“Don’t forget the ices!” whispered Bessie, as Winona rejoined Marjorie and Joyce.

“We’ll stop at the cafe on the way home, and you shall each choose what you like!” declared Winona, with spendthrift liberality.

CHAPTER XVII

Back to the Land

Easter fell late, so Winona spent the lovely early part of May at her own home.  After so many weeks of town it was delightful to be once more in the country.  She worked with enthusiasm in the garden, mowed the lawn, and with Letty and Mamie’s help began to put up an arbor, over which she hoped to persuade a crimson rambler to ramble successfully.  In the house she tried her hand at scones and cakes, entirely to the children’s satisfaction, if not altogether to her own; she enjoyed experiments in cooking, for she had longed to join the Domestic Science class at school, and had felt aggrieved when Miss Bishop decided that her time-table was full enough without it.  She found her mother looking delicate and worried.  Poor Mrs. Woodward’s health had not improved during the last two years; she was nervous, anxious about Percy, and inclined to be fretful and tearful.  The increased income-tax and the added cost of living made her constantly full of financial cares; she was not a very good manager, and the thought of the future oppressed her.

“I don’t know what’s to be done with you, Winona, when you leave school!” she remarked plaintively one evening.  “I feel that you ought to go in for something, but I’m sure I don’t know what!  I’d hoped you were going to turn out clever, and win a scholarship for College, and get a good post as a teacher afterwards, but there doesn’t seem the least chance of your doing that.  It’s all very well this hockey and cricket that’s made such a fuss of at schools nowadays, but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s going to lead to anything.  I’d rather you stuck to your books!  Yes, your future’s worrying me very much.  I’ve all these little ones to bring up and educate, and I’d hoped you’d be able to earn your own living before long, and lend the children a helping hand.  I can’t spend anything on giving you an expensive training, Percy has cost me so much out of capital, and it’s Letty’s turn next, besides which it’s high time Ernie and Godfrey were packed off to a boarding-school.  Oh, dear!  I never seem free from trouble!  It’s no light anxiety to be the mother of seven children!  I often wonder what will become of you all!”

To Winona her mother’s tearful confidences came as a shock.  Up to the present she had been so intensely interested in school affairs that she had given scarcely a thought to her future career.  Life had existed for her in detail only to the end of the summer term, after that it had stretched a nebulous void into which her imagination had never troubled to penetrate.  Now she took herself seriously to task, and tried to face the prospect of the time