results, and herself upon having produced Mr L. Murchison."




Chapter III

From the day she stepped into it Mrs Murchison knew that
the Plummer Place was going to be the bane of her existence.
This may have been partly because Mr Murchison had bought
it, since a circumstance welded like that into one's life
is very apt to assume the character of a bane, unless
one's temperament leads one to philosophy, which Mrs
Murchison's didn't. But there were other reasons more
difficult to traverse: it was plainly true that the place
did require a tremendous amount of "looking after," as
such things were measured in Elgin, far more looking
after than the Murchisons could afford to give it. They
could never have afforded, in the beginning, to possess
it had it not been sold, under mortgage, at a dramatic
sacrifice. The house was a dignified old affair, built
of wood and painted white, with wide green verandahs
compassing the four sides of it, as they often did in
days when the builder had only to turn his hand to the
forest. It stood on the very edge of the town; wheatfields
in the summer billowed up to its fences, and corn-stacks
in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army.
The plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took
the road or, if you were so inclined, the river, into
which you could throw a stone from the orchard of the