When she raised her face it was wet with tears.

CHAPTER II

The next morning, when the younger girls came down to breakfast, they found only the three women in the kitchen.  An odour of coffee hung in the air.  Belle was scraping burned toast at the sink, the flying, sooty particles clinging to wet surfaces everywhere.  Lydia sat packing cold hominy in empty baking-powder tins; to be sliced and fried for the noon meal.  Mrs. Monroe, preferring an informal kitchen breakfast to her own society in the dining room, was standing by the kitchen table, alternating swallows from a saucerless cup of hot coffee with indifferent mouthfuls of buttered cold bread.  She rarely went to the trouble of toasting her own bread, spending twice the energy required to do so in protests against the trouble.

Lydia had breakfasted an hour ago.  Sally and Martie sliced bread, pushed forward the coffee pot, and entered a spirited claim for cream.  It was Saturday morning, when Leonard slept late.  Pa was always late.  Lydia was anxious to save a generous amount of cream for the sleepers.

“Len often takes a second cup of coffee when he’s got lots of time,” Lydia said.

“Well, I don’t care!” Martie said, suddenly serious.  “I’m going to take my coffee black, anyway.  I’m getting too fat!”

“Oh, Martie, you are not!” Sally laughed.

“That’s foolish—­you’ll just upset your health!” her mother added disapprovingly.

Martie’s only answer was a buoyant kiss.  She and Sally carried their breakfast into the dining room, where they established themselves comfortably at one end of the long table.  While they ate, dipping their toast in the coffee, buttering and rebuttering it, they chattered as tirelessly as if they had been deprived of each other’s society and confidence for weeks.

The morning was dark and foggy, and a coal fire slumbered in the grate, giving out a bitter, acrid smell.  Against the windows the soft mist pressed, showing a yellow patch toward the southeast, where the sun would pierce it after a while.

Malcolm Monroe came downstairs at about nine o’clock, and the girls gathered up their dishes and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.  Not that Ma would not, as usual, prepare their father’s toast and bacon with her own hands, and not that Lydia would not, as usual, serve it.  The girls were not needed.  But Pa always made it impossible for them to be idle and comfortable over their own meal.  If he did not actually ask them to fetch butter or water, or if he could find no reasonable excuse for fault-finding, he would surely introduce some dangerous topic; lure them into admissions, stand ready to pursue any clue.  He did not like to see young girls care-free and contented; time enough for that later on!  And as years robbed him of actual dignities, and as Monroe’s estimate of him fell lower and lower, he turned upon his daughters the authority, the carping and controlling that might otherwise have been spent upon respectful employees and underlings.  He found some relief for a chafed and baffled spirit in the knowledge that Sally and Martie were helpless, were bound to obey, and could easily be made angry and unhappy.