"But surely," cried Mrs. Rexford, "neither Dr. Nash nor Principal Trenholme suggested to you that Captain Rexford could give you rooms for—" She was going to say "pulling out teeth," but she omitted that.
The young man looked at her, evidently thinking of something else. "Would you consider it a liberty, ma'am, if I—" He stopped diffidently, for, seeing by his manner that he meditated immediate action of some sort, she looked at him so fiercely that her glance interrupted him for a moment, "if I were to stop the stove smoking?" He completed the sentence with great humility, evidently puzzled to know how he had excited her look of offence.
She gave another excited poke at the damper herself, and, having got her hand blacked, wiped it on her coarse grey apron. The diamond keeper above the wedding-ring looked oddly out of place, but not more so than the small, shapely hand that wore it. Seeing that she had done the stove no good, she sat back in her chair with her hands crossed upon her now dirty apron.
"You can do nothing with it. Before we came to Canada no one told us that the kitchen stoves invariably smoked. Had they done so I should have chosen another country. However, as I say to my children, we must make the best of it now. There's no use crying; there's no use lamenting. It only harasses their father."
The last words were said with a sharp glance of reproof at Blue and Red. This mother never forgot the bringing up of her children in any one's presence, but she readily forgot the presence of others in her remarks to her children.
"But you aren't making the best of it," said the visitor. With that he got up, carefully lifted an iron piece in the back of the stove, turned a key thus disclosed in the pipe, and so materially altered the mood of the fire that in a few moments it stopped smoking and crackled nicely.
"Did you ever, mamma!" cried the girls. A juggler's feat could not have entertained them more.
"If for a time, first off, you had someone in the house who had lived in this country, you'd get on first class," said the youth.
"But you know, my dears," Mrs. Rexford spoke to her daughters, forgetting the young man for a moment as before, "if I had not supposed that Eliza understood the stove I should have inquired of Principal Trenholme before now."
"May I enquire where you got your help?" asked the American. "If she was from this locality she certainly ought to have comprehended the stove."