Ethelyn was at home at last.



CHAPTER VI

MRS. MARKHAM'S WAYS

They were very peculiar, and no one knew this better than Mrs. Jones and
her daughter Melinda, sister and mother to the deceased Abigail and the
redoubtable Tim. Naturally bright and quick-witted, Melinda caught
readily at any new improvement, and the consequence was that the Jones
house bore unmistakable signs of having in it a grown-up daughter whose
new ideas of things kept the old ideas from rusting. After Melinda came
home from boarding-school the Joneses did not set the table in the
kitchen close to the hissing cook stove, but in the pleasant dining
room, where there gradually came to be crocheted tidies on the backs of
the rocking-chairs, and crayon sketches on the wall, and a pot of
geraniums in the window, with a canary bird singing in his cage near by.
At first, Mrs. Markham, who felt a greater interest in the Joneses than
in any other family--Mrs. Jones being the only woman in the circle of
her acquaintance to whom she would lend her copper boiler--looked a
little askance at these "new-fangled notions," wondering how "Miss Jones
expected to keep the flies out of her house if she had all the doors
a-flyin' three times a day," and fearing lest Melinda was getting
"stuck-up notions in her head, which would make her fit for nothing."

But when she found there were no more flies buzzing in Farmer Jones'
kitchen than in her own, and that Melinda worked as much as ever, and