eeper were bearing him swiftly towards her.

Miss Gordon's needle flashed in and out of Malcolm's sock, in a
disapproving manner. She tried to look severe, but in spite of
herself, her face showed something of pleasant excitement, for Miss
Gordon was very much of a woman and could not but find a love affair
interesting.

She had been a handsome girl once, and her fine, high-bred face was
still almost beautiful. It was covered with innumerable tiny wrinkles,
but her dark eyes were bright, and her cheeks bore a fixed pink flush,
the birth-mark of the land of heather. Her hair, glossy black, with
not a thread of gray, was parted in the middle and lay on either side
in perfectly even waves. Her figure was slim and stiffly straight, her
hands long and slender. She looked every inch a woman of refinement,
and also a woman who would not flinch from any task that duty demanded.

And duty had asked much of her during these last few years--exile,
privations, uncongenial tasks, and the mothering of eight orphans.
This last demand had been the hardest. Even to their own mother, upon
whom the burden had been laid gradually and gently, in Nature's wise
way, the task had been a big one; but what had it been to her, who,
without a moment's warning, had one day found herself at the head of a
family, ranging from sixteen years to six days? Many times she had
needed all her strength of character to keep her from dropping it all,
and flying back to the peace and quiet of her old Edinburgh home. And
yet she had struggled on under the burden for four years--four long
years this spring; but even at this late day, she was overcome with a
feeling of homesickness, as poignant as it had been in her first
Canadian springtime.

She suspended her needle and looked about her as though inquiring the
cause of this renewed longing. It was a May-day--a perfect Ontario
May-day--all a luxury of blossoms and perfume. In the morning rain had
fallen, and though now the clouds lay piled in dazzling white
mountain-heaps far away on the horizon, leaving the dome above an empty
quivering blue, still the fields and the gardens remembered the showers
with gratitude and sparkled joyously under their garniture of
diamond-drops. The wild cherry-trees bordering the lane and the
highway, and the orchard behind the house were smothered in odorous
blossoms of white and pink. A big flower-laden hawthorn grew in the
lane, near the little gate leading from th