a rather desultory fashion.
Though she pretended to be glad she was an emancipated young lady, as a
matter of fact she missed school immensely, and was finding life
decidedly slow and tame.

With their elders palpably dissatisfied, Ingred and Hereward would have
been hardly human if they had not raised some personal grievances of
their own to grumble at, and matters would often have been dismal enough
at the bungalow but for Mrs. Saxon's happy capacity for looking on the
bright side of things. The whole household centered round "Mother." She
was a woman in a thousand. Naturally it had hurt her to relinquish
Rotherwood, and it grieved her--for the girls' sake--that most of her
old acquaintances in Grovebury had not troubled to pay calls at
Wynchcote. The small rooms, the one maid from the Orphanage, the
necessity of doing much of the housework herself, the difficulties of
shopping on a limited purse, and her husband's fretfulness and
fault-finding, might have soured a less unselfish disposition: she had
married, however, "for better or for worse," and took the altered
circumstances with cheery optimism. She was a great lover of nature and
of scenery, and the nearness of the moors, with their ever-changing
effects of storm and sunshine, and the opportunities they gave for the
study of birds and insects, proved compensation for some of the things
which life otherwise lacked.

Every morning, after the fuss of getting off the family to their several
avocations, she would run down the garden, and stand for a few minutes
by the wall that overlooked the moor, watching great shafts of sunlight
fall from a gray sky on to brown wastes of heather and bracken,
listening to the call of the curlews or to the trilling autumn warble of
the robin, perched on the red-berried hawthorn bush. Kind Mother Nature
could always soothe her spirits, and send her back with fresh courage
for the day's work. And, in the evening, when husband and children came
home to fire and lamp-light, she had generally some nature notes to tell
them, or some amusing little incident to make them laugh and forget
their various woes and worries.

"I'm so glad, Muvvie dear, you're not a melancholy lugubrious person!"
said Ingred once. "It would be _so_ trying if you sat at the tea-table
and sighed."

"Humor is the salt of life," smiled Mrs. Saxon. "We may just as well get
all the fun out of the little daily happenings. Even 'the orphan' has
her bright side!"

A