re of that house.

"I suppose it will be a boarding-house," she would say, "it's much too
large for poor people to rent, and only poor people are coming into this
district now."

"Oh, Aunt Mary!"

"Well, my dear, why should we complain? We are poor, and it is
appropriate that we should live among the poor. Sometimes I think it is
a pity that you should have been thrown all your life with rich people,
my child. I am afraid it has made you discontented. It is no disgrace to
be poor. We ought to be thankful that we have everything we need."

Honora put down her sewing. For she had learned to sew--Aunt Mary
had insisted upon that, as well as French. She laid her hand upon her
aunt's.

"I am thankful," she said, and her aunt little guessed the intensity of
the emotion she was seeking to control, or imagined the hidden
fires. "But sometimes--sometimes I try to forget that we are poor.
Perhaps--some day we shall not be."

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 a