It seemed to Honora that Aunt Mary derived a real pleasure from the contradiction of this hope.  She shook her head vigorously.

“We shall always be, my child.  Your Uncle Tom is getting old, and he has always been too honest to make a great deal of money.  And besides,” she added, “he has not that kind of ability.”

Uncle Tom might be getting old, but he seemed to Honora to be of the same age as in her childhood.  Some people never grow old, and Uncle Tom was one of these.  Fifteen years before he had been promoted to be the cashier of the Prairie Bank, and he was the cashier to-day.  He had the same quiet smile, the same quiet humour, the same calm acceptance of life.  He seemed to bear no grudge even against that ever advancing enemy, the soot, which made it increasingly difficult for him to raise his flowers.  Those which would still grow he washed tenderly night and morning with his watering-pot.  The greatest wonders are not at the ends of the earth, but near us.  It was to take many years for our heroine to realize this.

Strong faith alone could have withstood the continued contact with such a determined fatalism as Aunt Mary’s, and yet it is interesting to note that Honora’s belief in her providence never wavered.  A prince was to come who was to bear her away from the ragmen and the boarding-houses and the soot:  and incidentally and in spite of herself, Aunt Mary was to come too, and Uncle Tom.  And sometimes when she sat reading of an evening under the maple, her book would fall to her lap and the advent of this personage become so real a thing that she bounded when the gate slammed —­to find that it was only Peter.

It was preposterous, of course, that Peter should be a prince in disguise.  Peter who, despite her efforts to teach him distinction in dress, insisted upon wearing the same kind of clothes.  A mild kind of providence, Peter, whose modest functions were not unlike those of the third horse which used to be hitched on to the street car at the foot of the Seventeenth-Street hill:  it was Peter’s task to help pull Honora through the interminable summers.  Uhrig’s Cave was an old story now:  mysteries were no longer to be expected in St. Louis.  There was a great panorama—­or something to that effect—­in the wilderness at the end of one of the new electric lines, where they sometimes went to behold the White Squadron of the new United States Navy engaged in battle with mimic forts on a mimic sea, on the very site where the country place of Madame Clement had been.  The mimic sea, surrounded by wooden stands filled with common people eating peanuts and popcorn, was none other than Madame Clement’s pond, which Honora remembered as a spot of enchantment.  And they went out in the open cars with these same people, who stared at Honora as though she had got in by mistake, but always politely gave her a seat.  And Peter thanked them.  Sometimes he fell into conversations with them, and it was noticeable that they nearly always shook hands with him at parting.  Honora did not approve of this familiarity.