wide-apart eyes as frank and sunny as a moorland burn, an innocent
mouth. It seemed to Jean a very uninteresting face. She was young,
certainly, but that was all--not beautiful, or brilliant and witty. Lord
Bidborough must see scores of lovely girls. Jean seemed to see them
walking past her in a procession--girls who had maids to do their hair
in the most approved fashion, constantly renewed girls whose clothes
were a dream of daintiness all charming, all witty, all fitted to be
wife to a man like Lord Bidborough. What was he doing now, Jean
wondered. Perhaps dancing, or sitting out with someone. Jean could see
him so clearly, listening, smiling, with lazy, amused eyes. By now he
must be thankful that the penny-plain girl at Priorsford had not
snatched at the offer he had made her, but had had the sense to send him
away. It must have been a sudden madness on his part. He had never said
a word of love to her--then suddenly in the rain and mud, when she was
looking her very plainest, muffled up in a thick coat, clogged by
goloshes, to ask her to marry him!

Jean nodded at the girl in the glass.

"What you've got to do is to put him out of your head, and be thankful
that you have lots to do, and a house to keep, and boys to make happy,
and aren't a heroine writhing about in a novel."

But she sighed as she turned away. Doing one's duty is a dreary business
for three-and-twenty. It goes on for such a long time.

CHAPTER XVIII

"It was told me I should be rich by the fairies."--_A Winter's
Tale._

January is always a long, flat month: the Christmas festivities are
over, the bills are waiting to be paid, the weather is very often of the
dreariest, spring is yet far distant. With February, hope and the
snowdrops begin to spring, but January is a month to be _warstled_
through as best we can.

This January of which I write Jean felt to be a peculiarly long, dull
month. She could not understand why, for David was at home, and she had
always thought that to have the three boys with her made up the sum of
her happiness. She told herself that it was Pamela she missed. It made
such a difference knowing that the door would not open to admit that
tall figure; the want of the embroidery frame seemed to take a
brightness from the room, and the lack of that little gay laugh of
Pamela's left a dullness that the loudest voices did nothing to dispel.

Pamela wrote that the visit to Champertoun had been a signal suc