e Katie Fleming would keep, clever scholar though she
was, Miss Betsey said, which was very possibly quite true. But it was
on Katie's own account that she did not approve of the place.

"Not that it would hurt her as it might some girls to `board round' in
the village houses, a week at a time, as she would have to do, and leave
her evenings free to spend with the idle young folks of the place. It,
maybe, wouldn't spoil that pretty pot of violets to have the street dust
blow on them for an hour or two, but you wouldn't care about having them
set out to catch it. And Katie Fleming is better at home making butter
for her grandmother than she would be anywhere else, and happier too, if
she only knew it."

Miss Betsey said this to Miss Elizabeth one day when she called, having
some business with the squire, and she said something like it to the
grandmother, which helped to a decision that Katie was to stay at home.
Katie was a little disappointed for the moment, but she acknowledged
that she might have failed with the school, and that she was much needed
at home; and Davie's satisfaction at the decision did much to reconcile
her to it. And all the rest were satisfied as well as Davie, for
Katie's being at home made a great deal of difference in the house.

Even Mrs Fleming, with her hopeful nature and her firm trust in God,
had times of great anxiety with regard to Davie. He was so like the son
who had gone so early astray, who had darkened all his father's life,
and nearly broken his heart, that she could not but anxiously watch his
words and his ways, attaching to them sometimes an importance that was
neither wise nor reasonable. His grandfather's discipline was strict,
not to say severe, and Davie's resistance, or rather his unwilling
submission and obedience, for he seldom resisted his grandfather's will,
made her afraid. Though she would not have acknowledged it to Davie,
she knew that his grandfather was hard on him sometimes, far harder
than, for such faults as Davie's, she herself would have been, and she
feared that unwilling or resentful obedience might in time change to
rebellion, and beyond such a possibility as that the anxious grandmother
did not dare to look.

But it was only once in a great while that she suffered herself to
contemplate the possibility of "anything happening" to Davie. The sore
troubles she had passed through had shaken her somewhat, and she was
growing old, but her bright and sun