“I hope so.”

“Well, it is more genteel work than what I have been used to; but the pen was always a weariness to me.  I thought shame of myself when I was in Australia, that I could write nothing to the bit creatures that I was spending my life for, but just that I was weel, and hoped they were the same, and bidding them be good bairns, and obedient and dutiful to their grandfather and grandmother, and that they should mind what the master said to them at school; and then I would send kind regards to two or three folk in the countryside, and signed myself their affectionate aunt, Margaret Walker.  But, dear me!  I should have said fifty things forbye that senseless stuff.  I am thinking, Miss Jane and Miss Elsie, that if they had been your nephews and nieces, and you had been parted from them by all these thousands of miles of land and water, that your letters would have been twice as often and ten times as long, full of good advice and loving words.  I have heard bonnie letters read to me.  I marvelled greatly at them—­everything so smooth and so distinct, just as if the two were not far apart, but had come together for an hour or so, and the one just spoke by word of mouth all that the other wanted most to hear.  I would like the bairns learned to write well and fast, for when the pen is slow, the heart Cannot find utterance.  I have heard worse letters even than my own, full of repetitions and stupid messages, and nothing said of what the body that got the letters wanted most to hear.  There is a very great odds in letters, Miss Melville, and mine were so useless and so bare, that I thought it better to sacrifice a good deal of money and come home to attend to the bairns myself, and to counsel them by word of mouth.”

“Peggy, you have had adventures,” said Jane.  “I wish you could tell my sister and me all that happened to you when you were in Australia.  Your life may be useful to us in many ways.”

“Not to put into a book, I hope,” said Peggy suspiciously.  “I have no will to be put into a book.”

“No fear of that,” said Elsie.

“It’s poetry you’re writing, like Robbie Burns’s.  I can see the lines are different lengths.  I’m thinking you’ll have no call to make any poetry on me, so I may tell you my story.  It may make you think on somebody or something out of your own troubles.”

“It was a great wonder to the Swinton people that you returned a single woman,” said Jane.  “They say Australia is the country to be married in.”

“I might have been married over and over again, up the country, and in Melbourne too,” said Peggy; “but you see I had the thought of the bairns on my head, and I did not feel free to change my condition.  Some of them said if I likit them well enough I could trust to their doing better for the young folk than I could myself; but I never let myself like them well enough to trust them so far, though one or two of them were very likely men, and spoke very fair.”