"Like your kind heart to think of all these things," she said.
"You'll see the sun of a fine morning rise 'twixt Hessary and Cramber," explained Margaret. "And I'm afraid the noise of the waterfall may keep you waking a bit till you'm used to it. 'Tis quiet to-night, but after heavy rain Meavy comes down like thunder."
"Nought keeps me awake," declared Rhoda. She altered the position of the fragments on the floor. "That was the best collie ever I had," she said, drawing a black and orange skin to her bedside; "a terrible fine dog, and only in his prime when he died. Father said he was going mad, though I never thought it. However, he was queer and snapped at the childer in a way very unlike himself, and father would not risk it, but put a charge of shot into his head when I was out of the way. You'd hardly believe it, Madge, but I cried! On my honour I cried--and a girl of near eighteen at the time."
Rhoda had brought a few of her special treasures and Margaret now helped her to arrange them to advantage. Her library was trifling and included a Bible and prayer-book, an anthology of verses, which Madge saw for the first time and felt astonishment at seeing, and a work on canine diseases.
"You can have they rhymes if you've got any use for them," said Rhoda. "They was given me by my gossip, old Martha Moon, when I was confirmed, but I don't understand poetry, though you may."
Then Rhoda admired the dog almanac, and she was still doing so when David's voice below brought the women down together.
He was thirsty and wanted his tea.
Rhoda produced one of the famous Bowden cakes, famed alike for size and wealth of ingredients; but the meal, while lacking nothing of goodness, warmth and variety, awoke no answering glow in the master's mind. He was clearly troubled, and Rhoda's passing brightness also gave place to a taciturn demeanour before her brother's concern. Margaret thereupon rated David and he explained his annoyance.
"What ever has come over you?" she asked. "So glumpy and glowry as you are! What's amiss with him, Rhoda? But I'll wager I know. It all looked so cosy and homelike at the Warren House that David felt homesick and didn't want to came back to me!"
David was bound to laugh at this absurd theory.