“Oh, we rough old chaps don’t require such prettiness about them.”

Norah displayed her small white teeth in a broadening smile; then she looked at the revered master thoughtfully.

“Why do you say you’re old?  You aren’t really old, Mr. Dale.”

“Oh, aren’t I?  I wonder what you call old, lassie.”

“I call father old, and Mr. Bates—­and Mrs. Goudie.”

“Well, I mayn’t be as old as them—­as they; but I think I’m like the walnut tree out there.  I still stand up straight, but I fear me I’ve seen my best days....  There!  What are you up to now?”

She was lugging and pushing the great porter’s chair from its corner.

“I don’t want that.”

“It’s your chair, so why shouldn’t you sit in it at breakfast as well as supper?” She brought it to the table, and looked at him over the back of it shyly, yet with a kind of defiance—­much as his own children looked at him when they had made up their minds to be cheeky.  “It’s quite an old man’s chair, sir—­so it’ll suit you nicely.”

He sat in the chair, amused by her impudence, but holding up his finger with mock reproof.  She had run to the kitchen door, and she stood there for a moment laughing merrily.  “Oh, you do look all a gran’father in that chair, Mr. Dale.  You do, indeed.”

Next moment she was singing at her work outside in the kitchen.  Then there came a silence; her shadow passed the window, and he guessed that she was taking a circuitous route to the room up-stairs where the children and Ethel were busily engaged in toilet operations.  Rather than risk disturbing him at his breakfast by coming through here, she had gone right round the house and in again at the front door.  She was always like that—­always thinking of other people’s comfort, never sparing her own labor.

Then he heard her voice at a distance somewhere near the cowhouse.  She had not gone up-stairs after all; she had gone out there on dairy business.  Soon she came singing back—­singing, he thought, as blithely as a lark; just as sweetly and tunefully as any bird one could name.

Other people as well as Dale noticed the freshness and unforced music of Norah’s singing, and it was not long before she received an invitation to sing among the regularly trained young women at the chapel.

On the morning when she left Dale’s side to take her place upon the platform she was woefully nervous.  Dale too had been anxious, but directly he heard her voice—­and he knew it so well that he at once distinguished it amid all the other voices that made up the platform chorus—­he felt perfectly reassured.  Her nervousness had not put her out of tune:  she was acquitting herself admirably.

They walked home together in a high state of gratification; and he hastened to tell Mavis that the little maid had achieved a success, and that Mr. Osborn had paid her a compliment at the door before everybody.  Mavis was delighted.  She ran to give kisses of congratulation, and she said that on her very next visit to Old Manninglea she would buy some stuff to make Norah a pretty new dress, which they would set to work on as soon as the evenings began to lengthen again.