It was plain enough, however, that nothing of the kind had come to pass.  Miss Christie had arrived in Elgin, bringing her affections intact; they might have been in any one of her portmanteaux.  She had come with definite calm intention, precisely in the guise in which she should have been expected.  At the very hour, in the very clothes, she was there.  Robust and pleasant, with a practical eye on her promising future, she had arrived, the fulfilment of despair.  Dr Drummond looked at her with acquiescence, half-cowed, half-comic, wondering at his own folly in dreaming of anything else.  Miss Cameron brought the situation, as it were, with her; it had to be faced, and Dr Drummond faced it like a philosopher.  She was the material necessity, the fact in the case, the substantiation of her own legend; and Dr Drummond promptly gave her all the consideration she demanded in this aspect.  Already he heard himself pronouncing a blessing over the pair—­and they would make the best of it.  With characteristic dispatch he decided that the marriage should take place the first Monday after Finlay’s return.  That would give them time to take a day or two in Toronto, perhaps, and get back for Finlay’s Wednesday prayer meeting.  “Or I could take it off his hands,” said Dr Drummond to himself.  “That would free them till the end of the week.”  Solicitude increased in him that the best should be made of it; after all, for a long time they had been making the worst.  Mrs Forsyth, whom it had been necessary to inform when Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Cameron became actually imminent, saw plainly that the future Mrs Finlay had made a very good impression on the Doctor; and as nature, in Mrs Forsyth’s case, was more powerful than grace, she became critical accordingly.  Still, she was an honest soul:  she found more fault with what she called Miss Cameron’s “shirt-waists” than with Miss Cameron herself, whom she didn’t doubt to be a good woman though she would never see thirty-five again.  Time and observation would no doubt mend or remodel the shirt-waists; and meanwhile both they and Miss Cameron would do very well for East Elgin, Mrs Forsyth avowed.  Mrs Kilbannon, definitely given over to caps and curls as they still wear them in Bross, Mrs Forsyth at once formed a great opinion of.  She might be something, Mrs Forsyth thought, out of a novel by Mr Crockett, and made you long to go to Scotland, where presumably everyone was like her.  On the whole the ladies from Bross profited rather than lost by the new frame they stepped into in the house of Dr Drummond, of Elgin, Ontario.  Their special virtues, of dignity and solidity and frugality, stood out saliently against the ease and unconstraint about them; in the profusion of the table it was little less than edifying to hear Mrs Kilbannon, invited to preserves, say, “Thank you, I have butter.”  It was the pleasantest spectacle, happily common enough, of the world’s greatest inheritance.  We see it in immigrants of all degrees,