Shaw began to read. It was "The Kentucky Cardinal" he read, that exquisite love-story, that makes us lovers all, even if we never have been, or worse still, have forgotten. Shaw loved the book, and read it tenderly, and Maud, leaning back in her chair, found her heart warmed with a sudden great content.
A week later Shaw and Maud walked along the river bank and discussed the situation. Autumn leaves carpeted the ground beneath their feet, and the faint murmur of the river below as it slipped over its pebbly bed came faintly to their ears. In the sky above them, wild geese with flashing white wings honked away toward the south, and a meadow lark, that jolly fellow who comes early and stays late, on a red-leafed haw-tree poured out his little heart in melody.
"You see, Mr. Shaw," Maud was saying, "it doesn't look right for Grandma to be living with a stranger when she has so many of her own people. I know she is happy with you—happier than she has been with any of us—but what will people think? It looks as if we didn't care for her, and we do. She is the sweetest old lady in the world." Maud was very much in earnest.
Shaw's eyes followed the wild geese until they faded into tiny specks on the horizon. Then he turned and looked straight into her face.
"Maud," he said, with a strange vibration in his voice, "I know a way out of the difficulty; a real good, pleasant way, and by it your grandmother can continue to live with me, and still be with her own folks. Maud, can you guess it?"
The blush that spread over Maud's face indicated that she was a good guesser!
Then the meadow-lark, all unnoticed, hopped a little nearer, and sang sweeter than ever. Not that anybody was listening, either!
THE RETURN TICKET
(Reprinted by permission of The Canadian Ladies' Home Journal.)
In the station at Emerson, the boundary town, we were waiting for the Soo train, which comes at an early hour in the morning. It was a bitterly cold, dark, winter morning; the wires overhead sang dismally in the wind, and even the cheer of the big coal fire that glowed in the rusty stove was dampened by the incessant mourning of the storm.