had been given some exercise that was decidedly beneficial.
While he ate his supper, Margaret Cameron went through the rooms, touching a curtain here and there, wiping a speck of dust from the wonderful pieces of old furniture, searching with jealous eyes to see if the stranger were doing any damage to the property of a neighbour whom she had learned, through the years, not only to respect but to cherish with a devotion that was deep and lasting.
Presently she came from the living room and dropped abruptly to a chair beside the table at which Jamie was eating his supper.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve had about all I can stand to-day. I’m worried over matters of my own. I’ve only one child and she has always been a good girl. She did her school work well and her training course, and she hadn’t any difficulty in getting a school when she wanted it, but I can’t see why she was bent on going so far from home when she might have had a position here where she could have stayed with me. Maybe she was tired of the little house and the exacting old woman always scouring and cleaning, always fussing about how the young people are going to ruin. I’m not sure that I didn’t drive her away, and I am sure that her Cousin Molly coaxed her away. I’m not sure that there is any sense in the idea that the present generation is going to ruin. My mother thought exactly the same thing about the girls of my day. When I wanted to go with the boy I married to a barn
