie
for your dinner? Thry and remimber the taste of it, won't ye ma, and
tell us when ye come home,' sez he."

"Oh, the sweet prattle of childhood," said Mrs. Francis, clasping her
shapely white hands. "How very interesting it must be to watch their
young minds unfolding as the flower! Is it nine little ones you have,
Mrs. Watson?"

"Yes, nine it is, ma'am. God save us. Teddy will be fourteen on St.
Patrick's Day, and all the rest are younger."

"It is a great responsibility to be a mother, and yet how few there be
that think of it," added Mrs. Francis, dreamily.

"Thrue for ye ma'am," Mrs. Watson broke in. "There's my own man, John
Watson. That man knows no more of what it manes than you do yerself
that hasn't one at all at all, the Lord be praised; and him the father
of nine."

"I have just been reading a great book by Dr. Ernestus Parker, on
'Motherhood.' It would be a great benefit to both you and your husband."

"Och, ma'am," Mrs. Watson broke in, hastily, "John is no hand for books
and has always had his suspicions o' them since his own mother's
great-uncle William Mulcahey got himself transported durin' life or
good behaviour for havin' one found on him no bigger'n an almanac, at
the time of the riots in Ireland. No, ma'am, John wouldn't rade it at
all at all, and he don't know one letther from another, what's more."

"Then if you would read it and explain it to him, it would be so
helpful to you both, and so inspiring. It deals so ably with the
problems of child-training. You must be puzzled many times in the
training of so many little minds, and Dr. Parker really does throw
wonderful light on all the problems that confront mothers. And I am
sure the mother of nine must have a great many perplexities."

Yes, Mrs. Watson had a great many perplexities--how to make trousers
for four boys out of the one old pair the minister's wife had given
her; how to make the memory of the rice-pudding they had on Sunday last
all the week; how to work all day and sew at night, and still be brave
and patient; how to make little Danny and Bugsey forget they were cold
and hungry. Yes, Mrs. Watson had her problems; but they were not the
kind that Dr. Ernestus Parker had dealt with in his book on
"Motherhood."

"But I must not keep you, Mrs. Watson," Mrs. Francis said, as she
remembered the washing. "When you go downstairs will you kindly bring
me up a small red notebook that you will find on the desk in the
library?"

"Yes ma'am," said Mrs. Watson, and went heavily down the stairs. She
found the book and brought it up.

While she was making the second laborious journey down the softly
padded stairs, Mrs. Francis was making an entry in the little red book.

   Dec. 7, 1903. Talked with one woman to-day RE Beauty
   of Motherhood. Recommended Dr. Parker's book. Believe
   good done.

Then she closed the book with a satisfied feeling. She was going to
have a very full report for her department at the next Annual
Convention of the Society for Propagation of Lofty Ideals.

In another part of the same Manitoba town lived John Watson,
unregenerate hater of books, his wife and their family of nine. Their
first dwelling when they had come to Manitoba from the Ottawa Valley,
thirteen years ago, had been C. P. R. box-car No. 722, but this had
soon to be enlarged, which was done by adding to it other car-roofed
shanties. One of these was painted a bright yellow and was a little
larger than the others. It had been the caboose of a threshing outfit
that John had worked for in '96. John was the fireman and when the
boiler blew up and John was carried home insensible the "boys" felt
that they should do something for the widow and orphans. They raised
one hundred and sixty dollars forthwith, every man contributing his
wages for the last four days. The owner of the outfit, Sam Motherwell,
in a strange fit of generosity, donated the caboose.

The next fall Sam found that he needed the caboose himself, and came
with his trucks to take it back. He claimed that he had given it with
the understanding that John was going to die. John had not fulfilled
his share of the contract, and Sam felt that his generosity had been
misplaced.

John was cutting wood beside his dwelling when Sam arrived with his
trucks, and accused him of obtaining goods under false pretences. John
was a man of few words and listened attentively to Sam's reasoning.
From the little window of the caboose came the discordant wail of a
very young infant, and old Sam felt his claims growing more and more
shadowy.

John took the pipe from his mouth and spat once at the woodpile. Then,
jerking his thumb toward the little window, he said briefly:

"Twins. Last night."

Sam Motherwell mounted his trucks and drove away. He knew when he was
beaten.

The house had received additions on every side, until it seemed to
threaten to run over the edge of the lot, and looked like a section of
a wrecked freight train, with its yellow refrigerator car.

The snow had drifted up to the windows, and entirely over the little
lean-to that had been erected at the time that little Danny had added
his feeble wail to the general family chorus.

But the smoke curled bravely up from the chimney into the frosty air,
and a snug pile of wood by the "cheek of the dure" gave evidence of
John's industry, notwithstanding his dislike of the world's best
literature.

Inside the floor was swept and the stove was clean, and an air of
comfort was over all, in spite of the evidence of poverty. A great
variety of calendars hung on the wall. Every store in town it seems had
sent one this year, last year and the year before. A large poster of
the Winnipeg Industrial Exhibition hung in the parlour, and a
Massey-Harris self-binder, in full swing, propelled by three maroon
horses, swept through a waving field of golden grain, driven by an
adipose individual in blue shirt and grass-green overalls. An enlarged
picture of John himself glared grimly from a very heavy frame, on the
opposite wall, the grimness of it somewhat relieved by the row of
Sunday-school "big cards" that were stuck in around the frame.

On the afternoon that Mrs. Watson had received the uplifting talk on
motherhood, and Mrs. Francis had entered it in the little red book,
Pearlie Watson, aged twelve, was keeping the house, as she did six days
in the week. The day was too cold for even Jimmy to be out, and so all
except the three eldest boys were in the kitchen variously engaged.
Danny under promise of a story was in the high chair submitting to a
thorough going over with soap and water. Patsey, looking up from his
self-appointed task of brushing the legs of the stove with the
hair-brush, loudly demanded that the story should begin at once.

"Story, is it?" cried Pearlie in her wrath, as she took the hair-brush
from Patsey. "What time have I to be thinkin' of stories and you that
full of badness. My heart is bruck wid ye."

"I'll be good now," Patsey said, penitently, sitting on the wood-box,
and tenderly feeling his skinned nose. "I got hurt to-day, mind that,
Pearlie."

"So ye did, poor bye," said Pearlie, her wrath all gone, "and what will
I tell yez about, my beauties?"

"The pink lady where Jimmy brings the milk," said Patsey promptly.

"But it's me that's gettin' combed," wailed Danny. "I should say what
ye'r to tell, Pearlie."

"True for ye," said Pearlie, "Howld ye'r tongue, Patsey. What will I
tell about, honey?"

"What Patsey said'll do" said Danny with an injured air, "and don't
forget the chockalut drops she had the day ma was there and say she
sent three o' them to me, and you can have one o' them, Pearlie."

"And don't forget the big plate o' potatoes and gravy and mate she gave
the dog, and the cake she threw in the fire to get red of it," said
Mary, who was knitting a sock for Teddy.

"No, don't tell that," said Jimmy, "it always makes wee Bugsey cry."

"Well," began Pearlie, as she had done many times before. "Once upon a
time not very long ago, there lived a lovely pink lady in a big house
painted red, with windies in ivery side of it, and a bell on the front
dure, and a velvet carpet on the stair and--"

"What's a stair?' asked Bugsey.

"It's a lot of boxes piled up higher and higher, and nailed down tight
so that ye can walk on them, and when ye get away up high, there is
another house right farninst ye--well anyway, there was a lovely pianny
in the parlow, and flowers in the windies, and two yalla burds that
sing as if their hearts wud break, and the windies had a border of
coloured glass all around them, and long white curtings full of holes,
but they like them all the better o' that, for it shows they are owld
and must ha' been good to ha' stood it so long. Well, annyway, there
was a little boy called Jimmie Watson"--here all eyes were turned on
Jimmy, who was sitting on the floor mending his moccasin with a piece
of sinew. "There was a little boy called Jimmy Watson who used to carry
milk to the lady's back dure, and a girl with black eyes and white
teeth all smiley used to take it from him, and put it in a lovely
pitcher with birds flying all over it. But one day the lady, herself,
was there all dressed in lovely pink velvet and lace, and a train as
long as from me to you, and she sez to Jimmy, sez she, 'Have you any
sisters or brothers at home,' and Jim speaks up real proud-like, 'Just
nine,' he sez, and sez she, swate as you please, 'Oh, that's lovely!
Are they all as purty as you?' she sez, and Jimmy sez, 'Purtier if
anything,' and she sez, 'I'll be steppin' over to-day to see yer ma,'
and Jim ran home and told them all, and they all got brushed and combed
and actin' good, and in she comes, laving her carriage at the dure, and
her in a long pink velvet cape draggin' behind her on the flure, and
wide white fer all around it, her silk skirts creakin' like a bag of
cabbage and the eyes of her just dancin' out of her head, and she says,
'These are fine purty childer ye have here, Mrs. Watson. This is a rale
purty girl, this oldest one. What's her name?' and ma ups and tells her
it is Rebecca Jane Pearl, named for her two grandmothers, and Pearl
just for short. She says, 'I'll be for taking you home wid me, Pearlie,
to play the pianny for me,' and then she asks all around what the
children's names is, and then she brings out a big box, from under her
cape, all tied wid store string, and she planks it on the table and
tearin' off the string, she sez, 'Now, Pearlie, it's ladies first,
tibby sure. What would you like to see in here?' And I says up
quick--'A long coat wid fer on it, and a handkerchief smellin' strong
of satchel powder,' and she whipped them out of the box and threw them
on my knee, and a new pair of red mitts too. And then she says, 'Mary,
acushla, it's your turn now.' And Mary says, 'A doll with a real head
on it,' and there it was as big as Danny, all dressed in green satin,
opening its eyes, if you plaze."

"Now, me!" roared Danny, squirming in his chair.

"'Daniel Mulcahey Watson, what wud you like?' she says, and Danny ups
and says, 'Chockaluts and candy men and taffy and curren' buns and
ginger bread,' and she had every wan of them."

"'Robert Roblin Watson, him as they call Bugsey, what would you like?'
and 'Patrick Healy Watson, as is called Patsey, what is your choice?'
says she, and--"

In the confusion that ensued while these two young gentlemen thus
referred to stated their modest wishes, their mother came in, tired and
pale, from her hard day's work.

"How is the pink lady to-day, ma?" asked Pearlie, setting Danny down
and beginning operations on Bugsey.

"Oh, she's as swate as ever, an' can talk that soft and kind about
children as to melt the heart in ye."

Danny crept up on his mother's knee "Ma, did she give ye pie?" he
asked, wistfully.

"Yes, me beauty, and she sent this to you wid her love," and Mrs.
Watson took a small piece out of a newspaper from under her cape. It
was the piece that had been set on the kitchen table for Mrs. Watson's
dinner. Danny called them all to have a bite.

"Sure it's the first bite that's always the best, a body might not like
it so well on the second," said Jimmy as he took his, but Bugsey
refused to have any at all. "Wan bite's no good," he said, "it just
lets yer see what yer missin."

"D'ye think she'll ever come to see us, ma?" asked Pearlie, as she set
Danny in the chair to give him his supper. The family was fed in
divisions. Danny was always in Division A.

"Her? Is it?" said Mrs. Watson and they all listened, for Pearlie's
story to-day had far surpassed all her former efforts, and it seemed as
if there must be some hope of its coming true. "Why och! childer dear,
d'ye think a foine lady like her would be bothered with the likes of
us? She is r'adin' her book, and writin' letthers, and thinkin' great
thoughts, all the time. When she was speakin' to me to-day, she looked
at me so wonderin' and faraway I could see that she thought I wasn't
there at all at all, and me farninst her all the time--no childer,
dear, don't be thinkin' of it, and Pearlie, I think ye'd better not be
puttin' notions inter their heads. Yer father wouldn't like it. Well
Danny, me man, how goes it?" went on Mrs. Watson, as her latest born
was eating his rather scanty supper. "It's not skim milk and dhry bread
ye'd be havin', if you were her child this night, but taffy candy
filled wid nuts and chunks o' cake as big as yer head." Whereupon Danny
wailed dismally, and had to be taken from his chair and have the
"Little Boy Blue" sung to him, before he could be induced to go on with
his supper.

The next morning when Jimmy brought the milk to Mrs. Francis's back
door the dark-eyed girl with the "smiley" teeth let him in, and set a
chair beside the kitchen stove for him to warm his little blue hands.
While she was emptying the milk into the pitcher with the birds on it,
Mrs. Francis, with a wonderful pink kimono on, came into the kitchen.

"Who is this boy, Camilla?" she asked, regarding Jimmy with a critical
gaze.

"This is Master James Watson, Mrs. Francis," answered Camilla with her
pleasant smile. "He brings the milk every morning."

"Oh yes; of course, I remember now," said Mrs. Francis, adjusting her
glasses. "How old is the baby, James?"

"Danny is it?" said Jim. "He's four come March."

"Is he very sweet and cunning James, and do you love him very much?"

"Oh, he's all right," Jim answered sheepishly.

"It is a great privilege to have a little brother like Daniel. You must
be careful to set before him a good example of honesty and sobriety. He
will be a man some day, and if properly trained he may be a useful
factor in the uplifting and refining of the world. I love little
children," she went on rapturously, looking at Jimmy as if he wasn't
there at all, "and I would love to train one, for service in the world
to uplift and refine."

"Yes ma'am," said Jimmy. He felt that something was expected of him,
but he was not sure what.

"Will you bring Daniel to see me to-morrow, James?" she said, as
Camilla handed him his pail. "I would like to speak to his young mind
and endeavour to plant the seeds of virtue and honesty in that fertile
soil."

When Jimmy got home he told Pearlie of his interview with the pink
lady, as much as he could remember. The only thing that he was sure of
was that she wanted to see Danny, and that she had said something about
planting seeds in him.

Jimmy and Pearlie thought it best not to mention Danny's proposed visit
to their mother, for they knew that she would be fretting about his
clothes, and would be sitting up mending and sewing for him when she
should be sleeping. So they resolved to say "nothin' to nobody."

The next day their mother went away early to wash for the Methodist
minister's wife, and that was always a long day's work.

Then the work of preparation began on Danny. A wash-basin full of snow
was put on the stove to melt, and Danny was put in the high chair which
was always the place of his ablutions.

Pearlie began to think aloud. "Bugsey, your stockin's are the best. Off
wid them, Mary, and mend the hole in the knees of them, and, Bugsey,
hop into bed for we'll be needin' your pants anyway. It's awful stylish
for a little lad like Danny to be wearin' pants under his dresses, and
now what about boots? Let's see yours, Patsey. They're all gone in the
uppers, and Billy's are too big, even if they were here, but they're
off to school on him. I'll tell you what Mary, hurry up wid that sock
o' Ted's and we'll draw them on him over Bugsey's boots and purtind
they're overstockin's, and I'll carry him all the way so's not to dirty
them."

Mary stopped her dish-washing, and drying her hands on the thin towel
that hung over the looking glass, found her knitting and began to knit
at the top of her speed.

"Isn't it good we have that dress o' his, so good yet, that he got when
we had all of yez christened. Put the irons on there Mary; never mind,
don't stop your knittin'. I'll do it myself. We'll press it out a bit,
and we can put ma's handkerchief, the one pa gev her for Christmas,
around his neck, sort o' sailor collar style, to show he's a boy. And
now the snow is melted, I'll go at him. Don't cry now Danny, man, yer
going' up to the big house where the lovely pink lady lives that has
the chocaklut drops on her stand and chunks of cake on the table wid
nuts in them as big as marbles. There now," continued Pearlie, putting
the towel over her finger and penetrating Danny's ear, "she'll not say
she can plant seeds in you. Yer ears are as clean as hers," and Pearlie
stood back and took a critical view of Danny's ears front and back.

"Chockaluts?" asked Danny to be sure that he hadn't been mistaken.

"Yes," went on Pearlie to keep him still while she fixed his shock of
red hair into stubborn little curls, and she told again with ever
growing enthusiasm the story of the pink lady, and the wonderful things
she had in the box tied up with store string.

At last Danny was completed and stood on a chair for inspection. But
here a digression from the main issue occurred, for Bugsey had grown
tired of his temporary confinement and complained that Patsey had not
contributed one thing to Danny's wardrobe while he had had to give up
both his stockings and his pants.

Pearlie stopped in the work of combing her own hair to see what could
be done.

"Patsey, where's your gum?" she asked. "Git it for me this minute," and
Patsey went to the "fallen leaf" of the table and found it on the
inside where he had put it for safe keeping.

"Now you give that to Bugsey," she said, "and that'll make it kind o'
even though it does look as if you wuz gettin' off pretty light."

Pearlie struggled with her hair to make it lie down and "act dacint,"
but the image that looked back at her from the cracked glass was not
encouraging, even after making allowance for the crack, but she
comforted herself by saying, "Sure it's Danny she wants to see, and she
won't be lookin' much at me anyway."

Then the question arose, and for a while looked serious-- What was
Danny to wear on his head? Danny had no cap, nor ever had one. There
was one little red toque in the house that Patsey wore, but by an
unfortunate accident, it had that very morning fallen into the milk
pail and was now drying on the oven door. For a while it seemed as if
the visit would have to be postponed until it dried, when Mary had an
inspiration.

"Wrap yer cloud around his head and say you wuz feart of the earache,
the day is so cold."

This was done and a blanket off one of the beds was pressed into
service as an outer wrap for Danny. He was in such very bad humour at
being wrapped up so tight that Pearlie had to set him down on the bed
again to get a fresh grip on him.

"It's just as well I have no mitts," she said as she lifted her heavy
burden. "I couldn't howld him at all if I was bothered with mitts. Open
the dure, Patsey, and mind you shut it tight again. Keep up the fire,
Mary. Bugsey, lie still and chew your gum, and don't fight any of yez."

When Pearlie and her heavy burden arrived at Mrs. Francis's back door
they were admitted by the dark-haired Camilla, who set a rocking-chair
beside the kitchen stove for Pearlie to sit in while she unrolled
Danny, and when Danny in his rather remarkable costume stood up on
Pearlie's knee, Camilla laughed so good humouredly that Danny felt the
necessity of showing her all his accomplishments and so made the face
that Patsey had taught him by drawing down his eyes, and putting his
fingers in his mouth. Danny thought she liked it very much, for she
went hurriedly into the pantry and brought back a cookie for him.

The savoury smell of fried salmon, for it was near lunch time,
increased Danny's interest in his surroundings, and his eyes were big
with wonder when Mrs. Francis herself came in.

"And is this little Daniel!" she cried rapturously. "So sweet; so
innocent; so pure! Did Big Sister carry him all the way? Kind Big
Sister. Does oo love Big Sister?"

"Nope," Danny spoke up quickly, "just like chockaluts."

"How sweet of him, isn't it, really?" she said, "with the world all
before him, the great untried future lying vast and prophetic waiting
for his baby feet to enter. Well has Dr. Parker said; 'A little child
is a bundle of possibilities and responsibilities.'"

"If ye please, ma'am," Pearlie said timidly, not wishing to contradict
the lady, but still anxious to set her right, "it was just this blanket
I had him rolled in."

At which Camilla again retired to the pantry with precipitate haste.

"Did you see the blue, blue sky, Daniel, and the white, white snow, and
did you see the little snow-birds, whirling by like brown leaves?" Mrs.
Francis asked with an air of great childishness.

"Nope," said Danny shortly, "didn't see nothin'."

"Please, ma'am," began Pearlie again, "it was the cloud around his head
on account of the earache that done it."

"It is sweet to look into his innocent young eyes and wonder what
visions they will some day see," went on Mrs. Francis, dreamily, but
there she stopped with a look of horror frozen on her face, for at the
mention of his eyes Danny remembered his best trick and how well it had
worked on Camilla, and in a flash his eyes were drawn down and his
mouth stretched to its utmost limit.

"What ails the child?" Mrs. Francis cried in alarm. "Camilla, come
here."

Camilla came out of the pantry and gazed at Danny with sparkling eyes,
while Pearlie, on the verge of tears, vainly tried to awaken in him
some sense of the shame he was bringing on her. Camilla hurried to the
pantry again, and brought another cookie. "I believe, Mrs. Francis,
that Danny is hungry," she said. "Children sometimes act that way," she
added, laughing.

"Really, how very interesting; I must see if Dr. Parker mentions this
strange phenomenon in his book."

"Please, ma'am, I think I had better take him home now," said Pearlie.
She knew what Danny was, and was afraid that greater disgrace might
await her. But when she tried to get him back into the blanket he lost
every joint in his body and slipped to the floor. This is what she had
feared--Danny had gone limber.

"I don't want to go home" he wailed dismally. "I want to stay with her,
and her; want to see the yalla burds, want a chockalut."

"Come Danny, that's a man," pleaded Pearlie, "and I'll tell you all
about the lovely pink lady when we go home, and I'll get Bugsey's gum
for ye and I'll--"

"No," Danny roared, "tell me how about the pink lady, tell her, and
her."

"Wait till we get home, Danny man." Pearlie's grief flowed afresh.
Disgrace had fallen on the Watsons, and Pearlie knew it.

"It would be interesting to know what mental food this little mind has
been receiving. Please do tell him the story, Pearlie."

