“But, Mother, Grandfather was poor, everyone says so!” gasped Pam, worried by the look on her mother’s face, and by all the unpleasant possibilities called up by Mrs. Walsh’s words.
“I dare say everyone thought so, and he would do what he could to keep them in their belief. But I do not think he was poor; he was always too fond of money not to have saved when he had the chance. He could live on next to nothing here, and if he only made a little money, that little he could save.”
“Mother, come and have supper, and leave off worrying about this,” said Pam hurriedly, for she could not bear to see how careworn her mother suddenly looked.
“I suppose that is about the only thing to be done, though it is very hard not to worry,” said Mrs. Walsh. She followed Pam across the big sitting-room, littered just now with the luggage of the travellers, and out to the kitchen, where a comfortable meal was spread.
It was the middle of the day, for Mrs. Walsh and her children had come up-river by the night boat. Pam and Jack declared that it gave them a most fearfully dissipated feeling to be sitting down to a meal in the middle of a day that was not Sunday. But weeding and hoeing were off for this one day, which was very much of a festival, and Pam had performed miracles of hard work since dawn in getting the house ready for the travellers. Nathan Gittins had driven his team to Hunt’s Crossing, taking Jack with him, to meet the arrivals, but he had too much tact to come in when they reached Ripple, and had driven off in a great hurry, pleading urgent business.
The boys were in raptures over the place, and Muriel was tearing round like a little wild thing. To them the new life would be like one long holiday, and Greg declared that he did not mind how hard he had to work provided he did not have to wait at table again.
“You may have to do worse than that. You may have to cook your own supper or go without,” laughed Pam.
“As if I should mind that!” snorted Greg. “I used to loathe waiting on the boarders, and seeing the disgusting greed with which they swallowed their food, and their eagerness to get their money’s worth. If you want to know what a person is really like, watch him feed, I say.”
“A good idea,” put in Jack hastily, for he had seen a cloud gather on his mother’s face, and he was not going to have her worried with the nonsense of the young ones if he could help it. “A very good idea indeed, Mr. Gregory Walsh, and by the elegant way in which you are at this moment eating flapjacks and molasses, I should be inclined to say that you are a bit of a bounder, and not very well acquainted with the usages of polite society.”
The others burst into peals of laughter at the expense of Greg, and the face of Mrs. Walsh smoothed as if by magic. It was only Jack and Pam who understood how any allusion to the hardships of the boarding-house life hurt her, and they spared her when they could.