e last volt of her energy made
her miserable when she considered that she was not fairly done by in
return. Pressed down and running over were the services she offered to
the general good, and it was on the ground of the merest justice that
she required from her daughters "some sort of interest" in domestic
affairs. From her eldest she got no sort of interest, and it was
like the removal of a grievance from the hearth when Advena took up
employment which ranged her definitely beyond the necessity of being
of any earthly use in the house. Advena's occupation to some extent
absorbed her shortcomings, which was much better than having to
attribute them to her being naturally "through-other," or naturally
clever, according to the bias of the moment. Mrs Murchison no longer
excused or complained of her daughter; but she still pitied the man.

"The boys," of course, were too young to think of matrimony. They were
still the boys, the Murchison boys; they would be the boys at forty if
they remained under their father's roof. In the mother country, men in
short jackets and round collars emerge from the preparatory schools; in
the daughter lands boys in tailcoats conduct serious affairs. Alec
and Oliver, in the business, were frivolous enough as to the feminine
interest. For all Dr Drummond's expressed and widely known views upon
the subject, it was a common thing for one or both of these young men
to stray from the family pew on Sunday evenings to the services of other
communions, thereafter to walk home in the dusk under the maples with
some attractive young person, and be sedately invited to finish the
evening on her father's verandah. Neither of them was guiltless of silk
ties knitted or handkerchiefs initialled by certain fingers; without
repeating scandal, one might say by various fingers. For while the
ultimate import of these matters was not denied in Elgin, there was
a general feeling against giving too much meaning to them, probably
originating in a reluctance among heads of families to add to their
responsibilities. These early spring indications were belittled and
laughed at; so much so that the young people them selves hardly
took them seriously, but regarded them as a form of amusement almost
conventional. Nothing would have surprised or embarrassed them more
than to learn that their predilections had an imperative corollary,
that anything should, of necessity, "come of it." Something, of course,
occasionally did co