r veins? True, her mother
was by no means an aged woman yet, and her son was a well-doing helpful
lad, who would soon be able to take care of himself. Her mother had
another daughter too, but Janet knew that her sister could never supply
her place to her mother. Though kind and well-intentioned, she was easy
minded, not to say thriftless, and the mother of many bairns besides,
and there could neither be room nor comfort for her mother at her
fireside, should its shelter come to be needed.

Day after day Janet wearied herself going over the matter in her mind.
"If it were not so far," she thought, or "if her mother could go with
her." But this she knew, for many reasons, could never be, even if her
mother could be brought to consent to such a plan. And Janet asked
herself, "What would my mother do if Sandy were to die? And what would
Sandy do if my mother were to die? And what would both do if sickness
were to overtake them, and me far-away?" till she quite hated herself
for ever thinking of putting the wide sea, between them and her.

There had been few pleasures scattered over Janet's rough path to
womanhood. Not more than two or three mornings since she could remember
had she risen to other than a life of labour. Even during the bright
brief years of her married-life, she had known little respite from toil,
for her husband had been a poor man, and he had died suddenly, before
her son was born. With few words spoken, and few tears shed, save what
fell in secret, she had given her infant to her mother's care, and gone
back again to a servant's place in the minister's household. There she
had been for ten years the stay and right hand of her beloved friend and
mistress, "working the work of two," as they told her, who would have
made her discontented in her lot, with no thought from year's end to
year's end, but how she might best do her duty in the situation in which
God had placed her.

But far-away into the future--it might be years and years hence--she
looked to the time when in a house of her own, she might devote herself
entirely to the comfort of her mother and her son. In this hope she was
content to strive and toil through the best years of her life, living
poorly and saving every penny, to all appearance equally indifferent to
the good word of those who honoured her for her faithfulness and patient
labour, and to the bad word of those who did not scruple to call her
most striking characteristics b