stomed to this sort of talk, and
yet it hurt her sensitive, affectionate nature every time. The blue
eyes took on no indignant light; instead, they filled with tears,
which irritated her mother still more, and she said, with increased
sharpness:

"There, go away. You are made of too fine stuff for common purposes;
getting so touchy that not a word can be said to you."

Counting time by her mother's calendar, Florence had been a long time
doing a little, but her nature was different from her mother's, all
her movements were gentle. She had been reverently following her
mother's directions. Her untiring patience ferreted dust out of every
little corner where it had lodged in the furniture; she had mounted
the step-ladder and dusted the pictures, had cleaned and polished all
the little ornaments. True, she lingered a moment over a book of
engravings, and to kiss a little statuette of "Prayer," but she
thought she had done it all so nicely, and a little word of praise
would have made her so happy. It was hard, when she had done her
best, to have only fault-findings.

At a very critical stage of affairs in the pastry-making, Nettie
Blynn knocked at the side door. She only wanted to see Maggie just a
minute about the Christmas entertainment. Maggie set down a
half-beaten dish of eggs and ran. The minute lengthened into many
more, and the girls talked and talked, as girls will, forgetting all
about time. When Margaret returned to the kitchen she found her
mother in a perfect fever of haste, and poor Florence trying to go
two or three ways at once.

"Now, Margaret," her mother began, "I might just as well depend upon
the wind as you! drop everything and run the minute you are called.
That is just as much sense as Nettie Blynn has, running to the
neighbours Saturday morning, and staying like that, when I have so
much to do. You don't seem to care whether you help me or not."

"Why, mother, how could I help it?" Margaret answered with spirit. "I
didn't ask her to come, and I couldn't tell her to go away. Saturday
morning is as good as any other time to her; she doesn't have to work
all day Saturday, and how should she know that I do?"

Just here the front door-bell gave a malicious ting-a-ling. Mrs.
Allan, an old friend who lived several miles out of town, had just a
few minutes before train time; she was sure there was no one in the
world she wanted to see so much as Mrs. Murray, and Mrs. Murray was
just as sure that she