“It was Camilla,” she whispered to herself.  “Oh, I love Camilla! and I never said ‘God bless Camilla,’”—­with a sudden pang of remorse.

She was on her knees in a moment and added the postscript.

“I can send the orange home to ma, and she can put the skins in the chist to make the things smell nice, and I’ll git that windy open to-morrow.”

Clasping her little purse in her hand, and with the orange close beside her head, she lay down to sleep.  The smell of the orange made her forget the heavy air in the room.

“Anyway,” she murmured contentedly, “the Lord is attendin’ to all that.”

Pearl slept the heavy sleep of healthy childhood and woke in the gray dawn before anyone else in the household was stirring.  She threw on some clothing and went down the ladder into the kitchen.  She started the fire, secured the basin full of water and a piece of yellow soap and came back to her room for her “oliver.”

“I can’t lave it all to the Lord to do,” she said, as she rubbed the soap on her little wash-rag.  “It doesn’t do to impose on good nature.”

When Tom, the only son of the Motherwells, came down to light the fire, he found Pearl setting the table, the kitchen swept and the kettle boiling.

Pearl looked at him with her friendly Irish smile, which he returned awkwardly.

He was a tall, stoop-shouldered, rather good-looking lad of twenty.  He had heavy gray eyes, and a drooping mouth.

Tom had gone to school a few winters when there was not much doing, but his father thought it was a great deal better for a boy to learn to handle horses and “sample wheat,” and run a binder, than learn the “pack of nonsense they got in school nowadays,” and when the pretty little teacher from the eastern township came to Southfield school, Mrs. Motherwell knew at one glance that Tom would learn no good from her—­she was such a flighty looking thing!  Flowers on the under side of her hat!

So poor Tom grew up a clod of the valley.  Yet Mrs. Motherwell would tell you, “Our Tom’ll be the richest man in these parts.  He’ll get every cent we have and all the land, too; and I guess there won’t be many that can afford to turn up their noses at our Tom.  And, mind ye, Tom can tell a horse as well as the next one, and he’s a boy that won’t waste nothin’, not like some we know.  Look at them Slaters now!  Fred and George have been off to college two years, big over-grown hulks they are, and young Peter is going to the Agricultural College in Guelph this winter, and the old man will hire a man to take care of the stock, and him with three boys of his own.  Just as if a boy can learn about farmin’ at a college! and the way them girls dress, and the old lady, too, and her not able to speak above a whisper.  The old lady wears an ostrich feather in her bonnet, and they’re a terrible costly thing, I hear.  Mind you they only keep six cows, and they send every drop they don’t use to the creamery.  Everybody can do as they like, I suppose, but I know they’ll go to the wall, and they deserve it too!”