ht be coming again so soon?"

"To love Him is of His grace, and you must get it direct from Him; but
it's wonderful how doing the best we can puts heart into our prayers."

The scarlet tanager rose and flew from tree to tree like a darting
flame, but Winifred had forgotten him.

CHAPTER XIII.

Midsummer came with its culmination of heat and verdure; and a great
epoch it was in the Chellaston year, for it brought the annual influx of
fashionable life from Quebec and Montreal. To tell the plain truth, this
influx only consisted of one or two families who had chosen this as a
place in which to build summer residences, and some hundred other people
who, singly or in parties, took rooms in the hotel for the hot season;
but it made a vast difference in the appearance of the quiet place to
have several smart phaetons, and one carriage and pair, parading its
roads, and to have its main street enlivened by the sight of the gay
crowd on the hotel verandahs.

"Now," said Miss Bennett, calling upon Miss Rexford, "there will be a
few people to talk to, and we shall see a little life. These people are
really a very good sort; you'll begin to have some enjoyment."

The Rexfords had indeed been advertised more than once of the advantage
that would accrue to them from the coming of the town-folks, and this
chiefly by Trenholme himself.

"The place will seem far different," he had said, "when you have passed
one of our summers. We really have some delightful pleasure parties here
in summer." And another time he had said, "When Mrs. Brown and her
daughters come to their house on the hill I want you to know them. They
are such true-hearted people. All our visitors are genuine Canadians,
not immigrants as we and our neighbours are; and yet, do you know, they
are so nice you would _hardly_ know them from English people. Oh, they
add to our social life very much when they come!"

He had said so many things of this sort, ostensibly to Mrs. Rexford,
really to Sophia, who was usually a party to his calls on her mother,
that he had inspired in them some of his own pleasurable anticipation.
It was not until the summer visitors were come that they realised how
great was the contrast between their own bare manner of living and the
easy-going expenditure of these people, who were supposed to be such
choice acquaintances for them. Everything is relative. They had not been
mortified by any comparison of their own circumstances and those