Thus admonished, Pearlie, with flaming cheeks began the story. She
tried to make it less personal, but at every change Danny screamed his
disapproval, and held her to the original version, and when it was
done, he looked up with his sweet little smile, and said to Mrs.
Francis nodding his head. "You're it! You're the lovely pink lady."
There was a strange flush on Mrs. Francis's face, and a strange feeling
stirring her heart, as she hurriedly rose from her chair and clasped
Danny in her arms.

"Danny! Danny!" she cried, "you shall see the yellow birds, and the
stairs, and the chocolates on the dresser, and the pink lady will come
to-morrow with the big parcel."

Danny's little arms tightened around her neck.

"It's her," he shouted. "It's her."

When Mrs. Burton Francis went up to her sitting-room, a few hours later
to get the "satchel" powder to put in the box that was to be tied with
the store string, the sun was shining on the face of the Madonna on the
wall, and it seemed to smile at her as she passed.

The little red book lay on the table forgotten. She tossed it into the
waste-paper basket.



CHAPTER II

THE OLD DOCTOR

Close beside Mrs. Francis's comfortable home stood another large house,
weather-beaten and dreary looking, a house whose dilapidated verandas
and broken fence clearly indicated that its good days had gone by. In
the summer-time vines and flowers grew around it to hide its scars and
relieve its grimness, pathetic as a brave smile on a sad face.

Dr. Barner, brilliant, witty and skilful, had for many years been a
victim of intemperance, but being Scotch to the backbone, he never
could see how good, pure "Kilmarnock," made in Glasgow, could hurt
anyone. He knew that his hand shook, and his brain reeled, and his eyes
were bleared; but he never blamed the whiskey. He knew that his
patients sometimes died while he was enjoying a protracted drunk, but
of course, accidents will happen, and a doctor's accidents are soon
buried and forgotten. Even in his worst moments, if he could be induced
to come to the sick bed, he would sober up wonderfully, and many a
sufferer was relieved from pain and saved from death by his gentle and
skilful, though trembling, hands. He might not be able to walk across
the room, but he could diagnose correctly and prescribe successfully.

When he came to Millford years ago, his practice grew rapidly. People
wondered why he came to such a small place, for his skill, his wit, his
wonderful presence would have won distinction anywhere.

His wife, a frail though very beautiful woman, at first thought nothing
of his drinking habits--he was never anything but gentlemanly in her
presence. But the time came when she saw honour and manhood slowly but
surely dying in him, and on her heart there fell the terrible weight of
a powerless despair. Her health had never been robust and she quickly
sank into invalidism.

The specialist who came from Winnipeg diagnosed her case as chronic
anaemia and prescribed port wine, which she refused with a queer little
wavering cry and a sudden rush of tears. But she put up a good fight
nevertheless. She wanted to live so much, for the sake of Mary, her
beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter.

Mrs. Barner did not live to see the whole work of degeneration, for the
end came in the early spring, swift and sudden and kind.

The doctor's grief for his wife was sincere. He always referred to her
as "my poor Mildred," and never spoke of her except when comparatively
sober.

Mary Barner took up the burden of caring for her father without
question, for she loved him with a great and pitying love, to which he
responded in his best moments. In the winter she went with him on his
drives night and day, for the fear of what might happen was always in
her heart. She was his housekeeper, his office-girl, his bookkeeper;
she endured all things, loneliness, poverty, disgrace, without
complaining or bitterness.

One day shortly after Mrs. Barner's death big John Robertson from "the
hills" drove furiously down the street to the doctor's house, and
rushed into the office without ringing the bell. His little boy had
been cut with the mower-knives, and he implored the doctor to come at
once.

The doctor sat at his desk, just drunk enough to be ugly-tempered, and
curtly told Mr. Robertson to go straight to perdition, and as the poor
man, wild with excitement, begged him to come and offered him money, he
yawned nonchalantly, and with some slight variations repeated the
injunction.

Mary hearing the conversation came in hurriedly.

"Mary, my dear," the doctor said, "please leave us. This gentleman is
quite forgetting himself and his language is shocking." Mary did not
even look at her father. She was packing his little satchel with all
that would be needed.

"Now pick him up and take him," she said firmly to big John. "He'll be
all right when he sees your little boy, never mind what he says now."

Big John seized the doctor and bore him struggling and protesting to
the wagon.

The doctor made an effort to get out.

"Put him down in the bottom with this under his head"--handing Big John
a cushion--"and put your feet on him," Mary commanded.

Big John did as she bid him, none too gently, for he could still hear
his little boy's cries and see that cruel jagged wound.

"Oh, don't hurt him," she cried piteously, and ran sobbing into the
house. Upstairs, in what had been her mother's room, she pressed her
face against her mother's kimono that still hung behind the door. "I am
not crying for you to come back, mother," she sobbed bitterly, "I am
just crying for your little girl."

The doctor was asleep when John reached his little shanty in the hills.
The child still lived, his Highland mother having stopped the blood
with rude bandaging and ashes, a remedy learned in her far-off island
home.

John shook the doctor roughly and cursed him soundly in both English
and Gaelic, without avail, but the child's cry so full of pain and
weakness roused him with a start. In a minute Dr. Frederick Barner was
himself. He took the child gently from his mother and laid him on the
bed.

For two days the doctor stayed in John's dirty little shanty, caring
for little Murdock as tenderly as a mother. He cooked for the child, he
sang to him, he carried him in his arms for hours, and soothed him with
a hundred quaint fancies. He superintended the cleaning of the house
and scolded John's wife soundly on her shiftless ways; he showed her
how to bake bread and cook little dishes to tempt the child's appetite,
winning thereby her undying gratitude. She understood but little of the
scolding, but she saw his kindness to her little boy, for kindness is
the same in all languages.

On the third day, the little fellow's fever went down and, peeping over
the doctor's shoulder, he smiled and chattered and asked for his
"daddy" and his "mathar."

Then Big John broke down utterly and tried to speak his gratitude, but
the doctor abruptly told him to quit his blubbering and hitch up, for
little Murdock would be chasing the hens again in a week or two.

The doctor went faithfully every day and dressed little Murdock's wound
until it no longer needed his care, remaining perfectly sober
meanwhile. Hope sprang up in Mary's heart--for love believeth all
things.

At night when he went to bed and she carefully locked the doors and
took the keys to her room, she breathed a sigh of relief. One more day
won!

But alas for Mary's hopes! They were built upon the slipping, sliding
sands of human desire. One night she found him in the office of the
hotel; a red-faced, senseless, gibbering old man, arguing theology with
a brother Scotchman, who was in the same condition of mellow
exhilaration.

Mary's white face as she guided her father through the door had an
effect upon the men who sat around the office. Kind-hearted fellows
they were, and they felt sorry for the poor little motherless girl,
sorry for "old Doc" too. One after another they went home, feeling just
a little ashamed.

The bartender, a new one from across the line, a dapper chap with
diamonds, was indignant. "I'll give that old man a straight pointer,"
he said, "that his girl has to stay out of here. This is no place for
women, anyway"--which is true, God knows.

Five years went by and Mary Barner lived on in the lonely house and did
all that human power could do to stay her father's evil course. But the
years told heavily upon him. He had made some fatal mistakes in his
prescribing, and the people had been compelled to get in another
doctor, though a great many of those who had known him in his best days
still clung to the "old man" in spite of his drinking. They could not
forget how he had fought with death for them and for their children.

Of all his former skill but little remained now except his wonderful
presence in the sick-room.

He could still inspire the greatest confidence and hope. Still at his
coming a sick man's fears fell away from him, and in their stead came
hope and good cheer. This was the old man's good gift that even his
years of sinning could not wholly destroy. God had marked him for a
great physician.



CHAPTER III

THE PINK LADY

When Mrs. Francis decided to play the Lady Bountiful to the Watson
family, she not only ministered to their physical necessity but she
conscientiously set about to do them good, if they would be done good
to. Mrs. Francis's heart was kind, when you could get to it; but it was
so deeply crusted over with theories and reflections and abstract
truths that not very many people knew that she had one.

When little Danny's arms were thrown around her neck, and he called her
his dear sweet, pink lady, her pseudo-intellectuality broke down before
a power which had lain dormant. She had always talked a great deal of
the joys of motherhood, and the rapturous delights of mother-love. Not
many of the mothers knew as much of the proper care of an infant during
the period of dentition as she. She had read papers at mothers'
meetings, and was as full of health talks as a school physiology.

But it was the touch of Danny's soft cheek and clinging arms that
brought to her the rapture that is so sweet it hurts, and she realised
that she had missed the sweetest thing in life. A tiny flame of real
love began to glimmer in her heart and feebly shed its beams among the
debris of cold theories and second-hand sensations that had filled it
hitherto.

She worried Danny with her attentions, although he tried hard to put up
with them. She was the lady of his dreams, for Pearl's imagination had
clothed her with all the virtues and graces.

Hers was a strangely inconsistent character, spiritually minded, but
selfish; loving humanity when it is spelled with a capital, but knowing
nothing of the individual. The flower of holiness in her heart was like
the haughty orchid that blooms in the hothouse, untouched by wind or
cold, beautiful to behold but comforting no one with its beauty.

Pearl Watson was like the rugged little anemone, the wind flower that
lifts its head from the cheerless prairie. No kind hand softens the
heat or the cold, nor tempers the wind, and yet the very winds that
blow upon it and the hot sun that beats upon it bring to it a grace, a
hardiness, a fragrance of good cheer, that gladdens the hearts of all
who pass that way.

Mrs. Francis found herself strongly attracted to Pearl. Pearl, the
housekeeper, the homemaker, a child with a woman's responsibility,
appealed to Mrs. Francis. She thought about Pearl very often.

Noticing one day that Pearl was thin and pale, she decided at once that
she needed a health talk. Pearl sat like a graven image while Mrs.
Francis conscientiously tried to stir up in her the seeds of right
living.

"Oh, ma!" Pearl said to her mother that night, when the children had
gone to bed and they were sewing by the fire. "Oh, ma! she told me more
to-day about me insides than I would care to remember. Mind ye, ma,
there's a sthring down yer back no bigger'n a knittin' needle, and if
ye ever broke it ye'd snuff out before ye knowed what ye was doin', and
there's a tin pan in yer ear that if ye got a dinge in it, it wouldn't
be worth a dhirty postage stamp for hearin' wid, and ye mustn't skip
ma, for it will disturb yer Latin parts, and ye mustn't eat seeds, or
ye'll get the thing that pa had--what is it called ma?"

Her mother told her.

"Yes, appendicitis, that's what she said. I never knowed there were so
many places inside a person to go wrong, did ye, ma? I just thought we
had liver and lights and a few things like that."

"Don't worry, alannah," her mother said soothingly, as she cut out the
other leg of Jimmy's pants. "The Lord made us right I guess, and he
won't let anything happen to us."

But Pearl was not yet satisfied. "But, oh ma," she said, as she hastily
worked a buttonhole. "You don't know about the diseases that are goin'
'round. Mind ye, there's tuberoses in the cows even, and them that sly
about it, and there's diseases in the milk as big as a chew o' gum and
us not seein' them. Every drop of it we use should be scalded well, and
oh, ma, I wonder anyone of us is alive for we're not half clean! The
poison pours out of the skin night and day, carbolic acid she said, and
every last wan o' us should have a sponge bath at night--that's just to
slop yerself all up and down with a rag, and an oliver in the mornin'.
Ma, what's an oliver, d'ye think?"

"Ask Camilla," Mrs. Watson said, somewhat alarmed at these hygienic
problems. "Camilla is grand at explaining Mrs. Francis's quare ways."

Pearl's brown eyes were full of worry.

"It's hard to git time to be healthy, ma," she said; "we should keep
the kittle bilin' all the time, she says, to keep the humanity in the
air--Oh, I wish she hadn't a told me, I never thought atin' hurt
anyone, but she says lots of things that taste good is black pison.
Isn't it quare, ma, the Lord put such poor works in us and us not there
at the time to raise a hand."

They sewed in silence for a few minutes.

Then Pearl said: "Let us go to bed now, ma, me eyes are shuttin'. I'll
go back to-morrow and ask Camilla about the 'oliver.'"



CHAPTER IV

THE BAND OF HOPE

Mary Barner had learned the lesson early that the only easing of her
own pain was in helping others to bear theirs, and so it came about
that there was perhaps no one in Millford more beloved than she.
Perhaps it was the memory of her own lost childhood that caused her
heart to go out in love and sympathy to every little boy and girl in
the village.

Their joys were hers; their sorrows also. She took slivers from little
fingers with great skill, beguiling the owners thereof with wonderful
songs and stories. She piloted weary little plodders through pages of
"homework." She mended torn "pinnies" so that even vigilant mothers
never knew that their little girls had jumped the fence at all. She
made dresses for concerts at short notice. She appeased angry parents,
and many a time prevented the fall of correction's rod.

When Tommy Watson beguiled Ignatius McSorley, Jr., to leave his
mother's door, and go swimming in the river, promising faithfully to
"button up his back"--Ignatius being a wise child who knew his
limitations--and when Tommy Watson forgot that promise and basely
deserted Ignatius to catch on the back of a buggy that came along the
river road, leaving his unhappy friend clad in one small shirt, vainly
imploring him to return, Ignatius could not go home, for his mother
would know that he had again yielded to the siren's voice; so it was to
the Barner back door that he turned his guilty steps. Miss Barner was
talking to a patient in the office when she heard a small voice at the
kitchen door full of distress, whimpering:

"Please Miss Barner, I'm in a bad way. Tommy Watson said he'd help me
and he never!"

Miss Barner went quickly, and there on the doorstep stood a tiny cupid
in tears, tightly clasping his scanty wardrobe to his bosom.

"He said he'd help me and he never!" he repeated in a burst of rage as
she drew him in hastily.

"Never mind, honey," she said, struggling to control her laughter.
"Just wait till I catch Tommy Watson!"

Miss Barner was the assistant Band of Hope teacher. On Monday afternoon
it was part of her duty to go around and help the busy mothers to get
the children ready for the meeting. She also took her turn with Mrs.
White in making taffy, for they had learned that when temperance
sentiment waned, taffy, with nuts in it, had a wonderful power to bind
and hold the wavering childish heart.

There was no human way of telling a taffy day--the only sure way was to
go every time. The two little White girls always knew, but do you think
they would tell? Not they. There was secrecy written all over their
blond faces, and in every strand of their straw-coloured hair. Once
they deliberately stood by and heard Minnie McSorley and Mary Watson
plan to go down to the creamery for pussy-willows on Monday
afternoon--there were four plates of taffy on their mother's pantry
shelf at the time and yet they gave no sign--Minnie McSorley and Mary
Watson went blindly on and reaped a harvest of regrets.

There was no use offering the White girls anything for the information.
Glass alleys, paint cards or even popcorn rings were powerless to
corrupt them. Once Jimmy Watson became the hero of an hour by
circulating the report that he had smelled it cooking when he took the
milk to Miss Barner's; but alas, for circumstantial evidence.

Every child went to Band of Hope that Monday afternoon eager and
expectant; but it was only a hard lesson on the effect of alcohol on
the lining of the stomach that they got, and when Mrs. White
complimented them on their increased attendance and gave out the
closing hymn,

   Oh, what a happy band are we!

the Hogan twins sobbed.

When the meeting was over, Miss Barner exonerated Jimmy by saying it
was icing for a cake he had smelled, and the drooping spirits of the
Band were somewhat revived by her promise that next Monday would surely
be Taffy Day.

On the last Monday of each month the Band of Hope had a programme
instead of the regular lesson. Before the programme was given the
children were allowed to tell stories or ask questions relating to
temperance. The Hogan twins were always full of communications, and on
this particular Monday it looked as if they would swamp the meeting.

William Henry Hogan (commonly known as Squirt) told to a dot how many
pairs of shoes and bags of flour a man could buy by denying himself
cigars for ten years. During William Henry's recital, John James Hogan,
the other twin, showed unmistakable signs of impatience. He stood up
and waved his hand so violently that he seemed to be in danger of
throwing that useful member away forever. Mrs. White gave him
permission to speak as soon as his brother had finished, and John James
announced with a burst of importance:

"Please, teacher, my pa came home last night full as a billy-goat."

Miss Barner put her hand hastily over her eyes. Mrs. White gasped, and
the Band of Hope held its breath.

Then Mrs. White hurriedly announced that Master James Watson would
recite, and Jimmy went forward with great outward composure and recited:

   As I was going to the lake
   I met a little rattlesnake;
   I fed him with some jelly-cake,
   Which made his little--

But Mrs. White interrupted Jimmy just then by saying that she must
insist on temperance selections at these programmes, whereat Pearlie
Watson's hand waved appealingly, and Miss Barner gave her permission to
speak.

"Please ma'am," Pearl said, addressing Mrs. White, "Jimmy and me
thought anything about a rattlesnake would do for a temperance piece,
and if you had only let Jimmy go on you would have seen what happened
even a snake that et what he hadn't ought to, and please ma'am, Jimmy
and me thought it might be a good lesson for all of us."

Miss Barner thought that Pearlie's point was well taken, and took Jimmy
with her into the vestry from which he emerged a few minutes later,
flushed and triumphant, and recited the same selection, with a possible
change of text in one place:

   As I was going to the lake
   I met a little rattlesnake;
   I fed him on some jelly-cake,
   Which made his little stomach ache.

The musical committee then sang:

   We're for home and mother,
   God and native land,
   Grown up friend and brother,
   Give us now your hand.

and won loud applause. Little Sissy Moore knew only the first verse,
but it would never have been known that she was saying
dum--dum--dum--dum--dum--dum--dum--dum dum-dum-dum, if Mary Simpson
hadn't told.

Wilford Ducker, starched as stiff as boiled and raw starch could make
him, recited "Perish, King Alcohol, we will grow up," but was accorded
a very indifferent reception by the Band of Hopers. Wilford was allowed
to go to Band of Hope only when Miss Barner went for him and escorted
him home again. Mrs. Ducker had been very particular about Wilford from
the first.

Then the White girls recited a strictly suitable piece. It was entitled
"The World and the Conscience."

Lily represented a vain woman of the world bent upon pleasure with a
tendency toward liquid refreshment. Her innocent china-blue eyes and
flaxen braids were in strange contrast to the mad love of glittering
wealth which was supposed to fill her heart:

   Give to me the flowing bowl,
      And Pleasure's glittering crown;
   The path of Pride shall be my goal,
      And conscience's voice I'll drown!

Then Blanche sweetly admonished her:

   Oh! lay aside your idle boasts,
      No Pleasure thus you'll find;
   The flowing bowl a serpent is
      To poison Soul and Mind.

   Oh, sign our pledge, while yet you can,
      Nor look upon the Wine
   When it is red within the Cup,
      Let not its curse be thine!

Thereupon the frivolous creature repents of her waywardness, and the
two little girls join hands and recite in unison:

   We will destroy this giant King,
   And drive him from our land;
   And on the side of Temp-er-ance
   We'll surely take our stand!

and the piece was over.

Robert Roblin Watson (otherwise known as Bugsey), who had that very day
been installed as a member of the Band of Hope, after he had avowed his
determination "never to touch, taste nor handle alcoholic stimulants in
any form as a beverage and to discourage all traffic in the same," was
the next gentleman on the programme. Pearlie was sure Bugsey's
selection was suitable. She whispered to him the very last minute not
to forget his bow, but he did forget it, and was off like a shot into
his piece.

   I belong to the Band of Hope,
   Never to drink and never to smoke;
   To love my parents and Uncle Sam,
   Keep Alcohol out of my diaphragm;
   To say my prayers when I go to bed,
   And not put the bedclothes over my head;
   Fill up my lungs with oxygen,
   And be kind to every living thing.

There! I guess there can't be no kick about that, Pearl thought to
herself as Bugsey finished, and the applause rang out loud and louder.

Pearlie had forgotten to tell Bugsey to come down when he was done, and
so he stood irresolute, as the applause grew more and more deafening.
Pearl beckoned and waved and at last got him safely landed, and when
Mrs. White announced that to-day was Taffy Day, owing to Miss Barner's
kindness, Bugsey's cup of happiness was full. Miss Barner said she had
an extra big piece for the youngest member, Master Danny Watson.
Pearlie had not allowed any person to mention taffy to him because
Danny could not bear to be disappointed.

But there were no disappointments that day. Taffy enough for every one,
amber-coloured taffy slabs with nuts in it, cream taffy in luscious
nuggets, curly twists of brown and yellow taffy. Oh look, there's
another plateful! and it's coming this way. "Have some more, Danny. Oh,
take a bigger piece, there's lots of it." Was it a dream?

When the last little Band of Hoper had left the vestry, Mary Barner sat
alone with her thoughts, looking with unseeing eyes at the red and
silver mottoes on the wall. Pledge cards which the children had signed
were gaily strung together with ribbons across the wall behind her. She
was thinking of the little people who had just gone--how would it be
with them in the years to come?--they were so sweet and pure and lovely
now. Unconsciously she bowed her head on her hands, and a cry quivered
from her heart. The yellow sunlight made a ripple of golden water on
the wall behind her and threw a wavering radiance on her soft brown
hair.

It was at that moment that the Rev. Hugh Grantley, the new Presbyterian
minister, opened the vestry door.



