And in five minutes, the horses were in the barn, the man sitting by the kitchen fire, while Elizabeth was ministering to the woman and child. The new-comers made a forlorn trio. They came from a district some fifty miles further south, and were travelling north in order to take shelter for a time with relations. The mother was a girl of twenty, worn with hardship and privation. The father, an English labourer, had taken up free land, but in spite of much help from a paternal Government, had not been able to fulfil his statutory obligation, and had now forfeited his farm. There was a history of typhoid fever, and as Elizabeth soon suspected, an incipient history of drink. In the first two years of his Canadian life the man worked for a farmer during the summer, and loafed in Winnipeg during the winter. There demoralisation had begun, and as Elizabeth listened, the shadow of the Old World seemed to be creeping across the radiant Canadian landscape. The same woes?--the same weaknesses?--the same problems of an unsound urban life?
Her heart sank for a moment--only to provoke an instant reaction of cheerfulness. No!--in Canada the human will has still room to work, and is not yet choked by a jungle growth of interests.
She waited for Anderson to come in, and meanwhile she warmed and comforted the mother. The poor girl looked round her in amazement at the pretty spacious room, as she spread her hands, knotted and coarsened by work, to the blaze. Elizabeth held her sickly babe, rocking it and crooning to it, while upstairs one of kind-eyed Cumberland women was getting a warm bath ready, and lighting a fire in the guest-room.
"How old is it?" she asked.
"Thirteen months."
"You ought to give up nursing it. It would be better for you both."
"I tried giving it a bit o' what we had ourselves," said the mother, dully--"But I nearly lost her."
"I should think so!" laughed Elizabeth indignantly; and she began to preach rational ways of feeding and caring for the child, while the mother sat by, despondent, and too crushed and hopeless to take much notice. Presently Elizabeth gave her back the babe, and went to fetch hot tea and bread and butter.
"Shall I come and get it in the kitchen?" said the woman, rising.
"No, no--stay where you are!" cried Elizabeth. And she was just carrying back a laden tray from the dining-room when Anderson caught her.