ed heartily; "you're the sort of a
girl for me. Say, what would you say to coming out West and keeping
house for me?"

Here was Opportunity come back to her! Christina seized him tightly.

"Oh, my! Wouldn't that be grand. It would be the very best--well, the
_second_ best thing in the world!"

"And what would be the very best?"

"To go to the University with Sandy next Fall!" she answered promptly.

"Well, I declare!" Allister laughed, "you've all been bitten by the
education bug. Mr. Sinclair used to say that if father was to change
the catechism, he'd have it read: 'Man's chief end is to glorify God
and get a good education.'"

"Just what I believe exactly!" declared Christina, who was trembling
with excitement.

"But girls go and get married, or ought to," said Allister practically.

"Well, I hope I will some day," confessed Christina. "I don't want to
be an old maid like the Auntie Grants. But I want to go away from
Orchard Glen first, and see what the world's like--and get a grand
education and know heaps and do something great--oh, I don't know what,
but just something like you read about in the papers!"

The cows were in the pasture by this time, and as Allister put up the
bars he said,

"Let's set down here for a few minutes and settle this matter."

Christina perched herself at his side on the top of the low rail fence.
The soft May mists were gathering in the valleys, the orchards shone
pink in the sunset. Away down in the beaver meadow the frogs were
tuning up for their first overture of evening, and a whippoorwill far
up in the Slash had begun to sing his lonely song to the dark hillside.
Allister looked about him and uttered a great sigh of contentment.

"Oh, it's great to be home again," he breathed. "Now that I don't have
to keep my nose to the grindstone I'm going to come home oftener.
Things change so. We may never all be home again together."

"Well, I'd be sorry for that," said Christina, who was fairly dancing
with impatience. "But I'd be sorrier if I thought things wouldn't
change. We don't want to live here for ever and ever just as we are."

"No, of course not. But I hope some of us will always be in Orchard
Glen. John always will."

"I suppose so. John's spent all his life working hard for the rest of
us," cried Christina, "and I suppose he'll go on doing it to the end."

"There's nobody better than John," declared Allister. "But let me tell
you this, that the m