CHAPTER V

THE RELICT OF THE LATE MCGUIRE

Close beside the Watson estate with its strangely shaped dwelling stood
another small house, which was the earthly abode of one Mrs. McGuire,
also of Irish extraction, who had been a widow for forty years. Mrs.
McGuire was a tall, raw-boned, angular woman with piercing black eyes,
and a firm forbidding jaw. One look at Mrs. McGuire usually made a book
agent forget the name of his book. When she shut her mouth, no lips
were visible; her upturned nose seemed seriously to contemplate running
up under her sun bonnet to escape from this wicked world with all its
troubling, and especially from John Watson, his wife and his family of
nine.

One fruitful cause of dispute between Mrs. McGuire and the Watsons was
the boundary line between the two estates. In the spring Mrs. Watson
and the boys put up a fence of green poplar poles where they thought
the fence should be, hoping that it might serve the double purpose of
dividing the lots and be a social barrier between them and the relict
of the late McGuire. The relict watched and waited and said not a word,
but it was the ominous silence that comes before the hail.

Mrs. McGuire hated the Watson family collectively, but it was upon John
Watson, the man of few words, that she lavished the whole wealth of her
South of Ireland hatred, for John Watson had on more than one occasion
got the better of her in a wordy encounter.

One time when the boundary dispute was at its height, she had burst
upon John as he went to his work in the morning, with a storm of
far-reaching and comprehensive epithets. She gave him the history of
the Watson family, past, present, and future--especially the future;
every Watson that ever left Ireland came in for a brief but pungent
notice.

John stood thoughtfully rubbing his chin, and when she stopped, not
from lack of words, but from lack of breath, he slowly remarked:

"Mistress McGuire, yer a lady."

"Yer a liar!" she snapped back, with a still more eloquent burst of
invectives.

John lighted his pipe with great deliberation, and when it was drawing
nicely he took it from his mouth and said, more to himself than to her:

"Stay where ye are, Pat McGuire. It may be hot where ye are, but it
would be hotter for ye if ye were here, and ye'd jist have the throuble
o' movin'. Stay where ye are, Pat, wherever ye are." He walked away
leaving Mrs. McGuire with the uncomfortable feeling that he had some
way got the best of her.

The Watsons had planted their potatoes beside the fence, and did not
dream of evil. But one morning in the early autumn, the earliest little
Watson who went out to get a basin of water out of the rain barrel, to
wash the "sleeps" out of his eyes, dropped the basin in his
astonishment, for the fence was gone--it was removed to Mrs. McGuire's
woodpile, and the lady herself was industriously digging the potatoes.

Bugsey, for he was the early little bird, ran back into the house
screaming:

"She's robbed us! She's robbed us! and tuk our fence."

The Watson family gathered as quickly as a fire brigade at the sound of
the gong, but in the scramble for garments some were less fortunate
than others. Wee Tommy, who was a little heavier sleeper than the
others, could find nothing to put on but one overshoe and an old chest
protector of his mother's, but he arrived at the front, nevertheless.
Tommy was not the boy to desert his family for any minor consideration
such as clothes.

Mrs. McGuire leaned on her hoe and nonchalantly regarded the gathering
forces. She had often thought out the scene, and her air of
indifference was somewhat overdone.

The fence was on her ground, so it was, and so were two rows of the
potatoes. She could do what she liked with her own, so she could. She
didn't ask them to plant potatoes on her ground. If they wanted to
stand there gawkin' at her, they wur welcome. She always did like
comp'ny; but she was afraid the childer would catch cowld, they were
dressed so loight for so late in the season. She picked up the last
pailful as she spoke, and retired into her own house, leaving the
Watson family to do the same.

Mrs. Watson counselled peace. John ate his breakfast in silence; but
the young Watsons, and even Pearlie, thirsted for revenge. Bugsey
Watson forgot his Band of Hope teaching of returning good for evil, and
standing on the disputed territory, he planted his little bare legs far
apart and shouted, dancing up and down to the rhythm:

   Chew tobacco, chew tobacco,
      Spit, spit, spit!
   Old McGuire, old McGuire,
      Nit, nit, nit!

Mrs. McGuire did occasionally draw comfort from an old clay pipe--but
Bugsey's punishment was near.

A long shadow fell upon him, and turning around he found himself face
to face with Mary Barner who stood spellbound, listening to her lately
installed Band of Hoper!

Bugsey's downfall was complete! He turned and ran down the road and
round behind an elevator, where half an hour later Pearl found him
shedding penitential tears, not alas! because he had sinned, but
because he had been found out.

The maternal instinct was strong in Pearlie. Bugsey in tears was in
need of consolation; Bugsey was always in need of admonition. So she
combined them:

"Don't cry, alannah. Maybe Miss Barner didn't hear yez at all at all.
Ladies like her do be thinkin' great thoughts and never knowin' what's
forninst them. Mrs. Francis never knows what ye'r sayin' to her at the
toime; ye could say 'chew tobacco, chew tobacco' all ye liked before
her; but what for did ye sass owld lady McGuire? Haven't I towld ye
time out of mind that a soft answer turns away wrath, and forbye makes
them madder than anything ye could say to them?"

Bugsey tearfully declared he would never go to Band of Hope again.
Taffy or no taffy, he could not bear to face her.

"Go tell her, Bugsey man," Pearlie urged. "Tell her ye'r sorry. I
w'uldn't mind tellin' Miss Barner anything. Even if I'd kilt a man and
hid his corp, she's the very one I'd git to help me to give me a h'ist
with him into the river, she's that good and swate."

The subject of this doubtful compliment had come down so early that
morning believing that Mrs. McGuire was confined to her bed with
rheumatism. Seeing the object of her solicitude up and about, she would
have returned without knowing what had happened; but Bugsey's
remarkable musical turn decided her that Mrs. McGuire was suffering
from worse than a rheumatic knee. She went into the little house, and
heard all about it.

When she went home a little later she found Robert Roblin Watson, with
resolute heart but hanging head, waiting for her on the back step. What
passed between them neither of them ever told, but in a very few
minutes Robert Roblin ran gaily homeward, happy in heart, shriven of
his sin, and with one little spot on his cheek which tingled with
rapture. Better still, he went, like a man, and made his peace with
Mrs. McGuire!



CHAPTER VI

THE MUSICAL SENSE

Mrs. Francis, in the sweetest of tea gowns, was intent upon Dr.
Ernestus Parker's book on "Purposeful Motherhood." It was the chapter
dealing with the "Musical Sense in Children" which engrossed Mrs.
Francis's attention. She had just begun subdivision C in the chapter,
"When and How the Musical Sense Is Developed," when she thought of
Danny. She fished into the waste-paper basket for her little red
note-book, and with her silver mounted pencil she made the following
entry:

   DANIEL WATSON,
   AGED 4.
   MUS. SENSE. DEVELOPED. IF SO, WHEN. IF NOT,
   HOW, AND AT ONCE.

She read on feverishly. She felt herself to be in the throes of a great
idea.

Then she called Camilla. Camilla is always so practical, she thought.

To Camilla she elaborated the vital points of Dr. Parker's theory of
the awakening of the musical sense, reading here and there from the
book, rapidly and unintelligibly. She was so excited she was
incoherent. Camilla listened patiently, although her thoughts were with
her biscuits in the oven below.

"And now, Camilla," she said when she had gone all over the subject,
"how can we awaken the musical sense in Daniel? You know I value your
opinion so much."

Camilla was ready.

"Take him to hear Professor Welsman play," she said. "The professor
will give his recital here on the 15th."

Mrs. Francis wrote rapidly. "I believe," she said looking up, "your
suggestion is a good one. You shall have the credit of it in my notes."

   Plan of awakening mus. sense suggested by C--.

Camilla smiled. "Thank you, Mrs. Francis. You are very kind."

When Camilla went back to the kitchen and took the biscuits from the
oven, she laughed softly to herself.

"This is going to be a good time for some further suggestions. Pearl
must go with Danny. What a treat it will be for poor little Pearl! Then
we must have a new suit for Danny, new dress for Pearl, new cap for D.,
new hat for P., all suggested by C. There are a few suggestions which
C. will certainly make."

On the evening of the professor's recital there were no two happier
people in the audience than Pearlie Watson and her brother Daniel
Mulcahey Watson; not because the great professor was about to interpret
for them the music of the masters--that was not the cause of their
happiness--but because of the good supper they had had and the good
clothes they wore, their hearts were glad. They had spent the afternoon
at Mrs. Francis's (suggested by C.). Danny's new coat had a velvet
collar lovely to feel (suggested by C.). Pearl had a wonderful new
dress--the kind she had often dreamed of--made out of one of Mrs.
Francis's tea gowns. (Not only suggested but made by C.). It had real
buttons on it, and there was not one pin needed. Pearl felt she was
just as well dressed as the little girl on the starch box. Her only
grief was that when she had on her coat--which was also new, and
represented one-half month of Camilla's wages--the velvet on her dress
did not show. But Camilla, anticipating this difficulty, laid back the
fronts in stunning lapels, and to complete the arrangement, put one of
her own lace collars around the neck of the coat, the ends coming down
over the turned-back fronts. When Pearl looked in the glass she could
not believe her eyes!

Mr. Francis did not attend piano recitals, nor the meetings of the
Browning Club. Mrs. Francis was often deeply grieved with James for his
indifference in regard to these matters. But the musical sense in James
continued to slumber and sleep.

The piano recital by Professor Welsman was given under the auspices of
the Ladies' Aid of the Methodist Church, the proceeds to be given
toward defraying the cost of the repairs on the parsonage.

The professor was to be assisted by local talent, it said on the
programmes. Pearl was a little bit disappointed about the programmes.
She had told Danny that there would be a chairman who would say: "I see
the first item on this here programme is remarks by the chair, but as
yez all know I ain't no hand at makin' a speech we'll pass on to the
next item." But there was not a sign of a chairman, not even a chair.
The people just came up themselves, without anybody telling them, and
did their piece and went back. It looked sort of bold to Pearl.

First the choir came in and sang: "Praise Waiteth for Thee, O Lord, in
Zion." Pearl did not like the way they treated her friend Dr. Clay.
Twice when he began to sing a little piece by himself, doing all right,
too, two or three of them broke in on him and took the words right out
of his mouth. Pearl had seen people get slapped faces for things like
that. Pearl thought it just served them right when the doctor stopped
singing and let them have it their own way.

When the professor came up the aisle everybody leaned forward to have a
good look at him. "He is just like folks only for his hair," Pearl
thought. Pearl lifted Danny on her knee and told him to look alive now.
She knew what they were there for.

Then the professor began to play. Indifferently at first after the
manner of his kind, clever gymnastics to limber up his fingers perhaps,
and perhaps to show how limber they are; runs and trills, brilliant
execution, one hand after the other in mad pursuit, crossing over, back
again, up and down in the vain endeavour to come up with the other
hand; crescendo, diminuendo, trills again!

Danny yawned widely.

"When's he goin' to begin?" he asked, sleepily.

Mrs. Francis watched Danny eagerly. The musical sense was liable to
wake up any minute. But it would have to hurry, for Daniel Mulcahey was
liable to go to sleep any minute.

Pearl was disgusted with the professor and her thoughts fell into
vulgar baseball slang:

"Playin' to the grand stand, ain't ye? instead o' gettin' down to work.
That'll do for ketch and toss. Play the game! Deliver the goods!"

Then the professor began the full arm chords with sudden fury, writhing
upon the stool as he struck the angry notes from the piano. Pearl's
indignation ran high.

"He's lost his head--he's up in the air!" she shouted, but the words
were lost in the clang of musical discords.

But wait! Pearl sat still and listened. There was something doing. It
was a Welsh rhapsodie that he was playing. It was all there--the
mountains and the rivers, and the towering cliffs with glimpses of the
sea where waves foam on the rocks, and sea-fowl wheel and scream in the
wind, and then a bit of homely melody as the country folk drive home in
the moonlight, singing as only the Welsh can sing, the songs of the
heart; songs of love and home, songs of death and sorrowing, that stab
with sudden sweetness. A child cries somewhere in the dark, cries for
his mother who will come no more. Then a burst of patriotic fire, as
the people fling defiance at the conquering foe, and hold the mountain
passes till the last man falls. But the glory of the fight and the
march of many feet trail off into a wailing chant--the death song of
the brave men who have died. The widow mourns, and the little children
weep comfortless in their mountain home, and the wind rushes through
the forest, and the river foams furiously down the mountain, falling in
billows of lace over the rocks, and the sun shines over all, cold and
pitiless.

"Why, Pearlie Watson, what are you crying for?" Mrs. Francis whispered
severely. Pearl's sobs had disturbed her. Danny lay asleep on Pearl's
knees, and her tears fell fast on his tangled curls.

"I ain't cryin', I ain't cryin' a bit. You leave me alone," Pearl
blubbered rudely, shaking off Mrs Francis's shapely hand.

Mrs. Francis was shocked. What in the world was making Pearl cry?

The next morning Mrs. Francis took out her little red book to enter the
result of her experiment, and sat looking long and earnestly at its
pages. Then she drew a writing pad toward her and wrote an illuminative
article on "Late Hours a Frequent and Fruitful Cause of Irritability in
Children."



CHAPTER VII

"ONE OF MANITOBA'S PROSPEROUS FARMERS"

Mr. Samuel Motherwell was a wealthy farmer who lived a few miles from
Millford. Photographs of Mr. Motherwell's premises may be seen in the
agricultural journals, machinery catalogues, advertisements for woven
wire, etc.--"the home of one of Manitoba's prosperous farmers."

The farm buildings were in good repair; a large red barn with white
trimmings surmounted by a creaking windmill; a long, low machine shed
filled with binders, seeders, disc-harrows--everything that is needed
for the seed-time and harvest and all that lies between; a large stone
house, square and gray, lonely and bare, without a tree or a shrub
around it. Mr. Motherwell did not like vines or trees around a house.
They were apt to attract lightning and bring vermin.

Potatoes grew from the road to the house; and around the front door, as
high as the veranda, weeds flourished in abundance, undisturbed and
unnoticed.

Behind the cookhouse a bed of poppies flamed scarlet against the
general sombreness, and gave a strange touch of colour to the common
grayness. They seemed out of place in the busy farmyard. Everything
else was there for use. Everybody hurried but the poppies; idlers of
precious time, suggestive of slothful sleep, they held up their brazen
faces in careless indifference.

Sam had not planted them--you may be sure of that. Mrs. Motherwell
would tell you of an English girl she had had to work for her that
summer who had brought the seed with her from England, and of how one
day when she sent the girl to weed the onions, she had found her
blubbering and crying over what looked to Mrs. Motherwell nothing more
than weeds. The girl then told her she had brought the seed with her
and planted it there. She was the craziest thing, this Polly Bragg. She
went every night to see them because they were like a "bit of home,"
she said. Mrs. Motherwell would tell you just what a ridiculous
creature she was!

"I never see the beat o' that girl," Mrs. Motherwell would say. "Them
eyes of hers were always red with homesickness, and there was no reason
for it in the world, her gettin' more wages than she ever got before,
and more'n she was earnin', as I often told her. Land! the way that
girl would sing when she had got a letter from home, the queerest songs
ye ever heard:

   Down by the biller there grew a green willer,
   Weeping all night with the bank for a piller.

Well, I had to stop her at last," Mrs. Motherwell would tell you with
an apologetic swallow, which showed that even generous people have to
be firm sometimes in the discharge of unpleasant duties.

"And, mind you," Mrs. Motherwell would go on, with a grieved air, "just
as the busy time came on didn't she up and take the fever--you never
can depend on them English girls--and when the doctor was outside there
in the buggy waitin' for her--he took her to the hospital--I declare if
we didn't find her blubberin' over them poppies, and not a flower on
them no mor'n nothing."

Sam Motherwell and his wife were nominally Presbyterians. At the time
that the Millford Presbyterian Church was built Sam had given
twenty-five dollars toward it, the money having been secured in some
strange way by the wiles of Purvis Thomas, the collector. Everybody was
surprised at Sam's prodigality. The next year, a new collector--for
Purvis Thomas had gone away--called on Mr. Motherwell.

The grain was just beginning to show a slight tinge of gold. It was one
of those cloudless sunshiny days in the beginning of August, when a
faint blue haze lies on the Tiger Hills, and the joy of being alive
swells in the breast of every living thing. The creek, swollen with the
July rain, ran full in its narrow channel, sparkling and swirling over
its gravelly bed, and on the green meadow below the house a herd of
shorthorns contentedly cropped the tender after-grass.

In the farmyard a gigantic turkey-gobbler marched majestically with
arched neck and spreading wings, feeling himself very much the king of
the castle; good-natured ducks puddled contentedly in a trough of dirty
water; pigeons, white winged and graceful, circled and wheeled in the
sunshine; querulous-voiced hens strutted and scratched, and gossiped
openly of mysterious nests hidden away.

Sam stood leaning on a pitchfork in front of the barn door. He was a
stout man of about fifty years of age, with an ox-like face. His
countenance showed the sullen stolidity of a man who spoke little but
listened always, of a man who indulged in suspicious thoughts. He knew
everything about his neighbours, good and bad. He might forget the
good, but never the evil. The tragedies, the sins, the misdeeds of
thirty years ago were as fresh in his memory as the scandal of
yesterday. No man had ever been tempted beyond his strength but Sam
Motherwell knew the manner of his undoing. He extended no mercy to the
fallen; he suggested no excuse for the erring.

The collector made known his errand. Sam became animated at once.

"What?" he cried angrily, "ain't that blamed thing paying yet? I've a
good notion to pull my money out of it and be done with it. What do you
take me for anyway?"

The collector ventured to call his attention to his prosperous
surroundings, and evident wealth.

"That's like you town fellows," he said indignantly. "You never think
of the hired help and twine bills, and what it costs to run a place
like this. I pay every time I go, anyway. There ain't a time that I let
the plate go by me, when I'm there. By gosh! you seem to think I've
money to burn."

The collector departed empty-handed.

The next time Sam went to Millford he was considerably surprised to
have the young minister, the Reverend Hugh Grantley, stop him on the
street and hand him twenty-five dollars.

"I understand, sir, that you wish to withdraw the money that you
invested in the Lord's work," he said as he handed the money to Sam,
whose fingers mechanically closed over the bills as he stared at the
young man.

The Rev. Hugh Grantley was a typical Scotchman, tall and broad
shouldered, with an eye like cold steel. Not many people had
contradicted the Rev. Hugh Grantley, at least to his face. His voice
could be as sweet as the ripple of a mountain stream, or vibrate with
the thunder of the surf that beats upon his own granite cliffs.

"The Lord sends you seed-time and harvest," he said, fixing his level
gray eye on the other man, who somehow avoided his gaze, "has given you
health of body and mind, sends you rain from heaven, makes his sun to
shine upon you, increases your riches from year to year. You have given
Him twenty-five dollars in return and you regret it. Is that so?"

"I don't know that I just said that," the other man stammered. "I don't
see no need of these fine churches and paid preachers. It isn't them as
goes to church most that is the best."

"Oh, I see," the young man said, "you would prefer to give your money
for the relief of the poor, for hospitals or children's homes, or
something like that. Is that so?"

"I don't know as there's any reason for me givin' up the money I work
hard for." Sam was touched on a vital spot.

"Well, I'll tell you the reason," the minister said; his voice was no
louder, but it fell with a sledge-hammer emphasis. He moved a step
nearer his companion, and some way caught and held his wavering vision.
"God owns one-tenth of all that stuff you call your own. You have
cheated Him out of His part all these years, and He has carried you
over from year to year, hoping that you will pay up without harsh
proceedings. You are a rich man in this world's goods, but your soul is
lean and hungry and naked. Selfishness and greed have blinded your
eyes. If you could see what a contemptible, good-for-nothing creature
you are in God's sight, you would call on the hills to fall on you.
Why, man, I'd rather take my chances with the gambler, the felon, the
drunkard, than with you. They may have fallen in a moment of strong
temptation; but you are a respectable man merely because it costs money
to be otherwise. The Lord can do without your money. Do not think for a
minute that God's work will not go on. 'He shall have dominion from sea
to sea,' but what of you? You shall lie down and die like the dog. You
shall go out into outer darkness. The world will not be one bit better
because you have passed through it."

Sam was incoherent with rage. "See here," he sputtered, "what do you
know about it? I pay my debts. Everybody knows that."

"Hold on, hold on," the young man said gently, "you pay the debts that
the law compels you to pay. You have to pay your hired help and your
threshing bills, and all that, because you would be 'sued' if you
didn't. There is one debt that is left to a man's honour, the debt he
owes to God, and to the poor and the needy. Do you pay that debt?"

"Well, you'll never get a cent out of me anyway. You have a mighty poor
way of asking for money--maybe if you had taken me the right way you
might have got some."

"Excuse me, Mr. Motherwell," the young man replied with unaffected good
humour, "I did not ask you for money at all. I gave you back what you
did give. No member of our congregation will ask you for any, though
there may come a time when you will ask us to take it."

Sam Motherwell broke into a scornful laugh, and, turning away, went
angrily down the street. The fact that the minister had given him back
his money was a severe shock to some of his deep-rooted opinions. He
had always regarded churches as greedy institutions, looking and
begging for money from everyone; ministers as parasites on society,
living without honest labour, preying on the working man. Sam's
favourite story was the old one about the woman whose child got a coin
stuck in its throat. She did not send for the doctor, but for the
minister! Sam had always seen considerable truth in this story and had
told it to every minister he had met.

