Helen soon settled down into a condition of ease, which put an end to blushing.  She knew she was admired.

“What are you doing i’ Bosley?” James demanded.

“I’m living i’ Bosley,” she retorted, smartly.

“Living here!” He stopped, and his hard old heart almost stopped too.  If not in mourning, she was in semi-mourning.  Surely Susan had not had the effrontery to die, away in Longshaw, without telling him!

“Mother has married again,” said Helen, lightly.

“Married!” He was staggered.  The wind was knocked out of him.

“Yes.  And gone to Canada!” Helen added.

You pick up your paper in the morning, and idly and slowly peruse the advertisements on the first page, forget it, eat some bacon, grumble at the youngest boy, open the paper, read the breach of promise case on page three, drop it, and ask your wife for more coffee—­hot—­glance at your letters again, then reopen the paper at the news page, and find that the Tsar of Russia has been murdered, and a few American cities tumbled to fragments by an earthquake—­you know how you feel then.  James Ollerenshaw felt like that.  The captain of the bowling-club, however, poising a bowl in his right hand, and waiting for James Ollerenshaw to leave his silken dalliance, saw nothing but an old man and a young woman sitting on a Corporation seat.

CHAPTER III

MARRYING OFF A MOTHER

“Yes,” said Helen Rathbone, “mother fell in love.  Don’t you think it was funny?”

“That’s as may be,” James Ollerenshaw replied, in his quality of the wiseacre who is accustomed to be sagacious on the least possible expenditure of words.

“We both thought it was awfully funny,” Helen said.

“Both?  Who else is there?”

“Why, mother and I, of course!  We used to laugh over it.  You see, mother is a very simple creature.  And she’s only forty-four.”

“She’s above forty-four,” James corrected.

“She told me she was thirty-nine five years ago,” Helen protested.

“Did she tell ye she was forty, four years ago?”

“No.  At least, I don’t remember.”

“Did she ever tell ye she was forty?”

“No.”

“Happen she’s not such a simple creature as ye thought for, my lass,” observed James Ollerenshaw.

“You don’t mean to infer,” said Helen, with cold dignity, “that my mother would tell me a lie?”

“All as I mean is that Susan was above thirty-nine five years ago, and I can prove it.  I had to get her birth certificate when her father died, and I fancy I’ve got it by me yet.”  And his eyes added:  “So much for that point.  One to me.”