"But if there is no one else?"
"Then pay a small boy to do it."
"Do you always get over your difficulties so easily?" laughed Chris. "If you are not rich, you cannot afford to pay some one to do your disagreeables for you."
"Then I would just leave them," Jean persisted.
Chris shook her head, but did not argue the subject.
"I wish, if you don't think me curious, you would tell me how you came to this place," said Jean presently. "You all seem so contented and happy here, and yet from what you say, you have not always been accustomed to a farm life. Who taught you to do dairy work and cook and manage everything?"
"I will tell you," said Chris, and a shade of gravity crept into her frank, laughing eyes. "We never have been comfortably off. My father had a very poor living, barely three hundred a year, and there were eight of us children to feed, clothe, and educate. Our mother was not strong, and of course, from the time we were quite little children, we learnt to help ourselves and others."
"Barbara was the eldest, then came Jack and Tom, then Lilian, then Mick, then me, then Rob and Martin. The elder boys went to school, but mother taught us girls, and Barbara, in her turn, taught the younger boys till they were old enough to join the others at school. We girls did all the mending, and as we grew older made our own dresses, and helped in the house as much as we could."
"Then mother's health failed, and she died. Barbara came home from the hospital just in time to nurse her before the end. She couldn't be spared from home again. Two years afterwards, Lilian married a soldier, a Captain Dunbar, who took her straight out to India with him; she has been there ever since. Jack and Tom went out to Canada. They are just getting a livelihood, no more. Rob went to sea; Martin died. He had diphtheria. Father would nurse him, and caught it, too. He died three weeks afterwards."
Chris stopped abruptly. Jean hardly knew how to express her sympathy. But with a catch in her breath Chris went on—