He told himself now that he was glad to get back the money, twenty-five
dollars was not picked up every day. But he was not glad. The very
touch of the bills was distasteful to him!

He did not tell his wife of the occurrence. Nor did he put the money in
the black bag, where their money was always kept in the bureau drawer,
safe under lock and key. He could not do that without telling his wife
where it came from. So he shoved it carelessly into the pocket of the
light overcoat that he was wearing. Sam Motherwell was not a careless
man about money, but the possession of this particular twenty-five
dollars gave him no pleasure.



CHAPTER VIII

THE OTHER DOCTOR

The young minister went down the street with a thoughtful face.

"I wonder if I did right," he was thinking. "It is a hard thing to talk
that way to a human being, and yet it seems to be the only thing to do.
Oh, what it would mean for God's work if all these rich farmers were
saved from their insatiable greed."

He turned into Dr. Clay's office.

"Oh, Clay!" he burst out when he had answered the young man's friendly
greeting, "it is an awful thing to lay open a mean man's meanness, and
tell him the plain truth about himself."

"It is, indeed," the young doctor answered, "but perhaps it is heroic
treatment your man needed, for I would infer that you have been reading
the law to someone. Who was it?"

"Sam Motherwell," the minister answered.

"Well, you had a good subject," the doctor said gravely. "For
aggravated greed, and fatty degeneration of the conscience, Mr.
Motherwell is certainly a wonder. When that poor English girl took the
fever out here, it was hard to convince Sam that she was really sick.
'Look at them red cheeks of hers,' he said to me, 'and her ears ain't
cold, and her eyes is bright as ever. She's just lookin' for a rest, I
think, if you wuz to ask me.'"

"How did you convince him?"

"I told him the girl would have to have a trained nurse, and would be
sick probably six weeks, and then they couldn't get the poor girl off
their hands quick enough. 'I don't want that girl dyin' round here,'
Sam said."

"Is Mrs. Motherwell as close as he is?" the minister asked after a
pause.

"Some say worse," the doctor replied, "but I don't believe it. She
can't be."

The minister's face was troubled. "I wish I knew what to do for them,"
he said sadly.

"I'll tell you something you can do for me," the doctor said sitting up
straight, "or at least something you may try to do."

"What is it?" the minister asked.

"Devise some method, suggest some course of treatment, whereby my tried
and trusty horse Pleurisy will cease to look so much like a saw-horse.
I'm afraid the Humane Society will get after me."

The minister laughed.

Everybody knew Dr. Clay's horse; there was no danger of mistaking him
for any other. He was tall and lean and gaunt. The doctor had bought
him believing him to be in poor condition, which good food and good
care would remedy. But as the months went by, in spite of all the
doctor could do, Pleurisy remained the same, eating everything the
doctor brought him, and looking for more, but showing no improvement.

"I've tried everything except egg-nog," the doctor went on, "and pink
pills, and I would like to turn over the responsibility to someone
else. I think perhaps his trouble must be mental--some gnawing sorrow
that keeps him awake at night. I don't mind driving Pleurisy where
people know me and know that I do feed him occasionally, but it is
disconcerting when I meet strangers to have kind-looking old ladies
shake their heads at me. I know what they're thinking, and I believe
Pleurisy really enjoys it, and then when I drive past a farmhouse to
see the whole family run out and hold their sides is not a pleasure.
Talk about scattering sunshine! Pleurisy leaves a trail of merriment
wherever he goes."

"What difference does it make what people think when your conscience is
clear. You do feed your horse, you feed him well, so what's the odds,"
inquired the Rev. Hugh Grantley, son of granite, child of the heather,
looking with lifted brows at his friend.

"Oh, there you go!" the doctor said smiling. "That's the shorter
catechism coming out in you--that Scotch complacency is the thing I
wish I had, but I can't help feeling like a rogue, a cheat, an
oppressor of the helpless, when I look at Pleurisy."

"Horace," the minister said kindly, with his level gray eyes fixed
thoughtfully on his friend's handsome face, "a man in either your
calling or mine has no right to ask himself how he feels. Don't feel
your own pulse too much. It is disquieting. It is for us to go on,
never faltering and never looking behind."

"In other words, to make good, and never mind the fans," the doctor
smiled. Then he became serious. "But Grantley, I am not always so sure
I am right as you are. You see a sinner is always a sinner and in
danger of damnation, for which there is but one cure, but a sick man
may have quinsy or he may have diphtheria, and the treatment is
different. But oh! Grantley, I wish I had that Scotch-gray confidence
in myself that you have. If you were a doctor you would tell a man he
had typhoid, and he'd proceed to have it, even if he had only set out
to have an ingrowing toe-nail. But my patients have a decided will of
their own. There's young Ab Cowan--they sent for me last night to go
out to see him. He has a bad attack of quinsy, but it is the strangest
case I ever saw."

The gaiety had died out of the young man's face, and he looked
perplexed and anxious.

"I do wish the old doctor and I were on speaking terms," he concluded.

"And are you not?" the minister asked in surprise. "Miss Barner told me
that you had been very kind--and I thought--" There was a flush on the
minister's face, and he hesitated.

"Oh, Miss Barner and I are the best of friends," the doctor said. "I
say, Grantley, hasn't that little girl had one lonely life, and isn't
she the brave little soul!"

The minister was silent, all but his eyes.

The doctor went on:

"'Who hath sorrow, who hath woe, who hath redness of eyes?' Solomon,
wasn't it, who said it was 'they who tarry long at the wine'? I think
he should have added 'those who wait at home.' Don't you think she is a
remarkably beautiful girl, Grantley?" he asked abruptly.

"I do, indeed," the minister answered, giving his friend a searching
glance. "But how about the doctor, why will he not speak to you?" He
was glad of a chance to change the subject.

"I suppose the old man's pride is hurt every time he sees me. He
evidently thinks he is all the medical aid they need around here. But I
do wish he would come with me to see this young Cowan; it's the most
puzzling case I've ever met. There are times, Grantley, when I think I
should be following the plough."

The minister looked at him thoughtfully.

"A man can only do his best, Horace," he said kindly.



CHAPTER IX

THE LIVE WIRE

"Who is this young gentleman or lady?" Dr. Clay asked of Pearlie Watson
one day when he met her wheeling a baby carriage with an abnormally fat
baby in it.

"This is the Czar of all the Rooshia," Pearl answered gravely, "and I'm
his body-guard."

The doctor's face showed no surprise as he stepped back to get a better
look at the czar, who began to squirm at the delay.

"See the green plush on his kerridge," Pearl said proudly, "and every
stitch he has on is hand-made, and was did for him, too, and he's fed
every three hours, rain or shine, hit or miss."

"Think of that!" the doctor exclaimed with emphasis, "and yet some
people tell us that the Czar has a hard time of it."

Pearl drew a step nearer, moving the carriage up and down rapidly to
appease the wrath of the czar, who was expressing his disapproval in a
very lumpy cry.

"I'm just 'tendin', you know, about him bein' the czar," she said
confidentially. "You see, I mind him every day, and that's the way I
play. Maudie Ducker said one day I never had no time to play cos we wuz
so pore, and that started me. It's a lovely game."

The doctor nodded. He knew something of "'tendin' games" too.

"I have to taste everything he eats, for fear of Paris green," Pearl
went on, speaking now in the loud official tone of the body-guard. "I
have to stand between him and the howlin' mob thirstin' for his gore."

"He seems to howl more than the mob," the doctor said smiling.

"He's afraid we're plottin'," Pearl whispered. "Can't trust no one. He
ain't howlin'. That's his natcheral voice when he's talkin' Rooshan. He
don't know one English word, only 'Goo!' But he'll say that every time.
See now. How is a precious luvvy-duvvy? See the pitty man, pull um baby
toofin!"

At which the czar, secure in his toothlessness, rippled his fat face
into dimples, and triumphantly brought forth a whole succession of
"goos."

"Ain't he a peach?" Pearlie said with pride. "Some kids won't show off
worth a cent when ye want them to, but he'll say 'goo' if you even
nudge him. His mother thinks 'goo' is awful childish, and she is at him
all the time to say 'Daddy-dinger,' but he never lets on he hears her.
Say, doctor"--Pearlie's face was troubled--"what do you think of his
looks? Just between ourselves. Hasn't he a fine little nub of a nose?
Do you see anything about him to make his mother cry?"

The doctor looked critically at the czar, who returned his gaze with
stolid indifference.

"I never saw a more perfect nub on any nose," he answered honestly.
"He's a fine big boy, and his mother should be proud of him."

"There now, what did I tell you!" Pearlie cried delightedly, nodding
her head at an imaginary audience.

"That's what I always say to his mother, but she's so tuk up with
pictures of pretty kids with big eyes and curly hair, she don't seem to
be able to get used to him. She never says his nose is a pug, but she
says it's 'different,' and his voice is not what she wanted. He cries
lumpy, I know, but his goos are all right. The kid in the book she is
readin' could say 'Daddy-dinger' before he was as old as the czar is,
and it's awful hard on her. You see, he can't pat-a-cake, or
this-little-pig-went-to-market, or wave a bye-bye or nothin'. I never
told her what Danny could do when he was this age. But I am workin'
hard to get him to say 'Daddy-dinger.' She has her heart set on that.
Well, I must go on now."

The doctor lifted his hat, and the imperial carriage moved on.

She had gone a short distance when she remembered something:

"I'll let you know when he says it, doc!" she shouted.

"All right, don't forget," he smiled back.

When Pearlie turned the next corner she met Maudie Ducker. Maudie
Ducker had on a new plaid dress with velvet trimming, and Maudie knew
it.

"Is that your Sunday dress," she asked Pearl, looking critically at
Pearlie's faded little brown winsey.

"My, no!" Pearlie answered cheerfully. "This is just my morning dress.
I wear my blue satting in the afternoon, and on Sundays, my purple
velvet with the watter-plait, and basque-yoke of tartaric plaid,
garnished with lace. Yours is a nice little plain dress. That stuff
fades though; ma lined a quilt for the boys' bed with it and it faded
gray."

Maudie Ducker was a "perfect little lady." Her mother often said so;
Maudie could not bear to sit near a child in school who had on a dirty
pinafore or ragged clothes, and the number of days that she could wear
a pinafore without its showing one trace of stain was simply wonderful!
Maudie had two dolls which she never played with. They were propped up
against the legs of the parlour table. Maudie could play the "Java
March" and "Mary's Pet Waltz" on the piano. She always spoke in a
hushed vox tremulo, and never played any rough games. She could not
bear to touch a baby, because it might put a sticky little finger on
her pinafore. All of which goes to show what a perfect little lady she
was.

When Maudie made inquiries of Pearl Watson as to her Sabbath-day
attire, her motives were more kindly than Pearl thought. Maudie's
mother was giving her a party. Hitherto the guests upon such occasions
had been selected with great care, and with respect to social standing,
and blue china, and correct enunciation. This time they were selected
with greater care, but with respect to their fathers' politics. All
conservatives and undecided voters' children were included. The
fight-to-a-finish-for-the-grand-old-party Reformers were tabooed.

Algernon Evans, otherwise known as the Czar of all the Rooshias, only
son of J. H. Evans, editor of the Millford Mercury, could not be
overlooked. Hence the reason for asking Pearl Watson, his body-guard.

Millford had two weekly newspapers--one Conservative in its tendencies
and the other one Reform. Between them there existed a feud, long
standing, unquenchable, constant. It went with the printing press, the
subscription list and the good-will of the former owner, when the paper
changed hands.

The feud was discernible in the local news as well as in the
editorials. In the Reform paper, which was edited at the time of which
we write by a Tipperary man named McSorley, you might read of a
distressing accident which befell one Simon Henry (also a Reformer),
while that great and good man was abroad upon an errand of mercy,
trying to induce a drunken man to go quietly to his home and family.
Mr. Henry was eulogised for his kind act, and regret was expressed that
Mr. Henry should have met with such rough usage while endeavouring to
hold out a helping hand to one unfortunate enough to be held in the
demon chains of intemperance.

In the Conservative paper the following appeared:

   We regret to hear that Simon Henry, secretary of the
   Young Liberal Club, got mixed up in a drunken brawl
   last evening and as a result will be confined to his
   house for a few days. We trust his injuries are not
   serious, as his services are indispensable to his
   party in the coming campaign.

Reports of concerts, weddings, even deaths, were tinged with partyism.
When Daniel Grover, grand old Conservative war-horse, was gathered to
his fathers at the ripe age of eighty-seven years, the Reform paper
said that Mr. Grover's death was not entirely unexpected, as his health
had been failing for some time, the deceased having passed his
seventieth birthday.

McSorley, the Liberal editor, being an Irishman, was not without
humour, but Evans, the other one, revelled in it. He was like the
little boys who stick pins in frogs, not that they bear the frogs any
ill-will, but for the fun of seeing them jump. He would sit half the
night over his political editorials, smiling grimly to himself, and
when he threw himself back in his chair and laughed like a boy the
knife was turned in someone!

One day Mr. James Ducker, lately retired farmer, sometimes insurance
agent, read in the Winnipeg Telegram that his friend the Honourable
Thomas Snider had chaperoned an Elk party to St. Paul. Mr. Ducker had
but a hazy idea of the duties of a chaperon, but he liked the sound of
it, and it set him thinking. He remembered when Tom Snider had entered
politics with a decayed reputation, a large whiskey bill, and about
$2.20 in cash. Now he rode in a private car, and had a suite of rooms
at the Empire, and the papers often spoke of him as "mine host" Snider.
Mr. Ducker turned over the paper and read that the genial Thomas had
replied in a very happy manner to a toast at the Elks' banquet.
Whereupon Mr. Ducker became wrapped in deep thought, and during this
passive period he distinctly heard his country's call! The call came in
these words: "If Tom Snider can do it, why not me?"

The idea took hold of him. He began to brush his hair artfully over the
bald spot. He made strange faces at his mirror, wondering which side of
his face would be the best to have photographed for his handbills. He
saw himself like Cincinnatus of old called from the plough to the
Senate, but he told himself there could not have been as good a thing
in it then as there is now, or Cincinnatus would not have come back to
the steers.

Mr. Ducker's social qualities developed amazingly. He courted his
neighbours assiduously, sending presents from his garden, stopping to
have protracted conversations with men whom he had known but slightly
before. Every man whose name was on the voters' list began to have a
new significance for him.

There was one man whom he feared--that was Evans, editor of the
Conservative paper. Sometimes when his fancy painted for him a gay and
alluring picture of carrying "the proud old Conservative banner that
has suffered defeat, but, thank God! never disgrace in the face of the
foe" (quotation from speech Mr. Ducker had prepared), sometimes he
would in the midst of the most glowing and glorious passages
inadvertently think of Evans, and it gave him goose-flesh. Mr. Ducker
had lived in and around Millford for some time. So had Evans, and Evans
had a most treacherous memory. You could not depend on him to forget
anything!

When Evans was friendly with him, Mr. Ducker's hopes ran high, but when
he caught Evans looking at him with that boyish smile of his twinkling
in his eyes, the vision of chaperoning an Elk party to St. Paul became
very shadowy indeed.

Mr. Ducker tried diplomacy. He withdrew his insurance advertisement
from McSorley's paper, and doubled his space in Evans's, paying in
advance. He watched the trains for visitors and reported them to Evans.
He wrote breezy little local briefs in his own light cow-like way for
Evans's paper.

But Mr. Ducker's journalistic fervour received a serious set back one
day. He rushed into the Mercury office just as the paper went to press
with the news that old Mrs. Williamson had at last winged her somewhat
delayed flight. Evans thanked him with some cordiality for letting him
know in time to make a note of it, and asked him to go around to Mrs.
Williamson's home and find out a few facts for the obituary.

Mr. Ducker did so with great cheerfulness, rather out of keeping with
the nature of his visit. He felt that his way was growing brighter.
When he reached the old lady's home he was received with all courtesy
by her slow-spoken son. Mr. Ducker bristled with importance as he made
known his errand, in a neat speech, in which official dignity and
sympathy were artistically blended. "The young may die, but the old
must die," he reminded Mr. Williamson as he produced his pencil and
tablet. Mr. Williamson gave a detailed account of his mother's early
life, marriages first and second, and located all her children with
painstaking accuracy. "Left to mourn her loss," Mr. Ducker wrote.

"And the cause of her death?" Mr. Ducker inquired gently, "general
breaking down of the system, I suppose?" with his pencil poised in the
air.

Mr. Williamson knit his shaggy brows.

"Well, I wouldn't say too much about mother's death if I were you.
Stick to her birth, and the date she joined the church, and her
marriages--they're sure. But mother's death is a little uncertain, just
yet."

A toothless chuckle came from the adjoining room. Mrs. Williamson had
been an interested listener to the conversation.

"Order my coffin, Ducker, on your way down, but never mind the flowers,
they might not keep," she shrilled after him as he beat a hasty retreat.

When Mr. Ducker, crestfallen and humiliated, re-entered the Mercury
office a few moments later, he was watched by two twinkling Irish eyes,
that danced with unholy merriment at that good man's discomfiture. They
belonged to Ignatius Benedicto McSorley, the editor of the other paper.

But Mrs. Ducker was hopeful. A friend of hers in Winnipeg had already a
house in view for them, and Mrs. Ducker had decided the church they
would attend when the session opened, and what day she would have, and
many other important things that it is well to have one's mind made up
on and not leave to the last. Maudie Ducker had been taken into the
secret, and began to feel sorry for the other little girls whose papas
were contented to let them live always in such a pokey little place as
Millford. Maudie also began to dream dreams of sweeping in upon the
Millford people in flowing robes and waving plumes and sparkling
diamonds, in a gorgeous red automobile. Wilford Ducker only of the
Ducker family was not taken into the secret. He was too young, his
mother said, to understand the change.

The nomination day was drawing near, which had something to do with the
date of Maudie Ducker's party. Mrs. Ducker told Maudie they must invite
the czar and Pearl Watson, though, of course, she did not say the czar.
She said Algernon Evans and that little Watson girl. Maudie, being a
perfect little lady objected to Pearl Watson on account of her scanty
wardrobe, and to the czar's moist little hands; but Mrs. Ducker,
knowing that the czar's father was their long suit, stood firm.

Mr. Ducker had said to her that very morning, rubbing his hands, and
speaking in the conspirator's voice: "We must leave no stone unturned.
This is the time of seed-sowing, my dear. We must pull every wire."

The czar was a wire, therefore they proceeded to pull him. They did not
know he was a live wire until later.

Pearl Watson's delight at being asked to a real party knew no bounds.
Maudie need not have worried about Pearl's appearing at the feast
without the festal robe. The dress that Camilla had made for her was
just waiting for such an occasion to air its loveliness. Anything that
was needed to complete her toilet was supplied by her kind-hearted
mistress, the czar's mother.

But Mrs. Evans stood looking wistfully after her only son as Pearl
wheeled him gaily down the walk. He was beautifully dressed in the
finest of mull and valenciennes; his carriage was the loveliest they
could buy; Pearl in her neat hat and dress was a little nurse girl to
be proud of. But Mrs. Evans's pretty face was troubled. She was
thinking of the pretty baby pictures in the magazines, and Algernon was
so--different! And his nose was--strange, too, and she had massaged it
so carefully, too, and when, oh when, would he say "Daddy-dinger!"

But Algeron was not envious of any other baby's beauty that afternoon,
nor worried about his nose either as he bumped up and down in his
carriage in glad good humour, and delivered full-sized gurgling "goos"
at every person he met, even throwing them along the street in the
prodigality of his heart, as he waved his fat hands and thumped his
heavy little heels.

Pearl held her head high and was very much the body-guard as she lifted
the weighty ruler to the ground. Mrs. Ducker ran down the steps and
kissed the czar ostentatiously, pouring out such a volume of admiring
and endearing epithets that Pearl stood in bewilderment, wondering why
she had never heard of this before. Mrs. Ducker carried the czar into
the house, Pearl following with one eye shut, which was her way of
expressing perplexity.

Two little girls in very fluffy short skirts, sat demurely in the
hammock, keeping their dresses clean and wondering if there would be
ice-cream. Within doors Maudie worried out the "Java March" on the
piano, to a dozen or more patient little listeners. On the lawn several
little girls played croquet. There were no boys at the party. Wilford
was going to have the boys--that is, the Conservative boys the next
day. Mrs. Ducker did not believe in co-education. Boys are so rough,
except Wilford. He had been so carefully brought up, he was not rough
at all. He stood awkwardly by the gate watching the girls play croquet.
He had been left without a station at his own request. Patsey Watson
rode by on a dray wagon, dirty and jolly. Wilford called to him
furtively, but Patsey was busy holding on and did not hear him. Wilford
sighed heavily. Down at the tracks a freight train shunted and
shuddered. Not a boy was in sight. He knew why. The farmers were
loading cattle cars.

Pearl went around to the side lawn where the girls were playing
croquet, holding the czar's hand tightly.

"What are you playin'?" she asked.

They told her.

"Can you play it?" Mildred Bates asked.

"I guess I can," Pearl said modestly. "But I'm always too busy for
games like that!"

"Maudie Ducker says you never play," Mildred Bates said with pity in
her voice.

