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I know, for I've heard them, hard at it, there in the library. "Finlay's fine in the pulpit," said John Murchison cautiously. "Oh, the man's well enough; it's him I'm sorry for. I don't call Advena fitted to be a wife, and last of all a minister's. Abby was a treasure for any man to get, and Stella won't turn out at all badly; she's taking hold very well for her age.
In that case we'll disappoint it." Whatever they expected, therefore, it was not Advena. It was not a tall young woman with expressive eyes, a manner which was at once abrupt and easy, and rather a lounging way of occupying the corner of a sofa. "When she sat down," as Mrs Kilbannon said afterward, "she seemed to untie and fling herself as you might a parcel."
"I dare say," replied her husband, cheerfully. "If Advena were any daughter of mine she'd have less patience with him." "She's not much like you," assented the father. "I must say I like a girl to have a little spirit if a man has none. And before I'd have him coming to the house week after week the way he has, I'd see him far enough."
Advena justified her existence by taking the university course for women at Toronto, and afterward teaching the English branches to the junior forms in the Collegiate Institute, which placed her arbitrarily outside the sphere of domestic criticism.
He comes here because, being human, he's got to open his mouth some time or other, I suppose; but it's my opinion he has neither Advena nor anybody else in his mind's eye at present. He doesn't go the right way about it." "H'm!" said John Murchison. "He brought her a book the last time he came what do you think the name of it was? The something or other of Plato!
"We want labour mostly," he said to Advena, "but nobody is refused leave to land because he has a little money." "I should think not, indeed," remarked Mrs Murchison, who was present. "I often wish your father and I had had a little more when we began. That whole Gregory block was going for three thousand dollars then. I wonder what it's worth now?"
"That may be," said Mr Murchison, and settled down in his armchair behind the Dominion. "I agree with Father," said Advena. "He won't be any good, Lorne." "Advena prefers Scotch," remarked Stella. "I don't know. He's full of the subject," said Lorne. "He can present it from the other side."
Mrs Murchison would have thought better of them if she had chanced again to overhear. "I wouldn't advise you to have it lined with fur," Advena was saying. The winter had sharply announced itself, and Finlay, to her reproach about his light overcoat, had declared his intention of ordering a buffalo-skin the following day. "And the buffaloes are all gone, you know thirty years ago," she laughed.
"You can never trust an Indian," said Mrs Murchison at the anxious family council. "Well do I remember them when you were a little thing, Advena, hanging round the town on a market-day; and the squaws coming to the back door with their tin pails of raspberries to sell, and just knowing English enough to ask a big price for them.
These were constant, but there were also mutables Once a Week, Good Words for the Young, Blackwood's, and the Cornhill they used to be; years of back numbers Mrs Murchison had packed away in the attic, where Advena on rainy days came into the inheritance of them, and made an early acquaintance with fiction in Ready Money Mortiboy and Verner's Pride, while Lorne, flat on his stomach beside her, had glorious hours on The Back of the North Wind.
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