The scarlet tanager rose and flew from tree to tree like a darting flame, but Winifred had forgotten him.

CHAPTER XIII.

Midsummer came with its culmination of heat and verdure; and a great epoch it was in the Chellaston year, for it brought the annual influx of fashionable life from Quebec and Montreal.  To tell the plain truth, this influx only consisted of one or two families who had chosen this as a place in which to build summer residences, and some hundred other people who, singly or in parties, took rooms in the hotel for the hot season; but it made a vast difference in the appearance of the quiet place to have several smart phaetons, and one carriage and pair, parading its roads, and to have its main street enlivened by the sight of the gay crowd on the hotel verandahs.

“Now,” said Miss Bennett, calling upon Miss Rexford, “there will be a few people to talk to, and we shall see a little life.  These people are really a very good sort; you’ll begin to have some enjoyment.”

The Rexfords had indeed been advertised more than once of the advantage that would accrue to them from the coming of the town-folks, and this chiefly by Trenholme himself.

“The place will seem far different,” he had said, “when you have passed one of our summers.  We really have some delightful pleasure parties here in summer.”  And another time he had said, “When Mrs. Brown and her daughters come to their house on the hill I want you to know them.  They are such true-hearted people.  All our visitors are genuine Canadians, not immigrants as we and our neighbours are; and yet, do you know, they are so nice you would hardly know them from English people.  Oh, they add to our social life very much when they come!”

He had said so many things of this sort, ostensibly to Mrs. Rexford, really to Sophia, who was usually a party to his calls on her mother, that he had inspired in them some of his own pleasurable anticipation.  It was not until the summer visitors were come that they realised how great was the contrast between their own bare manner of living and the easy-going expenditure of these people, who were supposed to be such choice acquaintances for them.  Everything is relative.  They had not been mortified by any comparison of their own circumstances and those of Chellaston families, because, on one account and another, there had always appeared to be something to equalise the difference.  Either their neighbours, if better off, had not long ago begun as meagrely, or else they lacked those advantages of culture or social standing which the Rexfords could boast.  Such are the half conscious refuges of our egotism.  But with the introduction of this new element it was different.  Not that they drew any definite comparison between themselves and their new neighbours—­for things that are different cannot be compared, and the difference on all points was great; but part of Trenholme’s prophecy took place; the life in that pleasant land did appear more and more desirable as they witnessed the keen enjoyment that these people, who were not workers, took in it—­only (Trenholme and Miss Bennett seemed to have overlooked this) the leisure and means for such enjoyment were not theirs.