The next morning Ruey betook herself to her neat little kitchen to reconstruct those cakes.  She would see if it were not possible to suit her husband in this.  “Let me see, he said they were too thick; I will thin them then.  He said they were sour and bitter; sugar is sweet and ought to remedy that.”  So in went the water to thin them, and the sugar to sweeten them.  “He said,” she further mused, “that they ought to be brown; brown they shall be, if fire will do it.”  So she proceeded to make a furious fire, in order to heat the griddle.  “Now,” she said to Joanna, “carry in the coffee and chops, then come and bake the cakes.”

The husband and wife were engaged in cheerful chat when the first instalment of cakes arrived; a few crumpled, burnt scraps of something.

“Why, what is this?” said Mr. Thorne.

“Cakes!” said Joanna, triumphantly.  “She fixed ’em;” pointing to Mrs. Thorne.

The two looked at the cakes, then at each other, and broke into peals of laughter.

“The griddle must be too hot,” said Mrs. Thorne, and she vanished into the kitchen.  She scraped the smoking griddle, and washed it and greased it, then she stirred the grey liquid and placed two or three spoonfuls on the griddle, then she essayed to turn them—­sticking plaster never stuck tighter than those cakes adhered to that griddle; she worked carefully, she insinuated her knife under just the outer edge of the cake, then gradually approached the centre, but when the final flop came, they went into little sticky hopeless heaps.  “They are too thin,” she ejaculated.  “Joanna, bring flour.  Now we shall have it all right.”  Then another set took their places on the griddle; these held together, they turned—­triumph at last! but they did not look inviting.  Mrs. Thorne tasted one, she then made a wry face.  “Joanna,” she said, with forced calmness, “you can throw this batter away.”  Then she went back to the dining-room, looking very hot and red, and said meekly to Philip:  “The cakes are a failure this morning, we will try it again tomorrow.”

Philip, who had lost himself in the morning paper, roused up to say: 

“Don’t trouble about them any more; we have enough else that is nice.”

“The cakes will be all right another time, Philip; there was a mistake made, they were too thin this morning; mother never makes them thin.”

Philip looked as if he would like to say: 

“I don’t care what your mother does; my mother’s cakes are nice and thin, and can’t be beaten;” but he didn’t.

Mrs. Thorne had no intention of abandoning buckwheat cakes as a failure, not she; it was not her way to give up easily and yield to discouragement; difficulties only strengthened her determination to conquer.

“I’ll see if I am to be vanquished by a buckwheat cake,” she said, studying her receipt-book that same evening.  “I shouldn’t wonder if there was not yeast enough in those others,” she said, as she mixed some fresh butter and added an extra quantity of yeast.  “Keep them warm while rising,” the receipt read.  She placed them near the register near the dining-room and retired with a complacent feeling that now all the conditions had been surely met.