meditated immediate action of some
sort, she looked at him so fiercely that her glance interrupted him for
a moment, "if I were to stop the stove smoking?" He completed the
sentence with great humility, evidently puzzled to know how he had
excited her look of offence.

She gave another excited poke at the damper herself, and, having got her
hand blacked, wiped it on her coarse grey apron. The diamond keeper
above the wedding-ring looked oddly out of place, but not more so than
the small, shapely hand that wore it. Seeing that she had done the stove
no good, she sat back in her chair with her hands crossed upon her now
dirty apron.

"You can do nothing with it. Before we came to Canada no one told us
that the kitchen stoves invariably smoked. Had they done so I should
have chosen another country. However, as I say to my children, we must
make the best of it now. There's no use crying; there's no use
lamenting. It only harasses their father."

The last words were said with a sharp glance of reproof at Blue and Red.
This mother never forgot the bringing up of her children in any one's
presence, but she readily forgot the presence of others in her remarks
to her children.

"But you aren't making the best of it," said the visitor. With that he
got up, carefully lifted an iron piece in the back of the stove, turned
a key thus disclosed in the pipe, and so materially altered the mood of
the fire that in a few moments it stopped smoking and crackled nicely.

"Did you ever, mamma!" cried the girls. A juggler's feat could not have
entertained them more.

"_If_ for a time, first off, you had someone in the house who had lived
in this country, you'd get on first class," said the youth.

"But you know, my dears," Mrs. Rexford spoke to her daughters,
forgetting the young man for a moment as before, "if I had not supposed
that Eliza understood the stove I should have inquired of Principal
Trenholme before now."

"May I enquire where you got your help?" asked the American. "If she was
from this locality she certainly ought to have comprehended the stove."

"She is a native of the country."

"As I say," he went on, with some emphasis, "if she comes from
hereabouts, or further west, she ought to have understood this sort of a
stove; but, on the other hand, if she comes from the French district,
where they use only the common box stove, she would not understand this
kind."

He seemed to be absorbed entirely in the stove, and