"

"If there's a thing I hate, it's to have my meals in bed. I don't want
anything, to begin with; and I can take it better here. What have you
got, Diana? You may make me a cup of tea. I don't feel as though I
could touch coffee. What's the use o' _your_ gettin' up so early?"

"I've all to do, you know, mother."

"No use in burning wood and lights half the night, though. The day's
long enough. When did you bake?"

Diana answered this and several other similar household questions, and
got her mother a cup of tea. But though it was accompanied with a nice
bit of toast, Mrs. Starling looked with a dissatisfied air at the more
substantial breakfast her daughter was setting on the table.

"I never could eat slops. Diana, you may give me some o' that pork. And
a potato."

"Mother, I do not believe it is good for you."

"Good for me? And I have eat it all my life."

"But when you were well."

"I'm well enough. Put some of the gravy on, Diana. I'll never get my
strength back on toasted chips."

The men came in, and Mrs. Starling held an animated dialogue with her
factotum about farm affairs; while Diana sat behind her big
coffee-pot--not the one she had used last night, and wondered if that
was all a dream; more sadly, if she should ever dream again. And why
her mother could not have staid in her room one day more. One day
more!--

"He hain't begun to get his ploughing ahead," said Mrs. Starling, as
the door closed on the delinquent.

"What, mother?" Diana asked, starting.

"Ploughing. You haven't kept things a-going, as I see," returned her
mother. "Josiah's all behind, as usual. If I could be a man half the
time, I could get on. He ought to have had the whole west field
ploughed, while I've been sick."

"I don't know so much about it as you do, mother."

"I know you don't. You have too much readin' to do. There's a pane of
glass broken in that window, Diana."

"Yes, mother. I know it."

"How did it come?"

"I don't know."

"You'll never get along, Diana, till you know everything that happens
in your house. You aren't fit anyhow to be a poor woman. If you're
rich, why you can get a new pane of glass, and there's the end of it.
I'm not so rich as all that comes to."

"Getting a pane of glass, mother?"

"Without knowing what for."

"But how does it help the matter to know what for? The glass must be
got anyway."

"If you know what for, it won't be to do another time. You'll find a
way to stop it