There was nothing painful about the situation, and I saw young Mrs. Duff's anxious expression fade away. Those children and grown persons were not thinking about her family difficulties, so she settled back in her chair and made up her mind to be happy.
Mr. Macdonald, the nice Scotsman, was very much impressed by Mrs. Duff, and when she took her dinner from a tray he was the one who handed all the things to her from the big table where sat the laughing restless crew of children.
The little lady ate scarcely anything, although she had said she was hungry. That is from a pony's point of view. We eat a good deal and eat a good while. It is a very bad thing to hurry any of the horse family with their meals, for we are nervous creatures, and we should never be groomed when we are eating. Who would wash a boy while he was taking his dinner?
Instead of eating, Mrs. Duff kept her wonderful eyes going, going all round the table from one face to another. These were her relatives, and she had no other ones. I saw that she was pleased with the Devering children, but it was to her own boy that her glance came oftenest and lingered longest. The mother spirit had waked up, and when it once wakes in a soul like hers it never goes to sleep again.
As soon as the lively dinner was over, her husband, who was watching her carefully, said, "Ranna, you will rest a while, won't you?"
"Not inside," she said, shaking her brown head with the soft hair wound round and round it, "not inside. I could not breathe. Out here where I can see the children."
"Heigh ho!" said Mr. Devering, who was standing nearby, and catching her up in his arms as if she had been a baby he ran round the house to the north veranda where the wind was not blowing. There he deposited her in a hammock swung outside his office.
"Lie here, my lady," he said, "and I will play you to sleep," and getting his violin he drove everybody away and sitting down beside her sang and played nice northern songs about good bears and little lost cubs, and nice Indians and squaw mothers and happy papooses.
Dallas and the children watching her from a distance, fell upon Mr. Duff and swept him up to the stables.