“Ah!” said Mrs. Rexford; and then in a minute, “I am glad to see that you feel her loss, I am sure.”  Here she got half off her chair to poke the damper of the stove.  “There is no loss so great as the loss of a mother.”

“No, and I always feel her loss most when I am tired and hungry; because, when I was a little chap, you know, it was always when I was tired and hungry that I went home and found her just sitting there, quite natural, waiting for me.”

Blue and Red looked at the cupboard.  They could not conceive how their mother could refrain from an offer of tea.  But, as it was, she gave the young man a sharp glance and questioned him further.  Where had he come from?  When had he arrived?

He had come, he said, from the next station on the railway.  He had been looking there, and in many other places, for an opening for his work, and for various reasons he had now decided that Chellaston was a more eligible place than any.  He had come in the early morning, and had called on the doctor and on Principal Trenholme of the College.  They had both agreed that there was an opening for a young dentist who would do his work well, charge low prices, and be content to live cheaply till the Tillage grew richer.  “It’s just what I want,” he said.  “I don’t seem to care much about making money if I can live honestly among kind-hearted folks.”

“But surely,” cried Mrs. Rexford, “neither Dr. Nash nor Principal Trenholme suggested to you that Captain Rexford could give you rooms for—­” She was going to say “pulling out teeth,” but she omitted that.

The young man looked at her, evidently thinking of something else.  “Would you consider it a liberty, ma’am, if I—­” He stopped diffidently, for, seeing by his manner that he meditated immediate action of some sort, she looked at him so fiercely that her glance interrupted him for a moment, “if I were to stop the stove smoking?” He completed the sentence with great humility, evidently puzzled to know how he had excited her look of offence.

She gave another excited poke at the damper herself, and, having got her hand blacked, wiped it on her coarse grey apron.  The diamond keeper above the wedding-ring looked oddly out of place, but not more so than the small, shapely hand that wore it.  Seeing that she had done the stove no good, she sat back in her chair with her hands crossed upon her now dirty apron.

“You can do nothing with it.  Before we came to Canada no one told us that the kitchen stoves invariably smoked.  Had they done so I should have chosen another country.  However, as I say to my children, we must make the best of it now.  There’s no use crying; there’s no use lamenting.  It only harasses their father.”

The last words were said with a sharp glance of reproof at Blue and Red.  This mother never forgot the bringing up of her children in any one’s presence, but she readily forgot the presence of others in her remarks to her children.