"Maudie Ducker is away off there," Pearl answered with dignity. "I have
more fun in one day than Maudie Ducker'll ever have if she lives to be
as old as Melchesidick, and it's not this frowsy
standin'-round-doin'-nothin' that you kids call fun either."

"Tell us about it, Pearl," they shouted eagerly. Pearl's stories had a
charm.

"Well," Pearl began, "ye know I wash Mrs. Evans's dishes every day, and
lovely ones they are, too, all pink and gold with dinky little ivy
leaves crawlin' out over the edges of the cups. I play I am at the
seashore and the tide is comin' in o'er and o'er the sand and 'round
and 'round the land, far as eye can see--that's out of a book. I put
all the dishes into the big dish pan, and I pertend the tide is risin'
on them, though it's just me pourin' on the water. The cups are the
boys and the saucers are the girls, the plates are the fathers and
mothers and the butter chips are the babies. Then I rush in to save
them, but not until they cry 'Lord save us, we perish!' Of course, I
yell it for them, good and loud too--people don't just squawk at a time
like that--it often scares Mrs. Evans even yet. I save the babies
first, I slush them around to clean them, but they never notice that,
and I stand them up high and dry in the drip-pan. Then I go in after
the girls, and they quiet down the babies in the drip-pan; and then the
mothers I bring out, and the boys and the fathers. Sometimes some of
the men make a dash out before the women, but you bet I lay them back
in a hurry. Then I set the ocean back on the stove, and I rub the
babies to get their blood circlin' again, and I get them all put to bed
on the second shelf and they soon forget they were so near death's
door."

Mary Ducker had finished the "Java March" and "Mary's Pet Waltz," and
had joined the interested group on the lawn and now stood listening in
dull wonder.

"I rub them all and shine them well," Pearl went on, "and get them all
packed off home into the china cupboard, every man jack o' them singin'
'Are we yet alive and see each other's face,' Mrs. Evans sings it for
them when she's there.

"Then I get the vegetable dishes and bowls and silverware and all that,
and that's an excursion, and they're all drunk, not a sober man on
board. They sing 'Sooper up old boys,' 'We won't go home till mornin'
and all that, and crash! a cry bursts from every soul on board. They
have struck upon a rock and are going down! Water pours in at the
gunnel (that's just me with more water and soap, you know), but I ain't
sorry for them, for they're all old enough to know that 'wine is a
mocker, strong drink is ragin', and whosoever is deceived thereby is
not wise.' But when the crash comes and the swellin' waters burst in
they get sober pret' quick and come rushin' up on deck with pale faces
to see what's wrong, and I've often seen a big bowl whirl 'round and
'round kind o' dizzy and say 'woe is me!' and sink to the bottom.  Mrs.
Evans told me that. Anyway I do save them at last, when they see what
whiskey is doin' for them. I rub them all up and send them home. The
steel knives--they're the worst of all. But though they're black and
stained with sin, they're still our brothers, and so we give them the
gold cure--that's the bath-brick, and they make a fresh start.

"When I sweep the floor I pertend I'm the army of the Lord that comes
to clear the way from dust and sin, let the King of Glory in. Under the
stove the hordes of sin are awful thick, they love darkness rather than
light, because their deeds are evil! But I say the 'sword of the Lord
and of Gideon!' and let them have it! Sometimes I pertend I'm the woman
that lost the piece of silver and I sweep the house diligently till I
find it, and once Mrs. Evans did put ten cents in a corner just for fun
for me, and I never know when she's goin' to do something like that."

Here Maudie Ducker, who had been listening with growing wonder
interrupted Pearl with the cry of "Oh, here's pa and Mr. Evans. They're
going to take our pictures!"

The little girls were immediately roused out of the spell that
Pearlie's story had put upon them, and began to group themselves under
the trees, arranging their little skirts and frills.

The czar had toddled on his uncertain little fat legs around to the
back door, for he had caught sight of a red head which he knew and
liked very much. It belonged to Mary McSorley, the eldest of the
McSorley family, who had brought over to Mrs. Ducker the extra two
quarts of milk which Mrs. Ducker had ordered for the occasion.

Mary sat on the back step until Mrs. Ducker should find time to empty
her pitcher. Mary was strictly an outsider. Mary's father was a
Reformer. He ran the opposition paper to dear Mr. Evans. Mary was never
well dressed, partly accounted for by the fact that the angels had
visited the McSorley home so often. Therefore, for these reasons, Mary
sat on the back step, a rank outsider.

The czar, who knew nothing of these things, began to "goo" as soon as
he saw her. Mary reached out her arms. The czar stumbled into them and
Mary fell to kissing his bald head. She felt more at home with a baby
in her arms.

It was at this unfortunate moment that Mr. Ducker and Mr. Evans came
around to the rear of the house. Mr. Evans was beginning to think
rather more favourably of Mr. Ducker, as the prospective Conservative
member. He might do all right--there are plenty worse--he has no
brains--but that does not matter. What need has a man of brains when he
goes into politics? Brainy men make the trouble. The Grits made that
mistake once, elected a brainy man, and they have had no peace since.

Mr. Ducker had adroitly drawn the conversation to a general discussion
of children. He knew that Mr. Evans's weak point was his little son
Algernon.

"That's a clever looking little chap of yours, Evans," he had remarked
carelessly as they came up the street. (Mr. Ducker had never seen the
czar closely.) "My wife was just saying the other day that he has a
wonderful forehead for a little fellow."

"He has," the other man said smiling, not at all displeased. "It runs
clear down to his neck!"

"He can hardly help being clever if there's anything in heredity," Mr.
Ducker went on with infinite tact, feeling his rainbow dreams of
responding to toasts at Elk banquets drawing nearer and nearer.

Then the Evil Genius of the House of Ducker awoke from his slumber, sat
up and took notice! The house that the friend in Winnipeg had selected
for them fell into irreparable ruins! Poor Maudie's automobile vanished
at a touch. The rosy dreams of Cincinnatus, and of carrying the grand
old Conservative banner in the face of the foe turned to clay and ashes!

They turned the corner, and came upon Mary McSorley who sat on the back
step with the czar in her arms. Mary's head was hidden as she kissed
the czar's fat neck, and in the general babel of voices, within and
without, she did not hear them coming.

"Speaking about heredity," Mr. Ducker said suavely, speaking in a low
voice, and looking at whom he supposed to be the latest McSorley, "it
looks as if there must be something in it over there. Isn't that
McSorley over again? Low forehead, pug nose, bulldog tendencies." Mr.
Ducker was something of a phrenologist, and went blithely on to his own
destruction.

"Now the girl is rather pleasant looking, and some of the others are
not bad at all. But this one is surely a regular little Mickey. I
believe a person would be safe in saying that he would not grow up a
Presbyterian."--Mr. Evans was the worshipful Grand Master of the Loyal
Orange Lodge, and well up in the Black, and this remark Mr. Ducker
thought he would appreciate.

"McSorley will never be dead while this little fellow lives," Mr.
Ducker laughed merrily, rubbing his hands.

The czar looked up and saw his father. Perhaps he understood what had
been said, and saw the hurt in his father's face and longed to heal him
of it; perhaps the time had come when he should forever break the
goo-goo bonds that had lain upon his speech. He wriggled off Mary's
knee, and toddling uncertainly across the grass with a mighty mental
conflict in his pudgy little face, held out his dimpled arms with a
glad cry of "Daddy-dinger!"

That evening while Mrs. Ducker and Maudie were busy fanning Mr. Ducker
and putting wet towels on his head, Mr. Evans sat down to write.

"Some more of that tiresome election stuff, John," his pretty little
wife said in disappointment, as she proudly rocked the emancipated czar
to sleep.

"Yes, dear, it is election stuff, but it is not a bit tiresome," he
answered smiling, as he kissed her tenderly. Several times during the
evening, and into the night, she heard him laugh his happy boyish laugh.

James Ducker did not get the nomination.



CHAPTER X

THE BUTCHER-RIDE

Patsey Watson waited on the corner of the street. It was in the early
morning and Patsey's face bore marks of a recent and mighty conflict
with soap and water. Patsey looked apprehensively every now and then at
his home; his mother might emerge any minute and insist on his wearing
a coat; his mother could be very tiresome that way sometimes.

It seemed long this morning to wait for the butcher, but the only way
to be sure of a ride was to be on the spot. Sometimes there were delays
in getting away from home. Getting on a coat was one; finding a hat was
the worst of all. Since Bugsey got the nail in his foot and could not
go out the hat question was easier. The hat was still hard to find, but
not impossible.

Wilford Ducker came along. Wilford had just had a dose of electric oil
artfully concealed in a cup of tea, and he felt desperate. His mother
had often told him not to play with any of the Watson boys, they were
so rough and unladylike in their manner. Perhaps that was why Wilford
came over at once to Patsey. Patsey did not care for Wilford Ducker
even if he did live in a big house with screen doors on it. Mind you,
he did not wear braces yet, only a waist with white buttons on it, and
him seven! Patsey's manner was cold.

"You goin' fer butcher-ride?" Wilford asked.

"Yep," Patsey answered with very little warmth.

"Say, Pat, lemme go," Wilford coaxed.

"Nope," Patsey replied, indifferently.

"Aw, do, Pat, won't cher?"

Mrs. Ducker had been very particular about Wilford's enunciation. Once
she dismissed a servant for dropping her final g's. Mrs. Ducker
considered it more serious to drop a final g than a dinner plate. She
often spoke of how particular she was. She said she had insisted on
correct enunciation from the first. So Wilford said again:

"Aw, do, Pat, won't cher?"

Patsey looked carelessly down the street and began to sing:

   How much wood would a wood-chuck chuck
   If a wood-chuck could chuck wood.

"What cher take fer butcher-ride, Pat?" Wilford asked.

"What cher got?"

Patsey had stopped singing, but still beat time with his foot to the
imaginary music.

Wilford produced a jack-knife in very good repair.

Patsey stopped beating time, though only for an instant. It does not do
to be too keen.

"It's a good un," Wilford said with pride. "It's a Rodger, mind ye--two
blades."

"Name yer price," Patsey condescended, after a deliberate examination.

"Lemme ride all week, ord'rin' and deliv'rin'."

"Not much, I won't," Patsey declared stoutly. "You can ride three days
for it."

Wilford began to whimper, but just then the butcher cart whirled around
the corner.

Wilford ran toward it. Patsey held the knife.

The butcher stopped and let Wilford mount. It was all one to the
butcher. He knew he usually got a boy at this corner.

Patsey ran after the butcher cart. He had caught sight of someone whom
Wilford had not yet noticed. It was Mrs. Ducker. Mrs. Ducker had been
down the street ordering a crate of pears. Mrs. Ducker was just as
particular about pears as she was about final g's, so she had gone
herself to select them.

When she saw Wilford, her son, riding with the butcher--well, really,
she could not have told the sensation it gave her. Wilford could not
have told, either, just how he felt when he saw his mother. But both
Mrs. Ducker and her son had a distinct sensation when they met that
morning.

She called Wilford, and he came. No sooner had he left his seat than
Patsey Watson took his place. Wilford dared not ask for the return of
the knife: his mother would know that he had had dealings with Patsey
Watson, and his account at the maternal bank was already overdrawn.

Mrs. Ducker was more sorrowful than angry.

"Wilford!" she said with great dignity, regarding the downcast little
boy with exaggerated scorn, "and you a Ducker!"

She escorted the fallen Ducker sadly homeward, but, oh, so glad that
she had saved him from the corroding influence of the butcher boy.

While Wilford Ducker was unfastening the china buttons on his waist,
preparatory to a season of rest and retirement, that he might the
better ponder upon the sins of disobedience and evil associations,
Patsey Watson was opening and shutting his new knife proudly.

"It was easy done," he was saying to himself. "I'm kinder sorry I jewed
him down now. Might as well ha' let him have the week. Sure, there's no
luck in being mane."



CHAPTER XI

HOW PEARL WATSON WIPED OUT THE STAIN

Mrs. Motherwell felt bitterly grieved with Polly for failing her just
when she needed her the most; "after me keepin' her and puttin' up with
her all summer," she said. She began to wonder where she could secure
help. Then she had an inspiration!

The Watsons still owed ten dollars on the caboose. The eldest Watson
girl was big enough to work. They would get her. And get ten dollars'
worth of work out of her if they could.

The next Saturday night John Watson announced to his family that old
Sam Motherwell wanted Pearlie to go out and work off the caboose debt.

Mrs. Watson cried, "God help us!" and threw her apron over her head.

"Who'll keep the dandrew out of me hair?" Mary said tearfully, "if
Pearlie goes away?"

"Who'll make me remember to spit on me warts?" Bugsey asked.

"Who'll keep house when ma goes to wash?" wee Tommy wailed dismally.

Danny's grievance could not be expressed in words. He buried his tousy
head in Pearl's apron, and Pearl saw at once that her whole house were
about to be submerged in tears, idle tears.

"Stop your bleatin', all of yez!" she commanded in her most
authoritative voice. "I will go!" she said, with blazing eyes. "I will
go, I will wipe the stain off me house once and forever!" waving her
arm dramatically toward the caboose which formed the sleeping apartment
for the boys. "To die, to die for those we love is nobler far than wear
a crown!" Pearl had attended the Queen Esther cantata the winter
before. She knew now how poor Esther felt.

On the following Monday afternoon everything was ready for Pearl's
departure. Her small supply of clothing was washed and ironed and
neatly packed in a bird-cage. It was Mary who thought of the bird-cage
"sittin' down there in the cellar doin' nothin', and with a handle on
it, too." Mary was getting to be almost as smart as Pearl to think of
things.

Pearl had bidden good-bye to them all and was walking to the door when
her mother called her back to repeat her parting instructions.

"Now, mind, Pearlie dear, not to be pickin' up wid strangers, and
speakin' to people ye don't know, and don't be showin' yer money or
makin' change wid anyone."

Pearl was not likely to disobey the last injunction. She had seventeen
cents in money, ten cents of which Teddy had given her, and the
remaining seven cents had come in under the heading of small sums, from
the other members of the family.

She was a pathetic little figure in her brown and white checked dress,
with her worldly effects in the bird-cage, as she left the shelter of
her father's roof and went forth into the untried world. She went over
to Mrs. Francis to say good-bye to her and to Camilla.

Mrs. Francis was much pleased with Pearl's spirit of independence and
spoke beautifully of the opportunities for service which would open for
her.

"You must keep a diary, Pearl," she said enthusiastically. "Set down in
it all you see and feel. You will have such splendid opportunities for
observing plant and animal life--the smallest little insect is
wonderfully interesting. I will be so anxious to hear how you are
impressed with the great green world of Out of Doors! Take care of your
health, too, Pearl; see that your room is ventilated."

While Mrs. Francis elaborated on the elements of proper living, Camilla
in the kitchen had opened the little bundle in the cage, and put into
it a pair of stockings and two or three handkerchiefs, then she slipped
in a little purse containing ten shining ten-cent pieces, and an
orange. She arranged the bundle to look just as it did before, so that
she would not have to meet Pearl's gratitude.

Camilla hastily set the kettle to boil, and began to lay the table. She
could hear the velvety tones of Mrs. Francis's voice in the library.

"Mrs. Francis speaks a strange language," she said, smiling to herself,
"but it can be translated into bread and butter and apple sauce, and
even into shoes and stockings, when you know how to interpret it. But
wouldn't it be dreadful if she had no one to express it in the tangible
things of life for her. Think of her talking about proper diet and aids
to digestion to that little hungry girl. Well, it seems to be my
mission to step into the gap--I'm a miss with a mission"--she was
slicing some cold ham as she spoke--"I am something of a health talker,
too."

Camilla knocked at the library door, and in answer to Mrs. Francis's
invitation to enter, opened the door and said:

"Mrs. Francis, would it not be well for Pearl to have a lunch before
she starts for her walk into the country; the air is so exhilarating,
you know."

"How thoughtful you are, Camilla!" Mrs. Francis exclaimed with honest
admiration.

Thus it happened that Pearlie Watson, aged twelve, began her journey
into the big unknown world, fully satisfied in body and soul, and with
a great love for all the world.

At the corner of the street stood Mrs. McGuire, and at sight of her
Pearl's heart stopped beating.

"It's bad luck," she said. "I'd as lief have a rabbit cross me path as
her."

But she walked bravely forward with no outward sign of her inward
trembling.

"Goin' to Sam Motherwell's, are ye?" the old lady asked shrilly.

"Yes'm," Pearl said, trembling.

"She's a tarter; she's a skinner; she's a damner; that's what she is.
She's my own first cousin and I know HER. Sass her; that's the only way
to get along with her. Tell her I said so. Here, child, rub yer j'ints
with this when ye git stiff." She handed Pearl a black bottle of
home-made liniment.

Pearl thanked her and hurried on, but at the next turn of the street
she met Danny.

Danny was in tears; Danny wasn't going to let Pearlie go away; Danny
would run away and get lost and runned over and drownded, now! Pearl's
heart melted, and sitting on the sidewalk she took Danny in her arms,
and they cried together. A whirr of wheels aroused Pearl and looking up
she saw the kindly face of the young doctor.

"What is it, Pearl?" he asked kindly. "Surely that's not Danny I see,
spoiling his face that way!"

"It's Danny," Pearl said unsteadily. "It's hard enough to leave him
widout him comin' afther me and breakin' me heart all over again."

"That's what it is, Pearl," the doctor said, smiling. "I think it is
mighty thoughtless of Danny the way he is acting."

Danny held obstinately to Pearl's skirt, and cried harder than ever. He
would not even listen when the doctor spoke of taking him for a drive.

"Listen to the doctor," Pearl commanded sternly, "or he'll raise a
gumboil on ye."

Thus admonished Danny ceased his sobs; but he showed no sign of
interest when the doctor spoke of popcorn, and at the mention of
ice-cream he looked simply bored.

"He's awful fond of 'hoo-hung' candy," Pearlie suggested in a whisper,
holding her hand around her mouth so that Danny might not hear her.

"Ten cents' worth of 'hoo-hung' candy to the boy that says good-bye to
his sister like a gentleman and rides home with me."

Danny dried his eyes on Pearl's skirt, kissed her gravely and climbed
into the buggy beside the doctor. Waterloo was won!

Pearl did not trust herself to look back as she walked along the deeply
beaten road.

The yellow cone-flowers raised their heads like golden stars along the
roadside, and the golden glory of the approaching harvest lay upon
everything. To the right the Tiger Hills lay on the horizon wrapped in
a blue mist. Flocks of blackbirds swarmed over the ripening oats, and
angrily fought with each other.

"And it not costin' them a cent!" Pearl said in disgust as she stopped
to watch them.

The exhilaration of the air, the glory of the waving grain, the
profusion of wild flowers that edged the fields with purple and yellow
were like wine to her sympathetic Irish heart as she walked through the
grain fields and drank in all the beauties that lay around, and it was
not until she came in sight of the big stone house, gloomy and bare,
that she realised with a start of homesickness that she was Pearl
Watson, aged twelve, away from home for the first time, and bound to
work three months for a woman of reputed ill-temper.

"But I'll do it," Pearl said, swallowing the lump that gathered in her
throat, "I can work. Nobody never said that none of the Watsons
couldn't work. I'll stay out me time if it kills me."

So saying, Pearl knocked timidly at the back door. Myriads of flies
buzzed on the screen. From within a tired voice said, "Come in."

Pearl walked in and saw a large bare room, with a long table in the
middle. A sewing machine littered with papers stood in front of one
window.

The floor had been painted a dull drab, but the passing of many feet
had worn the paint away in places. A stove stood in one corner. Over
the sink a tall, round-shouldered woman bent trying to get water from
an asthmatic pump.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" she said in a tone so very unpleasant that Pearl
thought she must have expected someone else.

"Yes'm," Pearl said meekly. "Who were ye expectin'?"

Mrs. Motherwell stopped pumping for a minute and looked at Pearl.

"Why didn't ye git here earlier?" she asked.

"Well," Pearl began, "I was late gettin' started by reason of the
washin' and the ironin', and Jimmy not gettin' back wid the boots. He
went drivin' cattle for Vale the butcher, and he had to have the boots
for the poison ivy is that bad, and because the sugar o' lead is all
done and anyway ma don't like to keep it in the house, for wee Danny
might eat it--he's that stirrin' and me not there to watch him now."

"Lord! what a tongue you have! Put down your things and go out and pick
up chips to light the fire with in the morning."

Pearl laid her bird-cage on a chair and was back so soon with the chips
that Mrs. Motherwell could not think of anything to say.

"Now go for the cows," she said, "and don't run them home!"

"Where will I run them to then, ma'am?" Pearl asked innocently.

"Good land, child, have I to tell you everything? Folks that can't do
without tellin' can't do much with, I say. Bring the cows to the bars,
and don't stand there staring at me."

When Pearl dashed out of the door, she almost fell over the old dog who
lay sleepily snapping at the flies which buzzed around his head. He
sprang up with a growl which died away into an apologetic yawn as she
stooped to pat his honest brown head.

A group of red calves stood at the bars of a small field plaintively
calling for their supper. It was not just an ordinary bawl, but a
double-jointed hyphenated appeal, indicating a very exhausted condition
indeed.

Pearl looked at them in pity. The old dog, wrinkling his nose and
turning away his head, did not give them a glance. He knew them. Noisy
things! Let 'em bawl. Come on!

