Purple Springs | Page 4

but there's absolutely nothing in it--he as much as told me so."
Pearl hung up the receiver with a click, and, pressing her lips together, walked over to the window with two crimson spots burning like danger signals on her cheeks. When Pearl's soul was burdened she always wanted to get outside, where the sky and the wind and the big blue distance would help her to think. But the day was too cold for that, so instinctively she walked to the window, where the short afternoon sun was making a pale glow on the heavy clouds.
Old Nap came from his place behind the table and shoved his cold nose into her hand, with a gentle wagging of his tail, reminding her that all was not lost while she still had him.
Dropping down on her knees beside him, Pearl buried her face in his glistening white collar, and for one perilous moment was threatened with tears. But pride, which has so often come to our rescue just in time, stepped into her quivering young heart, she stood up and shook her head like an angry young heifer.
"'Common,' are they?" she said, with eyes that darted fire; "not half common enough--decent people that do their work and mind their own business,--helpin' a friend in need and hurtin' no wan--it would be a better world if people like them were commoner! 'And the mother washed for ye, did she, you dirty trollop? Well, it was a God's mercy that some one washed for you, and it was good clane washin' she did, I'll bet--and blamed little she got for it, too, while you lay in your bed with your dandruffy hair in a greasy boudoir cap, and had her climb the stairs with your breakfast. And you'd fault her for washin' for you--and cleanin' your house--you'd fault her for it! I know the kind of ye--you'd rather powder ye'r neck than wash it, any day!"
No one would recognize the young Normalite who two weeks before had taken the highest marks in English, and had read her essay at the closing exercises, and afterwards had it printed, at the editor's request, in the _Evening Echo_, for Pearl's fierce anger had brought her back again to the language of her childhood.
"And he as much as told you, did he?" she whispered, turning around to glare in stormy wrath at the unoffending telephone--"he as much as told you there was nothing in it?"
Pearl puckered her lips and shut one eye in a mighty mental effort to imagine what he would say, but in trying to hear his words she could only see his glowing face, the rumpled hair she loved so well, and then her voice came back like a perfect phonograph record, that strong, mellow, big voice which had always set her heart tingling and drove away every fear. She couldn't make him say anything else but the old sweet words that had lived with her for the last three years.
The storm faded from her eyes in a moment, and in the rush of joy that broke over her, she threw herself down beside old Nap and kissed the shiny top of his smooth black head. Then going over to the telephone, she shook her fist at it:
"Did my mother wash for you, ma'am? She did--and you never had better washin' done! Are we common people?--we are, and we're not ashamed. We're doin' fine, thank you--all the children are at school but me, and I've gone thro' the public school and Normal too. The crops are good--we have thirty head of cattle and six horses, sound in wind and limb. Some day we'll have a fine new house, and we'll live all over it too. John Watson did work on the section, and they'd be fine and glad to get him back. He owes no man a dollar, and bears no man a grudge. I wouldn't change him for the Governor-General for me dad--and now listen--I'm tellin' ye something, I'm goin' to marry the doctor--if he wants me--and if you don't like it there's a place you can go to. I'll not be namin' it in the presence of Nap here, for he's a good Christian."
"And you, sir,"--she addressed the telephone again,--"I thank you for your kind words regarding brains and looks. I hope it is a true word you speak, for I may need both before I'm done."

The home-coming of the cows at eventime has been sung about, written about, talked about, painted, and always it has had in it the restfulness of evening,--the drowsy whirr of insects' wings, the benediction of the sunset, the welcoming gladness of a happy family. But these pictures have not been painted by those of us who have seen the hungry cattle come in from the range when