“I won’t promise you eleven,” said Lorne, “but there seems to be a pretty fair chance of one or two.”

At this she had a tale for him which charmed his ears.  “I didn’t know where to look,” she said.  “Aunt Emmie, you know, has a very bad trick of coming into my room without knocking.  Well, in she walked last night, and found me before the glass practising my curtsey!  I could have killed her.  Pretended she thought I was out.”

“Dora, would you like me to promise something?” he asked, with a mischievous look.

“Of course, I would.  I don’t care how much you promise.  What?”

But already he repented of his daring, and sat beside her suddenly conscious and abashed.  Nor could any teasing prevail to draw from him what had been on his audacious lips to say.

Social precedents are easily established in the country.  The accident that sent the first Liberal canvasser for Jordanville votes to the Crow place for his supper would be hard to discover now; the fact remains that he has been going there ever since.  It made a greater occasion than Mrs Crow would ever have dreamed of acknowledging.  She saw to it that they had a good meal of victuals, and affected indifference to the rest; they must say their say, she supposed.  If the occasion had one satisfaction which she came nearer to confessing than another, it was that the two or three substantial neighbours who usually came to meet the politicians left their wives at home, and that she herself, to avoid giving any offence on this score, never sat down with the men.  Quite enough to do it was, she would explain later, for her and the hired girl to wait on them and to clear up after them.  She and Bella had their bite afterward when the men had hitched up, and when they could exchange comments of proud congratulation upon the inroads on the johnny-cake or the pies.  So there was no ill feeling, and Mrs Crow, having vindicated her dignity by shaking hands with the guests of the evening in the parlour, solaced it further by maintaining the masculine state of the occasion, in spite of protests or entreaties.  To sit down opposite Mr Crow would have made it ordinary “company”; she passed the plates and turned it into a function.

She was waiting for them on the parlour sofa when Crow brought them in out of the nipping early dark of December, Elmore staying behind in the yard. with the horses.  She sat on the sofa in her best black dress with the bead trimming on the neck and sleeves, a good deal pushed up and wrinkled across the bosom, which had done all that would ever be required of it when it gave Elmore and Abe their start in life.  Her wiry hands were crossed in her lap in the moment of waiting:  you could tell by the look of them that they were not often crossed there.  They were strenuous hands; the whole worn figure was strenuous, and the narrow set mouth, and the eyes which had looked after so many matters for so long, and even the way the hair was drawn back into a knot in a fashion that would have given a phrenologist his opportunity.  It was a different Mrs Crow from the one that sat in the midst of her poultry and garden-stuff in the Elgin market square; but it was even more the same Mrs Crow, the sum of a certain measure of opportunity and service, an imperial figure in her bead trimming, if the truth were known.