Across the narrow creek they bounded, Pearl and old Nap, and up the
other hill where the silver willows grew so tall they were hidden in
them. The goldenrod nodded its plumy head in the breeze, and the tall
Gaillardia, brown and yellow, flickered unsteadily on its stem.

The billows of shadow swept over the wheat on each side of the narrow
pasture; the golden flowers, the golden fields, the warm golden
sunshine intoxicated Pearl with their luxurious beauty, and in that
hour of delight she realised more pleasure from them than Sam
Motherwell and his wife had in all their long lives of barren
selfishness. Their souls were of a dull drab dryness in which no flower
took root, there was no gold to them but the gold of greed and gain,
and with it they had never bought a smile or a gentle hand pressure or
a fervid "God bless you!" and so it lost its golden colour, and turned
to lead and ashes in their hands.

When Pearl and Nap got the cows turned homeward they had to slacken
their pace.

"I don't care how cross she is," Pearl said, "if I can come for the
cows every night. Look at that fluffy white cloud! Say, wouldn't that
make a hat trimming that would do your heart good. The body of the hat
blue like that up there, edged 'round with that cloud over there, then
a blue cape with white fur on it just to match. I kin just feel that
white stuff under my chin."

Then Pearl began to cake-walk and sing a song she had heard Camilla
sing. She had forgotten some of the words, but Pearl never was at a
loss for words:

   The wild waves are singing to the shore
   As they were in the happy days of yore.

Pearl could not remember what the wild waves were singing, so she sang
what was in her own heart:

   She can't take the ripple from the breeze,
   And she can't take the rustle from the trees;
   And when I am out of the old girl's sight
   I can-just-do-as-I-please.

"That's right, I think the same way and try to act up to it," a man's
voice said slowly. "But don't let her hear you say so."

Pearl started at the sound of the voice and found herself looking into
such a good-natured face that she laughed too, with a feeling of
good-fellowship.

The old dog ran to the stranger with every sign of delight at seeing
him.

"I am one of the neighbours," he said. "I live over there"--pointing to
a little car-roofed shanty farther up the creek. "Did I frighten you? I
am sorry if I did, but you see I like the sentiment of your song so
much I could not help telling you. You need not think it strange if you
find me milking one of the cows occasionally. You see, I believe in
dealing directly with the manufacturer and thus save the middleman's
profit, and so I just take what milk I need from So-Bossie over there."

"Does she know?" Pearl asked, nodding toward the house.

"Who? So-Bossie?"

"No, Mrs. Motherwell."

"Well, no," he answered slowly. "You haven't heard of her having a fit,
have you?"

"No," Pearl answered wonderingly.

"Then we're safe in saying that the secret has been kept from her."

"Does it hurt her, though?" Pearl asked.

"It would, very much, if she knew it," the young man replied gravely.

"Oh, I mean the cow," Pearl said hastily.

"It doesn't hurt the cow a bit. What does she care who gets the milk?
When did you come?"

"To-night," Pearl said. "I must hurry. She'll have a rod in steep for
me if I'm late. My name's Pearl Watson. What's yours?"

"Jim Russell," he said. "I know your brother Teddy."

Pearl was speeding down the hill. She shouted back:

"I know who you are now. Good-bye!" Pearl ran to catch up to the cows,
for the sun was throwing long shadows over the pasture, and the
plaintive lowing of the hungry calves came faintly to her ears.

A blond young man stood at the bars with four milk pails.

He raised his hat when he spoke to Pearl.

"Madam says you are to help me to milk, but I assure you it is quite
unnecessary. Really, I would much prefer that you shouldn't."

"Why?" Pearl asked in wonder.

"Oh, by Jove! You see it is not a woman's place to work outside like
this, don't you know."

"That's because ye'r English," Pearl said, a sudden light breaking in
on her. "Ma says when ye git a nice Englishman there's nothing nicer,
and pa knowed one once that was so polite he used to say 'Haw Buck' to
the ox and then he'd say, 'Oh, I beg yer pardon, I mean gee.' It wasn't
you, was it?"

"No," he said smiling, "I have never driven oxen, but I have done a
great many ridiculous things I am sure."

"So have I," Pearl said confidentially, as she sat down on a little
three-legged stool to milk So-Bossie. "You know them fluffy white
things all made of lace and truck like that, that is hung over the beds
in rich people's houses, over the pillows, I mean?"

"Pillow-shams?" he asked.

"Yes, that's them! Well, when I stayed with Camilla one night at Mrs.
Francis's didn't I think they were things to pull down to keep the
flies off ye'r face. Say, you should have heard Camilla laugh, and ma
saw a girl at a picnic once who drank lemonade through her veil, and
she et a banana, skin and all."

Pearl laughed heartily, but the Englishman only smiled faintly.
Canadian ways were growing stranger all the time.

"Say," Pearl began after a pause, "who does the cow over there with the
horns bent down look like? Someone we both know, only the cow looks
pleasanter."

"My word!" the Englishman exclaimed, "you're a rum one."

Pearl looked disappointed.

"Animals often look like people," she said. "We have two cows at home,
one looks like Mrs. White, so good and gentle, wouldn't say boo to a
goose; the other one looks just like Fred Miller. He works in the mill,
and his hair goes in a roll on the top; his mother did it that way with
a hair-pin too long, I guess, and now it won't go any other way, and I
know an animal that looks like you; he's a dandy, too, you bet. It is
White's dog, and he can jump the fence easy as anything."

"Oh, give over, give over!" the Englishman said stiffly.

Pearl laughed delightedly.

"It's lots of fun guessing who people are like," she said. "I'm awful
smart at it and so is Mary, four years younger'n me. Once we could not
guess who Mrs. Francis was like, and Mary guessed it. Mrs. Francis
looks like prayer--big bug eyes lookin' away into nothin', but hopin'
it's all for the best. Do you pray?"

"I am a rector's son," he answered.

"Oh, I know, minister's son, isn't that lovely? I bet you know prayers
and prayers. But it isn't fair to pray in a race is it? When Jimmy
Moore and my brother Jimmy ran under twelve, Jimmie Moore prayed, and
some say got his father to pray, too; he's the Methodist minister, you
know, and, of course, he won it; but our Jimmy could ha' beat him easy
in a fair race, and no favours; but he's an awful snoopie kid and prays
about everything. Do you sing?"

"I do--a little," the Englishman said modestly.

"Oh, my, I am glad," Pearl cried rapturously. "When I was two years old
I could sing 'Hush my babe lie,' all through--I love singin'--I can
sing a little, too, but I don't care much for my own. Have they got an
organ here?"

"I don't know," he answered, "I've only been in the kitchen."

"Say, I'd like to see a melodeon. Just the very name of it makes me
think of lovely sounds, religious sounds, mountin' higher and higher
and swellin' out grander and grander, rollin' right into the great
white throne, and shakin' the streets of gold. Do you know the 'Holy
City,'" she asked after a pause.

The Englishman began to hum it in a rich tenor.

"That's it, you bet," she cried delightedly. "Just think of you coming
all the way across the ocean and knowing that just the same as we do. I
used to listen at the keyhole when Mrs. Francis had company, and I was
there helping Camilla. Dr. Clay sang that lots of times."

The Englishman had not sung since he had left his father's house. He
began to sing now, in a sweet, full voice, resonant on the quiet
evening air, the cows staring idly at him. The old dog came down to the
bars with his bristles up, expecting trouble.

Old Sam and his son Tom coming in from work stopped to listen to these
strange sounds.

"Confound them English!" old Sam said. "Ye'd think I was payin' him to
do that, and it harvest-time, too!"

When Dr. Clay, with Danny Watson gravely perched beside him, drove
along the river road after saying good-bye to Pearl, they met Miss
Barner, who had been digging ferns for Mrs. McGuire down on the river
flat.

The doctor drew in his horse.

"Miss Barner," he said, lifting his hat, "if Daniel Mulcahey Watson and
I should ask you to come for a drive with us, I wonder what you would
say?"

Miss Barner considered for a moment and then said, smiling:

"I think I would say, 'Thank you very much, Mr. Watson and Dr. Clay, I
shall be delighted to come if you have room for me.'"

Life had been easier for Mary Barner since Dr. Clay had come to
Millford. It was no longer necessary for her to compel her father to go
when he was sent for, and when patients came to the office, if she
thought her father did not know what he was doing, she got Dr. Clay to
check over the prescriptions.

It had been rather hard for Mary to ask him to do this, for she had a
fair share of her father's Scotch pride; but she had done too many hard
things in her life to hesitate now. The young doctor was genuinely glad
to serve her, and he made her feel that she was conferring, instead of
asking, a favour.

They drove along the high bank that fell perpendicularly to the river
below and looked down at the harvest scene that lay beneath them. The
air was full of the perfume of many flowers and the chatter of birds.

The Reverend Hugh Grantley drove swiftly by them, whereupon Danny made
his presence known for the first time by the apparently irrelevant
remark:

"I know who Miss Barner's fellow is! so I do."

Now if Dr. Clay had given Danny even slight encouragement, he would
have pursued the subject, and that might have saved complications in
the days to come.



CHAPTER XII

FROM CAMILLA'S DIARY

It is nearly six months since I came to live with Mrs. Francis, and I
like housework so well and am so happy at it, that it shows clearly
that I am not a disguised heiress. My proud spirit does not chafe a bit
at having to serve meals and wear a cap (you should see how sweet I
look in a cap). I haven't got the fear on my heart all day that I will
make a mistake in a figure that will rise up and condemn me at the end
of the month as I used to be when I was book-keeping on a high stool,
for the Western Hail and Fire Insurance Company (peace to its ashes!).
"All work is expression," Fra Elbertus says, so why may I not express
myself in blueberry pie and tomato soup?

Mrs. Francis is an appreciative mistress, and she is not so entirely
wrapped up in Browning as to be insensible to a good salad either, I am
glad to say.

One night after we had company and everything had gone off well, Mr.
Francis came out into the kitchen, and looked over his glasses at me.
He opened his mouth twice to speak, but seemed to change his mind. I
knew what was struggling for utterance. Then he laid fifty cents on the
window sill, pointed at it, nodded to me, and went out hurriedly. My
first impulse was to hand it back--then I thought better of it--words
do not come easily to him. So he expressed himself in currency. I put
the money into my purse for a luck penny.

Mrs. Francis is as serene as a summer sea, and can look at you without
knowing you are there. Mr. Francis is a peaceful man, too. He looks at
his wife in a helpless way when she begins to explain the difference
between the Elizabethan and the Victorian poets--I don't believe he
cares a cent for either of them.

Mrs. Francis entertains quite a bit; I like it, too, and I do not go
and cry into the sink because I have to wait on the guests. She
entertains well and is a delightful hostess, but some of the people
whom she entertains do not appreciate her flights of fancy.

I do not like to see them wink at each other, although I know it is
funny to hear Mrs. Francis elaborate on the mother's influence in the
home and the proper way to deal with selfishness in children; but she
means well, and they should remember that, no matter how funny she gets.

April 18th.--She gave me a surprise to-day. She called me upstairs and
read to me a paper she was preparing to read before some society--she
belongs to three or four--on the domestic help problem. Well, it hadn't
very much to do with the domestic help problem, but of course I could
not tell her that so when she asked me what I thought of it I said:

"If all employers were as kind as you and Mr. Francis there would be no
domestic help problem."

She looked at me suddenly, and something seemed to strike her. I
believe it came to her that I was a creature of like passions with
herself, capable of gratitude, perhaps in need of encouragement.
Hitherto I think she has regarded me as a porridge and coffee machine.

She put her arm around me and kissed me.

"Camilla," she said gently--she has the softest, dreamiest voice I ever
heard--"I believe in the aristocracy of brains and virtue. You have
both."

Farewell, oh Soulless Corporation! A long, last, lingering farewell,
for Camilla E. Rose, who used to sit upon the high stool and add
figures for you at ten dollars a week, is far away making toast for two
kindly souls, one of whom tells her she has brains and virtue and the
other one opens his mouth to speak, and then pushes fifty cents at her
instead.

Danny Watson, bless his heart! is bringing madam up. He has wound
himself into her heart and the "whyness of the what" is packing up to
go.

May 1st.--Mrs. Francis is going silly over Danny. A few days ago she
asked me if I could cut a pattern for a pair of pants. I told her I had
made pants once or twice and meekly inquired whom she wanted the pants
for. She said for a boy, of course--and she looked at me rather
severely. I knew they must be for Danny, and cut the pattern about the
size for him. She went into the sewing-room, and I only saw her at meal
times for two days. She wrestled with the garment.

Last night she asked me if I would take a parcel to Danny with her
love. I was glad to go, for I was just dying to see how she had got
along.

When I held them up before Mrs. Watson the poor woman gasped.

"Save us all!" she cried. "Them'll fit none of us. We're poor, but,
thank God, we're not deformed!"

I'll never forget the look of those pants. They haunt me still.

May 15th.--Pearl Watson is the sweetest and best little girl I know.
Her gratitude for even the smallest kindness makes me want to cry. She
told me the other day she was sure Danny was going to be a doctor. She
bases her hopes on the questions that Danny asks. How do you know you
haven't got a gizzard? How would you like to be ripped clean up the
back? and Where does your lap go to when you stand up? She said, "Ma
and us all have hopes o' Danny."

Mrs. Francis has a new role, that of matchmaker, though I don't suppose
she knows it. She had Mary Barner and the young minister for tea
to-night. Mary grows dearer and sweeter every day. People say it is not
often one girl praises another; but Mary is a dear little gray-eyed
saint with the most shapely hands I ever saw. Reverend Hugh thinks so,
too, I have no doubt. It was really too bad to waste a good fruit salad
on him though, for I know he didn't know what he was eating. Excelsior
would taste like ambrosia to him if Mary sat opposite--all of which is
very much as it should be, I know. I thought for a while Mary liked Dr.
Clay pretty well, but I know it is not serious, for she talks quite
freely of him. She is very grateful to him for helping her so often
with her father. But those gray-eyed Scotch people never talk of what
is nearest the heart. I wonder if he knows that Mary Barner is a queen
among women. I don't like Scotchmen. They take too much for granted.



CHAPTER XIII

THE FIFTH SON

Arthur Wemyss, fifth son of the Reverend Alfred Austin Wemyss, Rector
of St. Agnes, Tilbury Road, County of Kent, England, had but recently
crossed the ocean. He and six hundred other fifth sons of rectors and
earls and dukes had crossed the ocean in the same ship and had been
scattered abroad over Manitoba and the Northwest Territories to be
instructed in agricultural pursuits by the honest granger, and
incidentally to furnish nutriment for the ever-ready mosquito or wasp,
who regarded all Old Country men as their lawful meat.

The honest granger was paid a sum varying between fifty and one hundred
fifty dollars for instructing one of these young fellows in farming for
one year, and although having an Englishman was known to be a pretty
good investment, the farmers usually spoke of them as they would of the
French-weed or the rust in the wheat. Sam Motherwell referred to his
quite often as "that blamed Englishman" and often said, unjustly, that
he was losing money on him every day.

Arthur--the Motherwells could not have told his other name--had learned
something since he came. He could pull pig-weed for the pigs and throw
it into the pen; he had learned to detect French-weed in the grain; he
could milk; he could turn the cream-separator; he could wash dishes and
churn, and he did it all with a willingness, a cheerfulness that would
have appealed favourably to almost any other farmer in the
neighbourhood, but the lines had fallen to Arthur in a stony place, and
his employer did not notice him at all unless to find fault with him.
Yet he bore it all with good humour. He had come to Canada to learn to
farm.

The only real grievance he had was that he could not get his "tub." The
night he arrived, dusty and travel-stained after his long journey, he
had asked for his "tub," but Mr. Motherwell had told him in language he
had never heard before--that there was no tub of his around the
establishment, that he knew of, and that he could go down and have a
dip in the river on Sunday if he wanted to. Then he had conducted him
with the lantern to his bed in the loft of the granary.

A rickety ladder led up to the bed, which was upon a temporary floor
laid about half way across the width of the granary. Bags of musty
smelling wheat stood at one end of this little room. Evidently Mr.
Motherwell wished to discourage sleep-walking in his hired help, for
the floor ended abruptly and a careless somnambulist would be
precipitated on the old fanning mill, harrow teeth and other debris
which littered the floor below.

The young Englishman reeled unsteadily going up the ladder. He could
still feel the chug-chug-chug of the ocean liner's engines and had to
hold tight to the ladder's splintered rungs to preserve his equilibrium.

Mr. Motherwell raised the lantern with sudden interest.

"Say," he said, more cheerfully than he had yet spoken, "you haven't
been drinking, have you?"

"Intoxicants, do you mean?" the Englishman asked, without turning
around. "No, I do not drink."

"You didn't happen to bring anything over with you, did you, for
seasickness on the boat?" Mr. Motherwell queried anxiously, holding the
lantern above his head.

"No, I did not," the young man said laconically.

"Turn out at five to-morrow morning then," his employer snapped in
evident disappointment, and he lowered the lantern so quickly that it
went out.

The young man lay down upon his hard bed. His utter weariness was a
blessing to him that night, for not even the racing mice, the musty
smells or the hardness of his straw bed could keep him from slumber.

In what seemed to him but a few minutes, he was awakened by a loud
knocking on the door below, voices shouted, a dog barked, cow-bells
jangled; he could hear doors banging everywhere, a faint streak of
sunlight lay wan and pale on the mud-plastered walls.

"By Jove!" he said yawning, "I know now what Kipling meant when he said
'the dawn comes up like thunder.'"

A few weeks after Arthur's arrival, Mrs. Motherwell called him from the
barn, where he sat industriously mending bags, to unhitch her horse
from the buggy. She had just driven home from Millford. Nobody had
taken the trouble to show Arthur how it was done.

"Any fool ought to know," Mr. Motherwell said.

Arthur came running from the barn with his hat in his hand. He grasped
the horse firmly by the bridle and led him toward the barn. As they
came near the water trough the horse began to show signs of thirst.
Arthur led him to the trough, but the horse tossed his head and was
unable to get it near the water on account of the check.

Arthur watched him a few moments with gathering perplexity.

"I can't lift this water vessel," he said, looking at the horse
reproachfully. "It's too heavy, don't you know. Hold! I have it," he
cried with exultation beaming in his face; and making a dash for the
horse he unfastened the crupper.

But the exultation soon died from his face, for the horse still tossed
his head in the vain endeavour to reach the water.

"My word!" he said, wrinkling his forehead, "I believe I shall have to
lift the water-vessel yet, though it is hardly fit to lift, it is so
wet and nasty." Arthur spoke with a deliciously soft Kentish accent,
guiltless of r's and with a softening of the h's that was irresistible.

A light broke over his face again. He went behind the buggy and lifted
the hind wheels. While he was holding up the wheels and craning his
neck around the back of the buggy to see if his efforts were
successful, Jim Russell came into the yard, riding his dun-coloured
pony Chiniquy.

He stood still in astonishment. Then the meaning of it came to him and
he rolled off Chiniquy's back, shaking with silent laughter.

"Come, come, Arthur," he said as soon as he could speak. "Stop trying
to see how strong you are. Don't you see the horse wants a drink?"

With a perfectly serious face Jim unfastened the check, whereupon the
horse's head was lowered at once, and he drank in long gulps the water
that had so long mocked him with its nearness.

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Russell," the Englishman cried delightedly. "Thanks
awfully, it is monstrously clever of you to know how to do everything.
I wish I could go and live with you. I believe I could learn to farm if
I were with you."

Jim looked at his eager face so cruelly bitten by mosquitoes.

"I'll tell you, Arthur," he said smiling, "I haven't any need for a man
to work, but I suppose I might hire you to keep the mosquitoes off the
horses. They wouldn't look at Chiniquy, I am sure, if they could get a
nip at you."

The Englishman looked perplexed.

"You are learning as well as any person could learn," Jim said kindly.
"I think you are doing famously. No person is particularly bright at
work entirely new. Don't be a bit discouraged, old man, you'll be a
rich land-owner some day, proprietor of the A. J. Wemyss Stock Farm,
writing letters to the agricultural papers, judge of horses at the
fairs, giving lectures at dairy institutes--oh, I think I see you,
Arthur!"

"You are chaffing me," Arthur said smiling.

"Indeed I am not. I am very much in earnest. I have seen more unlikely
looking young fellows than you do wonderful things in a short time, and
just to help along the good work I am going to show you a few things
about taking off harness that may be useful to you when you are
president of the Agricultural Society of South Cypress, or some other
fortunate municipality."

Arthur's face brightened.

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Russell," he said.

That night Arthur wrote home a letter that would have made an
appropriate circular for the Immigration Department to send to
prospective settlers.



CHAPTER XIV

THE FAITH THAT MOVETH MOUNTAINS

When supper was over and Pearl had washed the heavy white dishes Mrs.
Motherwell told her, not unkindly, that she could go to bed. She would
sleep in the little room over the kitchen in Polly's old bed.

"You don't need no lamp," she said, "if you hurry. It is light up
there."

Mrs. Motherwell was inclined to think well of Pearl. It was not her
soft brown eyes, or her quaint speech that had won Mrs. Motherwell's
heart. It was the way she scraped the frying-pan.

