"The old answer," said Ann. "Nothing, nothing--'howbeit let me go in any wise.' ... Well, we have wandered from our subject. What do you say, Mums, to reading Robert Louis right through? We have the Edinburgh edition here. He will teach you to love the moorlands." Mrs. Douglas recoiled in horror from the suggestion. "Oh no! No. No. The very name of R.L.S. makes me think of the eternal crying of whaups, and we are fairly beset with the creatures here. Really to appreciate Robert Louis you must read him immersed in a town with no hope of a holiday, or on the burning, shining plains of India, or on the South African veldt. To read there of 'a great, rooty sweetness of bogs' and 'the infinite, melancholy piping of hill-birds,' and 'winds austere and pure' is like water in a thirsty land. But when one is seated in the bogs, and deaved by the hill-birds it's only an irritation. I'd rather read Ethel M. Dell, and warm myself with the thought of heroes whose eyes are like slumbering volcanoes, and heroines who generally manage to get a flogging from some one before they win through to happiness." Ann laughed. "It's quite true. Here we must read books hot with life, full of intrigues and sensational developments. We have all the simplicity we want in the Green Glen." Her mother sighed. "I'm not really discontented, Ann, though I'm afraid I sound so. But I seem to lead such a useless life here. A few letters to sick and sad people is all I accomplish. If there were some people about the doors whom I could visit and, perhaps, help a little. Once a minister's wife always a minister's wife. I can't get out of the habit of trying to help. But there's only old Geordie's cottage, and he hasn't even a wife, and he wouldn't thank me for a visit." "No," laughed Ann. "He is very proud of being able to fend for himself, and hopes to die without being beholden to any woman. He was telling me a sad tale the other day about an old friend of his who lived alone until he was eighty, and then fell ill and had to have the district nurse, who insisted on his remaining in bed. 'To think,' said Geordie, 'that a man should live to be aichty and be overpowered by a wumman in the end.' But I can quite see that the lack of people to comfort and help is a great lack to you--born minister's wife that you are."