frey so cleverly.'

Pete would be in directly, Patty thought; he had just gone to the mill,
he was bound to be back soon. Mother was making the lavender bags in
the storeroom, wouldn't the young ladies step in? she'd be fine and
pleased; and she showed them into the house and held back Nancy, who
would have followed, since she never would learn when she wasn't
wanted. The store-room was a long, low room, running along the back of
the house and looking on to the garden. To-day it was full of the
clean, pleasant scent of lavender; there were great trays of dried
lavender on the long table, and Martha Rogers sat stitching away at
muslin bags to put it in. Every year those lavender bags were made at
Oakfield Place; they were all alike, of black muslin bound with
lilac-coloured ribbon. Old Mrs. Maitland had made them herself up to
the last year she lived; there were great stores of beautiful linen in
the house, sheets and towels and table-cloths which she and her sisters
had stitched at in their young days, and they were all stowed away in
big presses, with the fragrant lavender between them, until the captain
should bring a wife home to Oakfield and want them. The lavender bags
which she did not use herself Mrs. Maitland gave to her friends; there
was no one she had been fond of who did not possess several of the
little sweet-scented presents. Miss Amelia Crayshaw had had plenty of
them, and Angel and Betty had received one each, long ago, one day when
they had been to drink tea at the Place with their cousin before Mrs.
Maitland died. And as long as they lived the scent of lavender would
always bring back to them the old house, and the sunny sloping garden,
and the long, low store-room, with its deep window seats and shelves
and presses, and Martha stitching away at black muslin and lilac
ribbon. For the captain liked to know that things were done still as
they had been in his mother's lifetime, and so the lavender was
gathered every year, and the bags were made to put among the stores of
linen which was waiting, all snowy and fragrant, till the master of the
house came home.

Martha Rogers was a tall, comely woman, with capable hands and a
sensible motherly face. And, indeed, she had mothered and cosseted
many a child besides her own three, and Angel and Betty Wyndham were
among the number. Often and often when they were little girls they had
come to Martha with their troubles, for Cousin Amelia, though she wa