Pearl went up the ladder into the kitchen loft, and found herself in a
low, long room, close and stifling, one little window shone light
against the western sky and on it innumerable flies buzzed unceasingly.
Old boxes, old bags, old baskets looked strange and shadowy in the
gathering gloom. The Motherwells did not believe in giving away
anything. The Indians who went through the neighbourhood each fall
looking for "old clo'" had long ago learned to pass by the big stone
house. Indians do not appreciate a strong talk on shiftlessness the way
they should, with a vision of a long cold winter ahead of them.

Pearl gazed around with a troubled look on her face. A large basket of
old carpet rags stood near the little bed. She dragged it into the
farthest corner. She tried to open the window, but it was nailed fast.

Then a determined look shone in her eyes. She went quickly down the
little ladder.

"Please ma'am," she said going over to Mrs. Motherwell, "I can't sleep
up there. It is full of diseases and microscopes."

"It's what?" Mrs. Motherwell almost screamed. She was in the pantry
making pies.

"It has old air in it," Pearl said, "and it will give me the fever."

Mrs. Motherwell glared at the little girl. She forgot all about the
frying pan.

"Good gracious!" she said. "It's a queer thing if hired help are going
to dictate where they are going to sleep. Maybe you'd like a bed set up
for you in the parlour!"

"Not if the windies ain't open," Pearl declared stoutly.

"Well they ain't; there hasn't been a window open in this house since
it was built, and there isn't going to be, letting in dust and flies."

Pearl gasped. What would Mrs. Francis say to that?

"It's in yer graves ye ought to be then, ma'am," she said with honest
conviction. "Mrs. Francis told me never to sleep in a room with the
windies all down, and I as good as promised I wouldn't. Can't we open
that wee windy, ma'am?"

Mrs. Motherwell was tired, unutterably tired, not with that day's work
alone, but with the days and years that had passed away in gray
dreariness; the past barren and bleak, the future bringing only visions
of heavier burdens. She was tired and perhaps that is why she became
angry.

"You go straight to your bed," she said, with her mouth hard and her
eyes glinting like cold flint, "and none of your nonsense, or you can
go straight back to town."

When Pearl again reached the little stifling room, she fell on her
knees and prayed.

"Dear God," she said, "there's gurms here as thick as hair on a dog's
back, and You and me know it, even if she don't. I don't know what to
do, dear Lord--the windy is nelt down. Keep the gurms from gittin' into
me, dear Lord. Do ye mind how poor Jeremiah was let down into the mire
and ye tuk care o' him, didn't ye? Take care o' me, dear Lord. Poor ma
has enough to do widout me comin' home clutterin' up the house wid
sickness. Keep yer eye on Danny if ye can at all, at all. He's awful
stirrin'. I'll try to git the windy riz to-morrow by hook or crook, so
mebbe it's only to-night ye'll have to watch the gurms. Amen."

Pearl braided her hair into two little pigtails, with her little
dilapidated comb. When she brought out the contents of the bird-cage
and opened it in search of her night-dress, the orange rolled out,
almost frightening her. The purse, too, rattled on the bare floor as it
fell.

She picked it up, and by going close to the fly-specked window she
counted the ten ten-cent pieces, a whole dollar. Never was a little
girl more happy.

"It was Camilla," she whispered to herself. "Oh, I love Camilla! and I
never said 'God bless Camilla,'"--with a sudden pang of remorse.

She was on her knees in a moment and added the postscript.

"I can send the orange home to ma, and she can put the skins in the
chist to make the things smell nice, and I'll git that windy open
to-morrow."

Clasping her little purse in her hand, and with the orange close beside
her head, she lay down to sleep. The smell of the orange made her
forget the heavy air in the room.

"Anyway," she murmured contentedly, "the Lord is attendin' to all that."

Pearl slept the heavy sleep of healthy childhood and woke in the gray
dawn before anyone else in the household was stirring. She threw on
some clothing and went down the ladder into the kitchen. She started
the fire, secured the basin full of water and a piece of yellow soap
and came back to her room for her "oliver."

"I can't lave it all to the Lord to do," she said, as she rubbed the
soap on her little wash-rag. "It doesn't do to impose on good nature."

When Tom, the only son of the Motherwells, came down to light the fire,
he found Pearl setting the table, the kitchen swept and the kettle
boiling.

Pearl looked at him with her friendly Irish smile, which he returned
awkwardly.

He was a tall, stoop-shouldered, rather good-looking lad of twenty. He
had heavy gray eyes, and a drooping mouth.

Tom had gone to school a few winters when there was not much doing, but
his father thought it was a great deal better for a boy to learn to
handle horses and "sample wheat," and run a binder, than learn the
"pack of nonsense they got in school nowadays," and when the pretty
little teacher from the eastern township came to Southfield school,
Mrs. Motherwell knew at one glance that Tom would learn no good from
her--she was such a flighty looking thing! Flowers on the under side of
her hat!

So poor Tom grew up a clod of the valley. Yet Mrs. Motherwell would
tell you, "Our Tom'll be the richest man in these parts. He'll get
every cent we have and all the land, too; and I guess there won't be
many that can afford to turn up their noses at our Tom. And, mind ye,
Tom can tell a horse as well as the next one, and he's a boy that won't
waste nothin', not like some we know. Look at them Slaters now! Fred
and George have been off to college two years, big over-grown hulks
they are, and young Peter is going to the Agricultural College in
Guelph this winter, and the old man will hire a man to take care of the
stock, and him with three boys of his own. Just as if a boy can learn
about farmin' at a college! and the way them girls dress, and the old
lady, too, and her not able to speak above a whisper. The old lady
wears an ostrich feather in her bonnet, and they're a terrible costly
thing, I hear. Mind you they only keep six cows, and they send every
drop they don't use to the creamery. Everybody can do as they like, I
suppose, but I know they'll go to the wall, and they deserve it too!"

And yet!

She and Mrs. Slater had been girls together and sat in school with arms
entwined and wove romances of the future, rosy-hued and golden. When
they consulted the oracle of "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich
man, poor man, beggar man, thief," the buttons on her gray winsey dress
had declared in favour of the "rich man." Then she had dreamed dreams
of silks and satins and prancing steeds and liveried servants, and
ease, and happiness--dreams which God in His mercy had let her forget
long, long ago.

When she had become the mistress of the big stone house, she had
struggled hard against her husband's penuriousness, defiantly
sometimes, and sometimes tearfully. But he had held her down with a
heavy hand of unyielding determination. At last she grew weary of
struggling, and settled down in sullen submission, a hopeless
heavy-eyed, spiritless women, and as time went by she became greedier
for money than her husband.

"Good-morning," Pearl said brightly. "Are you Mr. Tom Motherwell?"

"That's what!" Tom replied. "Only you needn't mind the handle."

Pearl laughed.

"All right," she said, "I want a little favor done. Will you open the
window upstairs for me?"

"Why?" Tom asked, staring at her.

"To let in good air. It's awful close up there, and I'm afraid I'll get
the fever or somethin' bad."

"Polly got it," Tom said. "Maybe that is why Polly got it. She's awful
sick now. Ma says she'll like as not die. But I don't believe ma will
let me open it."

"Where is Polly?" Pearl asked eagerly. She had forgotten her own
worries. "Who is Polly? Did she live here?"

"She's in the hospital now in Brandon," Tom said in answer to her rapid
questions. "She planted them poppies out there, but she never seen the
flowers on them. Ma wanted me to cut them down, for Polly used to put
off so much time with them, but I didn't want to. Ma was mad, too, you
bet," he said, with a reminiscent smile at his own foolhardiness.

Pearl was thinking--she could see the poppies through the window,
bright and glowing in the morning light. They rocked lightly in the
wind, and a shower of crimson petals fell. Poor Polly! she hadn't seen
them.

"What's Polly's other name?" she asked quickly.

"Polly Bragg," he answered. "She was awful nice, Polly was, and jolly,
too. Ma thought she was lazy. She used to cry a lot and wish she could
go home; but my! she could sing fine."

Pearl went on with her work with a preoccupied air.

"Tom, can you take a parcel for me to town to-day?"

"I am not goin'," he said in surprise. "Pa always goes if we need
anything. I haven't been in town for a month."

"Don't you go to church?" Pearl asked in surprise.

"No, you bet I don't, not now. The preacher was sassy to pa and tried
to get money. Pa says he'll never touch wood in his church again, and
pa won't give another cent either, and, mind you, last year we gave
twenty-five dollars."

"We paid fourteen dollars," Pearl said, "and Mary got six dollars on
her card."

"Oh, but you town people don't have the expenses we have."

"That's true, I guess," Pearl said doubtfully--she was wondering about
the boot bills. "Pa gets a dollar and a quarter every day, and ma gets
seventy-five cents when she washes. We're gettin' on fine."

Then Mrs. Motherwell made her appearance, and the conversation came to
an end.

That afternoon when Pearl had washed the dishes and scrubbed the floor,
she went upstairs to the little room to write in her diary. She knew
Mrs. Francis would expect to see something in it, so she wrote
laboriously:

   I saw a lot of yalla flowers and black-burds. The rode
   was full of dust and wagging marks. I met a man with
   a top buggy and smelt a skunk. Mrs. M. made a kake
   to-day--there was no lickens.

   I'm goin' to tidy up the granary for Arthur. He's
   offel nice--an' told me about London Bridge--it hasn't
   fallen down at all, he says, that's just a song.

All day long the air had been heavy and close, and that night while
Pearl was asleep the face of the heavens was darkened with
storm-clouds. Great rolling masses came up from the west, shot through
with flashes of lightening, and the heavy silence was more ominous than
the loudest thunder would have been. The wind began in the hills, gusty
and fitful at first, then bursting with violence over the plain below.
There was a cutting whine in it, like the whang of stretched steel,
fateful, deadly as the singing of bullets, chilling the farmer's heart,
for he knows it means hail.

Pearl woke and sat up in bed. The lightning flashed in the little
window, leaving the room as black as ink. She listened to the whistling
wind.

"It's the hail," she whispered delightedly. "I knew the Lord would find
a way to open the windy without me puttin' my fist through it--I'll
have a look at the clouds to see if they have that white edge on them.
No--I won't either--it isn't my put in. I'll just lave the Lord alone.
Nothin' makes me madder than when I promise Tommy or Mary or any of
them something and then have them frettin' all the time about whether
or not I'll get it done. I'd like to see the clouds though. I'll bet
they're a sight, just like what Camilla sings about:

   Dark is His path on the wings o' the storm.

In the kitchen below the Motherwells gathered with pale faces. The
windows shook and rattled in their casings.

"Keep away from the stove, Tom," Mrs. Motherwell said, trembling.
"That's where the lightnin' strikes."

Tom's teeth were chattering.

"This'll fix the wheat that's standing, every--bit of it," Sam said. He
did not make it quite as strong as he intended. Something had taken the
profanity out of him.

"Hadn't you better go up and bring the kid down, ma?" Tom asked,
thinking of Pearl.

"Her!" his father said contemptuously. "She'll never hear it." The wind
suddenly ceased. Not a breath stirred, only a continuous glare of
lightning. Then crack! crack! crack! on the roof, on the windows,
everywhere, like bad boys throwing stones, heavier, harder, faster,
until it was one beating, thundering roar.

It lasted but a few minutes, though it seemed longer to those who
listened in terror in the kitchen.

The roar grew less and less and at last ceased altogether, and only a
gentle rain was falling.

Sam Motherwell sat without speaking, "You have cheated the Lord all
these years, and He has borne with you, trying to make you pay up
without harsh proceedings"--he found himself repeating the minister's
words. Could this be what he meant by harsh proceedings? Certainly it
was harsh enough taking away a man's crop after all his hard work.

Sam was full of self-pity. There were very few men who had ever been
treated as badly as he felt himself to be.

"Maybe there'll only be a streak of it hailed out," Tom said, breaking
in on his father's dismal thoughts.

"You'll see in the mornin'," his father growled, and Tom went back to
bed.

When Pearl woke it was with the wind blowing in upon her; the morning
breeze fragrant with the sweetness of the flowers and the ripening
grain. The musty odours had all gone, and she felt life and health in
every breath. The blackbirds were twittering in the oats behind the
house, and the rising sun was throwing long shadows over the field.
Scattered glass lay on the floor.

"I knew the dear Lord would fix the gurms," Pearl said as she dressed,
laughing to herself. But her face clouded in a moment. What about the
poppies?

Then she laughed again. "There I go frettin' again. I guess the Lord
knows they're, there and He isn't going to smash them if Polly really
needs them."

She dressed herself hastily and ran down the ladder and around behind
the cookhouse, where a strange sight met her eyes. The cookhouse roof
had been blown off and placed over the poppies, where it had sheltered
them from every hailstone.

Pearl looked under the roof. The poppies stood there straight and
beautiful, no doubt wondering what big thing it was that hid them from
the sun.

When Tom and his father went out in the early dawn to investigate the
damage done by the storm, they found that only a narrow strip through
the field in front of the house had been touched.

The hail had played a strange trick; beating down the grain along this
narrow path, just as if a mighty roller had come through it, until it
reached the house, on the other side of which not one trace of damage
could be found.

"Didn't we get off lucky?" Tom exclaimed "and the rest of the grain is
not even lodged. Why, twenty-five dollars would cover the whole loss,
cookhouse roof and all."

His father was looking over the rippling field, green-gold in the rosy
dawn. He started uncomfortably at Tom's words.

Twenty-five dollars!



CHAPTER XV

INASMUCH

After sundown one night Pearl's resolve was carried into action. She
picked a shoe-box full of poppies, wrapping the stems carefully in wet
newspaper. She put the cover on, and wrapped the box neatly.

Then she wrote the address. She wrote it painfully, laboriously, in
round blocky letters. Pearl always put her tongue out when she was
doing anything that required minute attention. She was so anxious to
have the address just right that her tongue was almost around to her
ear. The address read:

   Miss Polly Bragg, english gurl
   and sick with fever
   Brandon Hospittle
   Brandon.

Then she drew a design around it. Jimmy's teacher had made them once in
Jimmy's scribbler, just beautiful. She was sorry she could not do a
bird with a long strip of tape in his mouth with "Think of Me" or "From
a Friend" or "Love the Giver" on it. Ma knew a man once who could do
them, quick as wink. He died a drunkard with delirium trimmings, but
was terrible smart.

Then she stuck, under the string, a letter she had written to Camilla.
Camilla would get them sent to Polly.

"I know how to get them sent to Camilla too, you bet," she murmured.
"There are two ways, both good ones, too. Jim Russell is one way. Jim
knows what flowers are to folks."

She crept softly down the stairs. Mrs Motherwell had left the kitchen
and no one was about. The men were all down at the barn.

She turned around the cookhouse where the poppies stood straight and
strong against the glowing sky. A little single red one with white
edges swayed gently on its slender stem and seemed to beckon to her
with pleading insistence. She hurried past them, fearing that she would
be seen, but looking back the little poppy was still nodding and
pleading.

"And so ye can go, ye sweetheart," she whispered. "I know what ye
want." She came back for it.

"Just like Danny would be honin' to come, if it was me," she murmured
with a sudden blur of homesickness.

Through the pasture she flew with the speed of a deer. The tall
sunflowers along the fence seemed to throw a light in the gathering
gloom.

A night hawk circled in the air above her, and a clumsy bat came
bumping through the dusk as she crossed the creek just below Jim's
shanty.

Bottles, Jim's dog, jumped up and barked, at which Jim himself came to
the door.

"Come back, Bottles," he called to the dog. "How will I ever get into
society if you treat callers that way, and a lady, too! Dear, dear, is
my tie on straight? Oh, is that you Pearl? Come right in, I am glad to
see you."

Over the door of Jim's little house the words "Happy Home" were printed
in large letters and just above the one little window another sign
boldly and hospitably announced "Hot Meals at all Hours."

Pearl stopped at the door. "No, Jim," she said, "it's not visitin' I
am, but I will go in for a minute, for I must put this flower in the
box. Can ye go to town, Jim, in a hurry?"

"I can," Jim replied.

"I mean now, this very minute, slappet-bang!"

Jim started for the door.

"Howld on, Jim!" Pearl cried, "don't you want to hear what ye'r goin'
for? Take this box to Camilla--Camilla E. Rose at Mrs. Francis's--and
she'll do the rest. It's flowers for poor Polly, sick and dyin' maybe
with the fever. But dead or alive, flowers are all right for folks,
ain't they, Jim? The train goes at ten o'clock. Can ye do it, Jim?"

Jim was brushing his hair with one hand and reaching for his coat with
the other.

"Here's the money to pay for the ride on the cars," Pearl said,
reaching out five of her coins.

Jim waved his hand.

"That's my share of it," he said, pulling his cap down on his head.
"You see, you do the first part, then me, then Camilla--just like the
fiery cross." He was half way to the stable as he spoke.

He threw the saddle on Chiniquy and was soon galloping down the road
with the box under his arm.

Camilla came to the door in answer to Jim's ring.

He handed her the box, and lifting his hat was about to leave without a
word, when Camilla noticed the writing.

"From Pearl," she said eagerly. "How is Pearl? Come in, please, while I
read the letter--it may require an answer."

Camilla wore a shirt-waist suit of brown, and the neatest collar and
tie, and Jim suddenly became conscious that his boots were not
blackened.

Camilla left him in the hall, while she went into the library and read
the contents of the letter to Mr. and Mrs. Francis.

She returned presently and with a pleasant smile said, holding out her
hand, "You are Mr. Russell. I am glad to meet you. Tell Pearl the
flowers will be sent to-night."

She opened the door as she spoke, and Jim found himself going down the
steps, wondering just how it happened that he had not said one word--he
who was usually so ready of speech.

"Well, well," he said to himself as he untied Chiniquy, "little Jimmy's
lost his tongue, I wonder why?"

All the way home the vision of lovely dark eyes and rippling brown hair
with just a hint of red in it, danced before him. Chiniquy, taking
advantage of his master's preoccupation, wandered aimlessly against a
barbed wire, taking very good care not to get too close to it himself.
Jim came to himself just in time to save his leg from a prod from the
spikes.

"Chiniquy, Chiniquy," he said gravely, "I understand now something of
the hatred the French bear your illustrious namesake. But no matter
what the man's sins may have been, surely he did not deserve to have a
little flea-bitten, mangey, treacherous, mouse-coloured deceiver like
you named for him."

When Camilla had read Pearl's letter to Mr. and Mrs. Francis, the
latter was all emotion. How splendid of her, so sympathetic, so full of
the true inwardness of Christian love, and the sweet message of the
poppy, the emblem of sleep, so prophetic of that other sleep that knows
no waking! Is it not a pagan thought, that? What tender recollections
they will bring the poor sufferer of her far away, happy childhood home!

Mrs. Francis's face was shining with emotion as she spoke. Then she
became dreamy.

"I wonder is her soul attune to the melodies of life, and will she feel
the love vibrations of the ether?"

Mr. Francis had noiselessly left the room when Camilla had finished her
rapid explanation. He returned with his little valise in his hand.

He stood a moment irresolutely looking, in his helpless dumb way, at
his wife, who was so beautifully expounding the message of the flowers.

Camilla handed him the box. She understood.

Mrs. Francis noticed the valise in her husband's hand.

"How very suddenly you make up your mind, James," she said. "Are you
actually going away on the train to-night? Really James, I believe I
shall write a little sketch for our church paper. Pearl's
thoughtfulness has moved me, James. It really has touched me deeply. If
you were not so engrossed in business, James, I really believe it would
move you; but men are so different from us, Camilla. They are not so
soulful. Perhaps it is just as well, but really sometimes, James, I
fear you give business too large a place in your life. It is all
business, business, business."

Mrs. Francis opened her desk, and drawing toward her her gold pen and
dainty letter paper, began her article.

Camilla followed Mr. Francis into the hall, and helped him to put on
his overcoat. She handed him his hat with something like reverence in
her manner.

"You are upon the King's business to-night," she said, with shining
eyes, as she opened the door for him.

He opened his mouth as if to speak, but only waved his hand with an
impatient gesture and was gone.



CHAPTER XVI

HOW POLLY WENT HOME

"We'll have to move poor Polly, if she lives thro' the night," the
nurse said to the house doctor in the hospital that night. "She is
making all the patients homesick. To hear her calling for her mother or
for 'someone from 'ome' is hard on the sick and well."

"What are her chances do you think?" the doctor asked gravely.

He was a wiry little man with a face like leather, but his touch
brought healing and his presence, hope.

"She is dying of homesickness as well as typhoid," the nurse said
sadly, "and she seems so anxious to get better, poor thing! She often
says 'I can't die miss, for what'll happen mother.' But for the last
two days, in her delirium, she seems to be worrying more about her work
and her flowers. I think they were pretty hard people she lived with.
'Surely she'll praise me this time,' she often says, 'I've tried my
'ardest.' The strenuous life has been too much for poor Polly. Listen
to her now!"

Polly was singing. Clear and steady and sweet, her voice rang over the
quiet ward, and many a fevered face was raised to listen. Polly's mind
was wandering in the shadows, but she still sang the songs of home in a
strange land:

   Down by the biller there grew a green willer
   A weeping all night with the bank for a piller.

And over and over again she sang with a wavering cadence, incoherently
sometimes, but always with tender pleading, something about "where the
stream was a-flowin', the gentle kine lowin', and over my grave keep
the green willers growin'."

