Presbyterian_. She went to bed at half-past seven as against
eleven or twelve on other nights, first reading, with
extraordinary rapidity, her "Chapter." Mrs. Maitland had a
"system" by which she was able to read the Bible through once a
year. She frequently recommended it to her superintendent; to her
way of thinking such reading was accounted to her as
righteousness.

Refreshed by a somnolent Sunday, she would rush furiously into
business on Monday morning, and Mr. Robert Ferguson, who never
went to church, followed in her wake, doing her bidding with grim
and admiring thoroughness. If not "worked to death," he was, at
any rate, absorbed in her affairs. Even when he went home at
night, and, on summer evenings, fell to grubbing in his narrow
back yard, where his niece "helped" him by pushing a little
wheelbarrow over the mossy flagstones,--even then he did not
dismiss Mrs. Maitland's business from his mind. He was scrupulous
to say, as he picked up the weeds scattered from the wheelbarrow,
"Have you been a good little girl to-day, Elizabeth?" but all the
while, in his own thoughts he was going over matters at the
Works. On Sundays he managed to get far enough away from business
to interrogate Miss White about his niece:

"I hope Elizabeth is behaving herself, Miss White?"

"Oh yes; she is a dear, good child."

"Well, you never can tell about children,--or anybody else. Keep
a sharp eye on her, Miss White. And be careful, please, about
vanity. I thought I saw her looking in the mirror in the hall