“But ye’re growin’ young, Katie—­d’ye know it?—­young and bonny, my girl.”

And Katie listened to the words with such sweet joy she feared her face would tell too much, and put up her hands to hide it, crying:  “Ah, ye’re tryin’ to make me silly, you Donald, with such flatterin’.  We’re gettin’ old, Donald, you an’ me,” she added, with a guilty little undercurrent of thought in her mind.  “D’ye mind that I was thirty last month?”

“Ay,” replied Donald, gloomily, his face darkening,—­“ay; I mind, by the same token, I’m forty.  It’s no need ye have to be callin’ yersel’ old.  But I’m old, an’ no mistake.”  The thought, as Katie had put it, had been gall and wormwood to him.  If Katie thought him old, what must he seem to Elspie!

It was early in June that Elspie had had the spinning-bee to which Katie had brought the unwelcome Donald.  The summer sped past, but a faster summer than any reckoned on the calendar of months and days was speeding in Elspie’s heart.  Such great love as Donald’s reaches and warms its object as inevitably as the heat of a fire warms those near it.  Early in June the spinning-bee, and before the last flax was pulled, early in September, Elspie knew that she was restless till Donald came, glad when he was by her side, and strangely sorry when he went away.  Still, she was not ready to admit to herself that it was anything more than her natural liking for any pleasant friend who broke in on the lonely monotony of the farm life.

The final drying of the flax, which is an important crop on most of the Prince Edward Island farms, is put off until autumn.  After its first drying in the fields where it grew, it is stored in bundles under cover till all the other summer work is done, and autumn brings leisure.  Then the flax camp, as it is called, is built,—­a big house of spruce boughs; walls, flat roof, all of the green spruce boughs, thick enough to keep out rain.  This is usually in the heart of a spruce grove.  Thither the bundles of flax are carried and stacked in piles.  In the centre of the inclosure a slow fire is lighted, and above this on a frame of slats the stalks of flax are laid for their last drying.  It is a difficult and dangerous process to keep the fire hot enough and not too hot, to shift and turn and lift the flax at the right moment.  Sometimes only a sudden flinging of moist earth upon the fire saves it from blazing up into the flax, and sometimes one careless second’s oversight loses the whole,—­flax, spruce-bough house, all, in a light blaze, and gone in a breath.

The McClouds’ flax camp had been built in the edge of the spruce grove where the picnickers had held their dance and merry-making on that June day, memorable to Donald and Elspie and Katie.  It was well filled with flax, in the drying of which nobody was more interested than Elspie.  She had big schemes for spinning and weaving in the coming winter.  A whole piece of linen she had promised to Katie, and a piece for herself, and, as Elspie thought it over, maybe a good many more pieces than one she might require for herself before spring.  Who knew?