Hurrah, hurrah for the Fourth of July,
      The day we love and prize,
    When there’s wonderful light on this fair green earth,
      And beautiful light in the skies.

The Middle Daughter.

BY MARGARET E. SANGSTER.

CHAPTER I.

AT THE MANSE.

“I am troubled and low in my mind,” said our mother, looking pensively out of the window.  “I am really extremely anxious about the Wainwrights.”

It was a dull and very chilly day in the late autumn.  Fog hid the hills; wet leaves soaked into the soft ground; the trees dripped with moisture; every little while down came the rain, now a pour, then a drizzle—­a depressing sort of day.

Our village of Highland, in the Ramapo, is perfectly enchanting in clear brilliant weather, and turn where you will, you catch a fine view of mountain, or valley, or brown stream, or tumbling cascade.  On a snowy winter day it is divine; but in the fall, when there is mist hanging its gray pall over the landscape, or there are dark low-hanging clouds with steady pouring rain, the weather, it must be owned, is depressing in Highland.  That is, if one cares about weather.  Some people always rise above it, which is the better way.

I must explain mamma’s interest in the Wainwrights.  They are our dear friends, but not our neighbors, as they were before Dr. Wainwright went to live at Wishing-Brae, which was a family place left him by his brother; rather a tumble-down old place, but big, and with fields and meadows around it, and a great rambling garden.  The Wainwrights were expecting their middle daughter, Grace, home from abroad.

Few people in Highland have ever been abroad; New York, or Chicago, or Omaha, or Denver is far enough away for most of us.  But Grace Wainwright, when she was ten, had been borrowed by a childless uncle and aunt, who wanted to adopt her, and begged Dr. Wainwright, who had seven children and hardly any money, to give them one child on whom they could spend their heaps of money.  But no, the doctor and Mrs. Wainwright wouldn’t hear of anything except a loan, and so Grace had been lent, in all, eight years; seven she had spent at school, and one in Paris, Berlin, Florence, Venice, Rome, the Alps.  Think of it, how splendid and charming!

Uncle Ralph and Aunt Hattie did not like to give her up now, but Grace, we heard, would come.  She wanted to see her mother and her own kin; maybe she felt she ought.

At the Manse we had just finished prayers.  Papa was going to his study.  He wore his Friday-morning face—­a sort of preoccupied pucker between his eyebrows, and a far-away look in his eyes.  Friday is the day he finishes up his sermons for Sunday, and, as a matter of course, we never expect him to be delayed or bothered by our little concerns till he has them off his mind.  Sermons in our house have the right of way.