ake place the first Monday after Finlay's return. That would give them
time to take a day or two in Toronto, perhaps, and get back for Finlay's
Wednesday prayer meeting. "Or I could take it off his hands," said Dr
Drummond to himself. "That would free them till the end of the week."
Solicitude increased in him that the best should be made of it; after
all, for a long time they had been making the worst. Mrs Forsyth, whom
it had been necessary to inform when Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Cameron
became actually imminent, saw plainly that the future Mrs Finlay
had made a very good impression on the Doctor; and as nature, in Mrs
Forsyth's case, was more powerful than grace, she became critical
accordingly. Still, she was an honest soul: she found more fault with
what she called Miss Cameron's "shirt-waists" than with Miss Cameron
herself, whom she didn't doubt to be a good woman though she would
never see thirty-five again. Time and observation would no doubt mend or
remodel the shirt-waists; and meanwhile both they and Miss Cameron
would do very well for East Elgin, Mrs Forsyth avowed. Mrs Kilbannon,
definitely given over to caps and curls as they still wear them in
Bross, Mrs Forsyth at once formed a great opinion of. She might be
something, Mrs Forsyth thought, out of a novel by Mr Crockett, and made
you long to go to Scotland, where presumably everyone was like her. On
the whole the ladies from Bross profited rather than lost by the new
frame they stepped into in the house of Dr Drummond, of Elgin, Ontario.
Their special virtues, of dignity and solidity and frugality, stood out
saliently against the ease and unconstraint about them; in the profusion
of the table it was little less than edifying to hear Mrs Kilbannon,
invited to preserves, say, "Thank you, I have butter." It was the
pleasantest spectacle, happily common enough, of the world's greatest
inheritance. We see it in immigrants of all degrees, and we may perceive
it in Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. They come in couples and in
companies from those little imperial islands, bringing the crusted
qualities of the old blood bottled there so long, and sink with grateful
absorption into the wide bountiful stretches of the further countries.
They have much to take, but they give themselves; and so it comes about
that the Empire is summed up in the race, and the flag flies for its
ideals.

Mrs Forsyth had been told of the approaching event; but neither Dr
Drummond, who was n