"It is pathetic to hear her," the nurse said, "and now listen to her
asking about her poppies."

"In the box, miss; I brought the seed hacross the hocean, and they wuz
beauties, they wuz wot came hup. They'll be noddin' and wavin' now red
and 'andsome, if she hasn't cut them. She wouldn't cut them, would she,
miss? She couldn't 'ave the 'eart, I think."

"No indeed, she hasn't cut them," the nurse declared with decision,
taking Polly's burning hand tenderly in hers. "No one could cut down
such beauties. What nonsense to think of such a thing, Polly. They're
blooming, I tell you, red and handsome, almost as tall as you are,
Polly."

The office-boy touched the nurse's arm.

"A gentleman who gave no name left this box for one of the typhoid
patients," he said, handing her the box.

The nurse read the address and the box trembled in her hands as she
nervously opened it and took out the contents.

"Polly, Polly!" she cried, excitedly, "didn't I tell you they were
blooming, red and handsome."

But Polly's eyes were burning with delirium and her lips babbled
meaninglessly.

The nurse held the poppies over her.

Her arms reached out caressingly.

"Oh, miss!" she cried, her mind coming back from the shadows. "They
have come at last, the darlin's, the sweethearts, the loves, the
beauties." She held them in a close embrace. "They're from 'ome,
they're from 'ome!" she gasped painfully, for her breath came with
difficulty now. "I can't just see them, miss, the lights is movin' so
much, and the way the bed 'eaves, but, tell me, miss, is there a little
silky one, hedged with w'ite? It was mother's favourite one of hall.
I'd like to 'ave it in my 'and, miss."

The nurse put it in her hand. She was only a young nurse and her face
was wet with tears.

"It's like 'avin' my mother's 'and, miss, it is," she murmured softly.
"Ye wouldn't mind the dark if ye 'ad yer mother's 'and, would ye, miss?"

And then the nurse took Polly's throbbing head in her strong young
arms, and soothed its restless tossing with her cool soft touch, and
told her through her tears of that other Friend, who would go with her
all the way.

"I'm that 'appy, miss," Polly murmured faintly. "It's like I was goin'
'ome. Say that again about the valley," and the nurse repeated tenderly
that promise of incomparable sweetness:

   Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow
   of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me,
   thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

"It's just like 'avin' mother's 'and to 'old the little silky one,"
Polly murmured sleepily.

The nurse put the poppies beside Polly's face on the pillow, and
drawing a screen around her went on to the next patient. A case of
urgent need detained her at the other end of the ward, and it was not
until the dawn was shining blue in the windows that she came back on
her rounds.

Polly lay just as she had left her. The crimson petals lay thick upon
her face and hair. The homesickness and redness of weeping had gone
forever from her eyes, for they were looking now upon the King in his
beauty! In her hand, now cold and waxen, she held one little silky
poppy, red with edges of white. Polly had gone home.

There was a whisper among the poppies that grew behind the cookhouse
that morning as the first gleam of the sun came yellow and wan over the
fields; there was a whisper and a shivering among the poppies as the
morning breezes, cold and chill, rippled over them, and a shower of
crystal drops mingled with the crimson petals that fluttered to the
ground. It was not until Pearl came out and picked a handful of them
for her dingy little room that they held up their heads once more and
waved and nodded, red and handsome.



CHAPTER XVII

"EGBERT AND EDYTHE"

When Tom Motherwell called at the Millford post office one day he got
the surprise of his life.

The Englishman had asked him to get his mail, and, of course, there was
the Northwest Farmer to get, and there might be catalogues; but the
possibilities of a letter addressed to Mr. Thos. Motherwell did not
occur to him.

But it was there!

A square gray envelope with his own name written on it. He had never
before got a real letter. Once he had a machinery catalogue sent to
him, with a typewritten letter inside beginning "Dear Sir," but his
mother had told him that it was just money they were after, but what
would she say if she saw this?

He did not trust himself to open it in the plain gaze of the people in
the office. The girl behind the wicket noticed his excitement.

"Ye needn't glue yer eye on me," Tom thought indignantly. "I'll not
open it here for you to watch me. They're awful pryin' in this office.
What do you bet she hasn't opened it?" He moved aside as others pressed
up to the wicket, feeling that every eye was upon him.

In a corner outside the door, Tom opened his letter, and laboriously
made out its contents. It was written neatly with carefully shaded
capitals:

   Dear Tom: We are going to have a party to-morrow night,
   because George and Fred are going back to college next
   week. We want you to come and bring your Englishman.
   We all hope you will come.

   Ever your friend,

   NELLIE SLATER.

Tom read it again with burning cheeks. A party at Slater's and him
invited!

He walked down the street feeling just the same as when his colt got
the prize at the "Fair." He felt he was a marked man--eagerly sought
after--invited to parties--girls writing to him! That's what it was to
have the cash!--you bet pa and ma were right!--money talks every time!

When he came in sight of home his elation vanished. His father and
mother would not let him go, he knew that very well. They were afraid
that Nellie Slater wanted to marry him. And Nellie Slater was not
eligible for the position of daughter-in-law. Nellie Slater had never
patched a quilt nor even made a tie-down. She always used baking powder
instead of cream of tartar and soda, and was known to have a leaning
toward canned goods. Mrs. Motherwell considered her just the girl to
spend a man's honest earnings and bring him to seedy ruin. Moreover,
she idled away her time, teaching cats to jump, and her eighteen years
old, if she was a day!

Tom knew that if he went to the party it must be by stealth. When he
drove up to the kitchen door his mother looked up from her ironing and
asked:

"What kept you, Tom?"

Tom had not been detained at all, but Mrs. Motherwell always used this
form of salutation to be sure.

Tom grumbled a reply, and handing out the mail began to unhitch.

Mrs. Motherwell read the addresses on the Englishman's letters:

   Mr. Arthur Wemyss,
   c/o Mr. S. Motherwell,
   Millford P.O.,
   Manitoba, Canada,
   Township 8, range 16, sec't. 20. North America.

"Now I wonder who's writing to him?" she said, laying the two letters
down reluctantly.

There was one other letter addressed to Mr. Motherwell, which she took
to be a twine bill. It was post-marked Brandon. She put it up in the
pudding dish on the sideboard.

As Tom led the horse to the stable he met Pearl coming in with the eggs.

"See here, kid," he said carelessly, handing her the letter.

Tom knew Pearl was to be trusted. She had a good head, Pearl had, for a
girl.

"Oh, good shot!" Pearl cried delightedly, as she read the note. "Won't
that be great? Are your clothes ready, though?" It was the eldest of
the family who spoke.

"Clothes," Tom said contemptuously. "They are a blamed sight readier
than I am."

"I'll blacken your boots," Pearl said, "and press out a tie. Say, how
about a collar?"

"Oh, the clothes are all right, but pa and ma won't let me go near
Nellie Slater."

"Is she tooberkler?" Pearl asked quickly.

"Not so very," Tom answered guardedly. "Ma is afraid I might marry her."

"Is she awful pretty?" Pearl asked, glowing with pleasure. Here was a
rapturous romance.

"You bet," Tom declared with pride. "She's the swellest girl in these
parts"--this with the air of a man who had weighed many feminine charms
and found them wanting.

"Has she eyes like stars, lips like cherries, neck like a swan, and a
laugh like a ripple of music?" Pearl asked eagerly.

"Them's it," Tom replied modestly.

"Then I'd go, you bet!" was Pearl's emphatic reply. "There's your
mother calling."

"Yes'm, I'm comin'. I'll help you, Tom. Keep a stout heart and all will
be well."

Pearl knew all about frustrated love. Ma had read a story once, called
"Wedded and Parted, and Wedded Again." Cruel and designing parents had
parted young Edythe (pronounced Ed'-ith-ee) and Egbert, and Egbert just
pined and pined and pined. How would Mrs. Motherwell like it if poor
Tom began to pine and turn from his victuals. The only thing that saved
Egbert from the silent tomb where partings come no more, was the old
doctor who used to say, "Keep a stout heart, Egbert, all will be well."
That's why she said it to Tom.

Edythe had eyes like stars, mouth like cherries, neck like a swan, and
a laugh like a ripple of music, and wasn't it strange, Nellie Slater
had, too? Pearl knew now why Tom chewed Old Chum tobacco so much. Men
often plunge into dissipation when they are crossed in love, and maybe
Tom would go and be a robber or a pirate or something; and then he
might kill a man and be led to the scaffold, and he would turn his
haggard face to the howling mob, and say, "All that I am my mother made
me." Say, wouldn't that make her feel cheap! Wouldn't that make a woman
feel like thirty cents if anything would. Here Pearl's gloomy
reflections overcame her and she sobbed aloud.

Mrs. Motherwell looked up apprehensively

"What are you crying for, Pearl?" she asked not unkindly.

Then, oh, how Pearl wanted to point her finger at Mrs. Motherwell, and
say with piercing clearness, the way a woman did in the book:

"I weep not for myself, but for you and for your children." But, of
course, that would not do, so she said:

"I ain't cryin'--much."

Pearl was grating horse-radish that afternoon, but the tears she shed
were for the parted lovers. She wondered if they ever met in the
moonlight and vowed to be true till the rocks melted in the sun, and
all the seas ran dry. That's what Egbert had said, and then a rift of
cloud passed athwart the moon's face, and Edythe fainted dead away
because it is bad luck to have a cloud go over the moon when people are
busy plighting vows, and wasn't it a good thing that Egbert was there
to break her fall? Pearl could just see poor Nellie Slater standing
dry-eyed and pale at the window wondering if Tom could get away from
his lynx-eyed parents who dogged his every footstep, and Pearl's tears
flowed afresh.

But Nellie Slater was not standing dry-eyed and pale at the window.

"Did you ask Tom Motherwell?" Fred, her brother, asked, looking up from
a list he held in his hand.

"I sent him a note," Nellie answered, turning around from the
baking-board. "We couldn't leave Tom out. Poor boy, he never has any
fun, and I do feel sorry for him."

"His mother won't let him come, anyway," Fred said smiling. "So don't
set your heart on seeing him, Nell."

"How discouraging you are Fred," Nellie replied laughing. "Now, I
believe he will come. Tom would be a smart boy if he had a chance, I
think. But just think what it must be like to live with two people like
the Motherwells. You do not realise it, Fred, because you have had the
superior advantages of living with clever people like your brother
Peter and your sister Eleanor Mary; isn't that so, Peter?"

Peter Slater, the youngest of the family, who had just come in, laid
down the milk-pails before replying.

"We have done our best for them all, Nellie," he said modestly. "I hope
they will repay us. But did I hear you say Tom Motherwell was coming?"

"You heard Nell say so," Fred answered, checking over the names. "Nell
seems to like Tom pretty well."

"I do, indeed," Nellie assented, without turning around.

"You show good taste, Eleanor," Peter said as he washed his hands.

"Who is going to drive into town for Camilla?" Nellie asked that
evening.

"I am," Fred answered promptly.

"No, you're not, I am," Peter declared.

George looked up hastily.

"I am going to bring Miss Rose out," he said firmly.

Then they laughed.

"Father," Nellie said gravely, "just to save trouble among the boys,
will you do it?"

"With the greatest of pleasure," her father said, smiling.

Under Pearl's ready sympathy Tom began to feel the part of the stricken
lover, and to become as eager to meet Nellie as Egbert had been to meet
the beautiful Edythe. He moped around the field that afternoon and let
Arthur do the heavy share of the work.

The next morning before Mrs. Motherwell appeared Pearl and Tom decided
upon the plan of campaign. Pearl was to get his Sunday clothes taken to
the bluff in the pasture field, sometime during the day. Then in the
evening Tom would retire early, watch his chance, slip out the front
door, make his toilet on the bluff, and then, oh bliss! away to Edythe.
Pearl had thought of having him make a rope of the sheets; but she
remembered that this plan of escape was only used when people were
leaving a place for good--such as a prison; but for coming back again,
perhaps after all, it was better to use the front door. Egbert had used
the sheets, though.

Fortune favoured Pearl's plans that afternoon. A book agent called at
the back door with the prospectus of a book entitled, "Woman's
Influence in the Home." While he was busy explaining to Mrs. Motherwell
the great advantages of possessing a copy of this book, and she was
equally busy explaining to him her views on bookselling as an
occupation for an able-bodied man, Pearl secured Tom's suit, ran down
the front stairs, out the front door and away to the bluff.

Coming back to the house she had an uneasy feeling that she was doing
something wrong. Then she remembered Edythe, dry-eyed and pale, and her
fears vanished. Pearl had recited once at a Band of Hope meeting a poem
of her own choosing--this was before the regulations excluding secular
subjects became so rigid. Pearl's recitation dealt with a captive
knight who languished in a mouldy prison. He begged a temporary
respite--his prayer was heard--a year was given him. He went back to
his wife and child and lived the year in peace and happiness. The hour
came to part, friends entreated--wife and child wept--the knight alone
was calm.

He stepped through the casement, a proud flush on his cheek, casting
aside wife, child, friends. "What are wife and child to the word of a
knight?" he said. "And behold the dawn has come!"

Pearl had lived the scene over and over; to her it stood for all that
was brave and heroic. Coming up through the weeds that day, she was
that man. Her step was proud, her head was thrown back, her brown eyes
glowed and burned; there was strength and grace in every motion.

When Tom Motherwell furtively left his father's house, and made his way
to the little grove where his best clothes were secreted, his movements
were followed by two anxious brown eyes that looked out of the little
window in the rear of the house.

The men came in from the barn, and the night hush settled down upon the
household. Mr. and Mrs. Motherwell went to their repose, little
dreaming that their only son had entered society, and, worse still, was
exposed to the baneful charms of the reckless young woman who was known
to have a preference for baking powder and canned goods, and curled her
hair with the curling tongs.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE PARTY AT SLATER'S

"I wonder how we are going to get all the people in to-night," Edith
Slater said gravely as the family sat at supper. "I am afraid the walls
will be bulged out to-morrow."

"The new chicken-house and the cellar will do for the overflow
meetings," George remarked.

"I borrow the pantry if it comes to a crush, you and I, Camilla," Peter
Slater said, helping himself to another piece of pie. Camilla had come
out in the afternoon to help with the preparations.

"No, Camilla is my partner," Fred said severely. "Peter is growing up
too fast, don't you think so, mother? Since I lent him my razor to play
with there's no end to the airs he gives himself. I think he should go
to bed at eight o'clock to-night, same as other nights."

Peter laughed scornfully, but Nellie interposed.

"You boys needn't quarrel over Camilla for Jim Russell is coming, and
when Camilla sees him, what chance do you suppose you'll have?"

"And when Jim sees Camilla, what chance will you have, Nell?" George
asked.

"Not one in a hundred; but I am prepared for the worst," Nellie
answered, good-naturedly.

"That means she has asked Tom Motherwell," Peter explained.

Then Mrs. Slater told them to hurry along with their supper for the
people would soon be coming.

It was Mrs. Slater who had planned the party. Mrs. Slater was the
leading spirit in everything in the household that required dash and
daring. Hers was the dominant voice, though nothing louder than a
whisper had been heard from her for years. She laughed in a whisper,
she cried in a whisper. Yet in some way her laugh was contagious, and
her tears brought comfort to those with whom she wept.

When she proposed the party the girls foresaw difficulties. The house
was small--there were so many to ask--it was a busy time.

Mrs. Slater stood firm.

"Ask everybody," she whispered. "Nobody minds being crowded at a party.
I was at a party once where we had to go outside to turn around, the
house was so small. I'll never forget what a good time we had."

Mr. Slater was dressed and ready for anything long before the time had
come for the guests to arrive. An hour before he had sat down
resignedly and said, "Come, girls, do as you think best with the old
man, scrub him, polish him, powder him, blacken his eyebrows, do not
spare him, he's yours," and the girls had laughingly accepted the
privilege.

George, whose duty it was to attend to the lamps for the occasion, came
in with a worried look, on his usually placid face.

"The aristocratic parlour-lamp is indisposed," he said. "It has balked,
refuses to turn up, and smells dreadfully."

"Bring in the plebeians, George," Fred cried gaily, "and never mind the
patrician--the forty-cent plebs never fail. I told Jim Russell to bring
his lantern, and Peter can stand in a corner and light matches if we
are short."

"It's working now," Edith called from the parlour, "burning
beautifully; mother drew her hand over it."

Soon the company began to arrive. Bashful, self-conscious girls, some
of them were, old before their time with the marks of toil, heavy and
unremitting, upon them, hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and
awkward. These were the daughters of rich farmers. Good girls they
were, too, conscientious, careful, unselfish, thinking it a virtue to
stifle every ambition, smother every craving for pleasure.

When they felt tired, they called it laziness and felt disgraced, and
thus they had spent their days, working, working from the gray dawn,
until the darkness came again, and all for what? When in after years
these girls, broken in health and in spirits, slipped away to premature
graves, or, worse still, settled into chronic invalidism, of what avail
was the memory of the cows they milked, the mats they hooked, the
number of pounds of butter they made.

Not all the girls were like these. Maud Murray was there. Maud Murray
with the milkmaid cheeks and curly black hair, the typical country girl
of bounding life aid spirits, the type so often seen upon the stage and
so seldom elsewhere.

Mrs. Motherwell had warned Tom against Maud Murray as well as Nellie
Slater. She had once seen Maud churning, and she had had a newspaper
pinned to the wall in front of her, and was reading it as she worked,
and Mrs. Motherwell knew that a girl who would do that would come to no
good.

Martha Perkins was the one girl of whom Mrs. Motherwell approved.
Martha's record on butter and quilts and mats stood high. Martha was a
nice quiet girl. Mrs. Motherwell often said a "nice, quiet, unappearing
girl." Martha certainly was quiet. Her conversational attainments did
not run high. "Things is what they are, and what's the good of saying
anything," Martha had once said in defence of her silent ways.

She was small and sallow-skinned and was dressed in an anaemic gray;
her thin hay-coloured hair was combed straight back from a rather fine
forehead. She stooped a little when she walked, and even when not
employed her hands picked nervously at each other. Martha's shyness,
the "unappearing" quality, was another of her virtues in the eyes of
Tom's mother. Martha rarely left home even to go to Millford. Martha
did not go to the Agricultural Fair when her mats and quilts and butter
and darning and buttonholes on cotton got their red tickets. Martha
stayed at home and dug potatoes--a nice, quiet, unappearing girl.

When they played games at the Slaters that evening, Martha would not
play. She never cared for games she said, they tired a person so. She
would just watch the others, and she wished again that she had her
knitting.

Then the kitchen floor was cleared; table, chairs and lounge were set
outside to make room for the dancing, and when the violins rang out
with the "Arkansaw Traveller," and big John Kennedy in his official
voice of caller-off announced, "Select your partners," every person
felt that the real business of the evening had begun.

Tom had learned to dance, though his parents would have been surprised
had they known it. Out in the granary on rainy days hired men had
obligingly instructed him in the mysteries of the two-step and waltz.
He sat in a corner and watched the first dance. When Jim Russell came
into the hall, after receiving a warm welcome from Mr. and Mrs. Slater,
who stood at the door, he was conscious of a sudden thrill of pleasure.
It was the vision of Camilla, at the farther end of the dining-room, as
she helped the Slater girls to receive their guests. Camilla wore a red
dress that brought out the blue-black of her eyes, and it seemed to Jim
as he watched her graceful movements that he had never seen anyone so
beautiful. She was piloting a bevy of bashful girls to the stairway,
and as she passed him she gave him a little nod and smile that set his
heart dancing.

He heard the caller-off calling for partners for a quadrille. The
fiddlers had already tuned their instruments. From where he stood he
could see the figures forming, but Jim watched the stairway. At last
she came, with a company of other girls, none of whom he saw, and he
asked her for the first dance. Jim was not a conceited young man, but
he felt that she would not refuse him. Nor did she.

Camilla danced well and so did Jim, and many an eye followed them as
they wound in and out through the other dancers. When the dance was
over he led her to a seat and sat beside her. They had much to talk of.
Camilla was anxious to hear of Pearl, and it seemed all at once that
they had become very good friends indeed.

The second dance was a waltz. Tom did not know that it was the music
that stirred his soul with a sudden tenderness, a longing indefinite,
that was full of pain and yet was all sweetness. Martha who sat near
him looked at him half expectantly. But her little gray face and
twitching hands repelled him. On the other side of the room, Nellie
Slater, flushed and smiling was tapping her foot to the music.

He found himself on his feet. "Who cares for mats?" he muttered. He was
beside Nellie in an instant.

"Nellie, will you dance with me?" he faltered, wondering at his own
temerity.

"I will, Tom, with pleasure," she said, smiling.

His arm was around her now and they were off, one, two, three; one,
two, three; yes, he had the step. "Over the foam we glide," in and out
through the other dancers, the violins weaving that story of love never
ending. "What though the world be wide"--Nellie's head was just below
his face--"Love's golden star will guide." Nellie's hand was in his as
they floated on the rainbow-sea. "Drifting along, glad is our
song"--her hair blew against his cheek as they swept past the open
door. What did he care what his mother would say. He was Egbert now.
Edythe was in his arms. "While we are side by side" the violins sang,
glad, triumphant, that old story that runs like a thread of gold
through all life's patterns; that old song, old yet ever new,
deathless, unchangeable, which maketh t

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