"Well, we're off at last! I declare I miss Maggie every hour in the day. I don't know what I should have done all these years without that girl!"
The mention of "Maggie" emphasizes one of the many changes in Flamsted during the six years of Champney Googe's absence. Mrs. Caukins, urged by her favorite, Aileen, and advised by Mrs. Googe and Father Honoré, had imported Margaret O'Dowd, the "Freckles" of the asylum, as mother's helper six months after Aileen's arrival in Flamsted. For nearly six years Maggie loyally seconded Mrs. Caukins in the care of her children and her household. Slow, but sure and dependable, strong and willing, she made herself invaluable in the stone house among the sheep pastures; her stunted affections revived and flourished apace in that household of well-cared-for children to whom both parents were devoted. It cost her a heartache to leave them; but six months ago burly Jim McCann, one of the best workmen in the sheds—although of unruly spirit and a source of perennial trouble among the men—began to make such determined love to the mother's helper that the Caukinses found themselves facing inevitable loss. Maggie had been married three months; and already McCann had quarrelled with the foreman, and, in a huff, despite his wife's tears and prayers, sought of his own accord work in another and far distant quarry.
"Maggie told me she'd never leave off teasing Jim to bring her back," said the fifth eldest Caukins.—"Oh, look!" he cried as they rumbled over the bridge; "there's Mrs. Googe and Champney on the porch waving to us!"
The Colonel took off his hat with a flourish; the boys swung theirs; Mrs. Caukins waved her sunshade to mother and son.
"I declare, I'd like to stop just a minute," she said regretfully, for the Colonel continued to drive straight on. "I'm so glad for Aurora's sake that he's come home; I only hope our Romanzo will do as well."
"It would be an intrusion at such a time, Elvira. The effusions of even the best-intentioned friends are injudicious at the inopportune moment of domestic reunion."
Mrs. Caukins subsided on that point. She was always depressed by the Colonel's grandiloquence, which he usually reserved for The Greenbush and the town-meeting, without being able to account for it.
"He'll see a good many changes here; it's another Flamsted we're living in," she remarked later on when they passed the first stone-cutters' shed on the opposite shore of the lake; and the family proceeded to comment all the way to church on the various changes along the route.
It was in truth another Flamsted, the industrial Flamsted which the Colonel predicted six years before on that memorable evening in the office of The Greenbush.