And they had all achieved it—­all six.  They had grown up sturdily, emerging into sobriety and decorum by much the same degrees as the old house, under John Murchison’s improving fortunes, grew cared for and presentable.  The new roof went on, slate replacing shingles, the year Abby put her hair up; the bathroom was contemporary with Oliver’s leaving school; the electric light was actually turned on for the first time in honour of Lorne’s return from Toronto, a barrister and solicitor; several rooms had been done up for Abby’s wedding.  Abby had married, early and satisfactorily, Dr Harry Johnson, who had placidly settled down to await the gradual succession of his father’s practice; “Dr Harry and Dr Henry” they were called.  Dr Harry lived next door to Dr Henry, and had a good deal of the old man’s popular manner.  It was an unacknowledged partnership, which often provided two opinions for the same price; the town prophesied well of it.  That left only five at home, but they always had Abby over in the West Ward, where Abby’s housekeeping made an interest and Abby’s baby a point of pilgrimage.  These considerations almost consoled Mrs Murchison declaring, as she did, that all of them might have gone but Abby, who alone knew how to be “any comfort or any dependence” in the house; who could be left with a day’s preserving; and I tell you that to be left by Mrs Murchison with a day’s preserving, be it cherries or strawberries, damsons or pears, was a mark of confidence not easy to obtain.  Advena never had it; Advena, indeed, might have married and removed no prop of the family economy.  Mrs Murchison would have been “sorry for the man”—­she maintained a candour toward and about those belonging to her that permitted no illusions—­but she would have stood cheerfully out of the way on her own account.  When you have seen your daughter reach and pass the age of twenty-five without having learned properly to make her own bed, you know without being told that she will never be fit for the management of a house—­don’t you?  Very well then.  And for ever and for ever, no matter what there was to do, with a book in her hand—­Mrs Murchison would put an emphasis on the “book” which scarcely concealed a contempt for such absorption.  And if, at the end of your patience, you told her for any sake to put it down and attend to matters, obeying in a kind of dream that generally drove you to take the thing out of her hands and do it yourself, rather than jump out of your skin watching her.

Sincerely Mrs Murchison would have been sorry for the man if he had arrived, but he had not arrived.  Advena justified her existence by taking the university course for women at Toronto, and afterward teaching the English branches to the junior forms in the Collegiate Institute, which placed her arbitrarily outside the sphere of domestic criticism.  Mrs Murchison was thankful to have her there —­outside—­where little more could reasonably be expected of her than that she should be down in time for breakfast.