"It was Camilla," she whispered to herself. "Oh, I love Camilla! and I never said 'G.o.d bless Camilla,'"--with a sudden pang of remorse.

She was on her knees in a moment and added the postscript.

"I can send the orange home to ma, and she can put the skins in the chist to make the things smell nice, and I'll git that windy open to-morrow."

Clasping her little purse in her hand, and with the orange close beside her head, she lay down to sleep. The smell of the orange made her forget the heavy air in the room.

"Anyway," she murmured contentedly, "the Lord is attendin' to all that."

Pearl slept the heavy sleep of healthy childhood and woke in the gray dawn before anyone else in the household was stirring. She threw on some clothing and went down the ladder into the kitchen. She started the fire, secured the basin full of water and a piece of yellow soap and came back to her room for her "oliver."

"I can't lave it all to the Lord to do," she said, as she rubbed the soap on her little wash-rag. "It doesn't do to impose on good nature."

When Tom, the only son of the Motherwells, came down to light the fire, he found Pearl setting the table, the kitchen swept and the kettle boiling.

Pearl looked at him with her friendly Irish smile, which he returned awkwardly.

He was a tall, stoop-shouldered, rather good-looking lad of twenty. He had heavy gray eyes, and a drooping mouth.

Tom had gone to school a few winters when there was not much doing, but his father thought it was a great deal better for a boy to learn to handle horses and "sample wheat," and run a binder, than learn the "pack of nonsense they got in school nowadays," and when the pretty little teacher from the eastern township came to Southfield school, Mrs. Motherwell knew at one glance that Tom would learn no good from her--she was such a flighty looking thing! Flowers on the under side of her hat!

So poor Tom grew up a clod of the valley. Yet Mrs. Motherwell would tell you, "Our Tom'll be the richest man in these parts. He'll get every cent we have and all the land, too; and I guess there won't be many that can afford to turn up their noses at our Tom. And, mind ye, Tom can tell a horse as well as the next one, and he's a boy that won't waste nothin', not like some we know. Look at them Slaters now! Fred and George have been off to college two years, big over-grown hulks they are, and young Peter is going to the Agricultural College in Guelph this winter, and the old man will hire a man to take care of the stock, and him with three boys of his own. Just as if a boy can learn about farmin' at a college! and the way them girls dress, and the old lady, too, and her not able to speak above a whisper. The old lady wears an ostrich feather in her bonnet, and they're a terrible costly thing, I hear. Mind you they only keep six cows, and they send every drop they don't use to the creamery. Everybody can do as they like, I suppose, but I know they'll go to the wall, and they deserve it too!"

And yet!

She and Mrs. Slater had been girls together and sat in school with arms entwined and wove romances of the future, rosy-hued and golden. When they consulted the oracle of "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief," the b.u.t.tons on her gray winsey dress had declared in favour of the "rich man." Then she had dreamed dreams of silks and satins and prancing steeds and liveried servants, and ease, and happiness--dreams which G.o.d in His mercy had let her forget long, long ago.

When she had become the mistress of the big stone house, she had struggled hard against her husband's penuriousness, defiantly sometimes, and sometimes tearfully. But he had held her down with a heavy hand of unyielding determination. At last she grew weary of struggling, and settled down in sullen submission, a hopeless heavy-eyed, spiritless women, and as time went by she became greedier for money than her husband.

"Good-morning," Pearl said brightly. "Are you Mr. Tom Motherwell?"

"That's what!" Tom replied. "Only you needn't mind the handle."

Pearl laughed.

"All right," she said, "I want a little favor done. Will you open the window upstairs for me?"

"Why?" Tom asked, staring at her.

"To let in good air. It's awful close up there, and I'm afraid I'll get the fever or somethin' bad."

"Polly got it," Tom said. "Maybe that is why Polly got it. She's awful sick now. Ma says she'll like as not die. But I don't believe ma will let me open it."

"Where is Polly?" Pearl asked eagerly. She had forgotten her own worries. "Who is Polly? Did she live here?"

"She's in the hospital now in Brandon," Tom said in answer to her rapid questions. "She planted them poppies out there, but she never seen the flowers on them. Ma wanted me to cut them down, for Polly used to put off so much time with them, but I didn't want to. Ma was mad, too, you bet," he said, with a reminiscent smile at his own foolhardiness.

Pearl was thinking--she could see the poppies through the window, bright and glowing in the morning light. They rocked lightly in the wind, and a shower of crimson petals fell. Poor Polly! she hadn't seen them.

"What's Polly's other name?" she asked quickly.

"Polly Bragg," he answered. "She was awful nice, Polly was, and jolly, too. Ma thought she was lazy. She used to cry a lot and wish she could go home; but my! she could sing fine."

Pearl went on with her work with a preoccupied air.

"Tom, can you take a parcel for me to town to-day?"

"I am not goin'," he said in surprise. "Pa always goes if we need anything. I haven't been in town for a month."

"Don't you go to church?" Pearl asked in surprise.

"No, you bet I don't, not now. The preacher was sa.s.sy to pa and tried to get money. Pa says he'll never touch wood in his church again, and pa won't give another cent either, and, mind you, last year we gave twenty-five dollars."

"We paid fourteen dollars," Pearl said, "and Mary got six dollars on her card."

"Oh, but you town people don't have the expenses we have."

"That's true, I guess," Pearl said doubtfully--she was wondering about the boot bills. "Pa gets a dollar and a quarter every day, and ma gets seventy-five cents when she washes. We're gettin' on fine."

Then Mrs. Motherwell made her appearance, and the conversation came to an end.

That afternoon when Pearl had washed the dishes and scrubbed the floor, she went upstairs to the little room to write in her diary. She knew Mrs. Francis would expect to see something in it, so she wrote laboriously:

I saw a lot of yalla flowers and black-burds. The rode was full of dust and wagging marks. I met a man with a top buggy and smelt a skunk. Mrs. M. made a kake to-day--there was no lickens.

I'm goin' to tidy up the granary for Arthur. He's offel nice--an' told me about London Bridge--it hasn't fallen down at all, he says, that's just a song.

All day long the air had been heavy and close, and that night while Pearl was asleep the face of the heavens was darkened with storm-clouds. Great rolling ma.s.ses came up from the west, shot through with flashes of lightening, and the heavy silence was more ominous than the loudest thunder would have been. The wind began in the hills, gusty and fitful at first, then bursting with violence over the plain below.

There was a cutting whine in it, like the whang of stretched steel, fateful, deadly as the singing of bullets, chilling the farmer's heart, for he knows it means hail.

Pearl woke and sat up in bed. The lightning flashed in the little window, leaving the room as black as ink. She listened to the whistling wind.

"It's the hail," she whispered delightedly. "I knew the Lord would find a way to open the windy without me puttin' my fist through it--I'll have a look at the clouds to see if they have that white edge on them.

No--I won't either--it isn't my put in. I'll just lave the Lord alone.

Nothin' makes me madder than when I promise Tommy or Mary or any of them something and then have them frettin' all the time about whether or not I'll get it done. I'd like to see the clouds though. I'll bet they're a sight, just like what Camilla sings about:

Dark is His path on the wings o' the storm.

In the kitchen below the Motherwells gathered with pale faces. The windows shook and rattled in their casings.

"Keep away from the stove, Tom," Mrs. Motherwell said, trembling.

"That's where the lightnin' strikes."

Tom's teeth were chattering.

"This'll fix the wheat that's standing, every--bit of it," Sam said. He did not make it quite as strong as he intended. Something had taken the profanity out of him.

"Hadn't you better go up and bring the kid down, ma?" Tom asked, thinking of Pearl.