ver
occasional necessities for strong expressions with ancestral kindness.
She felt like reverting to him more than once that summer, because, Rast
having gone, there was less of a whirlwind of out-door life, of pleasure
in the woods and on the water, and the plain bare state of things stood
clearly revealed. Anne fell behind every month with the household
expenses in spite of all her efforts, and every month Miss Lois herself
made up the deficiency. The boys were larger, and careless. The old
house yawned itself apart. Of necessity the gap between the income and
the expenditure must grow wider and wider. Anne did not realize this,
but Miss Lois did. The young girl thought each month that she must have
been unusually extravagant; she counted in some item as an extra expense
which would not occur again, gave up something for herself, and began
anew with fresh hope. On almost all subjects Miss Lois had the smallest
amount of patience for what she called blindness, but on this she was
silent. Now and then her eyes would follow Anne's father with a troubled
gaze; but if he looked toward her or spoke, she at once assumed her
usual brisk manner, and was even more cheerful than usual. Thus, the
mentor being silent, the family drifted on.

The short Northern summer, with its intense sunshine and its cool
nights, was now upon them. Fire crackled upon the hearth of the Agency
sitting-room in the early morning, but it died out about ten o'clock,
and from that time until five in the afternoon the heat and the
brightness were peculiarly brilliant and intense. It seemed as though
the white cliffs must take fire and smoulder in places where they were
without trees to cover them; to climb up and sit there was to feel the
earth burning under you, and to be penetrated with a sun-bath of rays
beating straight down through the clear air like white shafts. And yet
there was nothing resembling the lowland heats in this atmosphere, for
all the time a breeze blew, ruffling the Straits, and bearing the
vessels swiftly on to the east and the west on long tacks, making the
leaves in the woods flutter on their branchlets, and keeping the
wild-brier bushes, growing on angles and points of the cliff, stretched
out like long whip-cords wreathed in pink and green. There was nothing,
too, of the stillness of the lowlands, for always one could hear the
rustling and laughing of the forest, and the wash of the water on the
pebbly beach. There were seldom