of a few days.
Miss Gordon was made of good Scotch granite, with a human heart beneath. The veneer of gentility had underneath it the pure gold of character. She seized the helm of the family ship with a heroic hand. She sailed steadily through a sea of troubles that often threatened to overwhelm her; the unaccustomed task of motherhood with its hundred trials, her brother's gloom and despair, the new conditions of the rough country--even the irony of a fate that had set her at hard, uncongenial toil in the very place where she had sought culture. But she succeeded, and had not only held her own poise in the struggle, but had managed to permeate the family life with something of her old-world refinement.
It was four long years since she had seen the hawthorn blooming in her home garden. And now the infant of that dark springtime was the sturdy boy, rolling over the grass with Collie, and the sixteen-year-old girl, with the big frightened eyes, was the tall young woman up there at the gate besid
