The person who seemed nearest like a fairy godmother to the child was Miss 'Rill. She spent a great deal of her spare time with the storekeeper's daughter. Sometimes she went to Mr. Drugg's cottage alone; but oftener she had Lottie around to the rooms she occupied with her mother on High Street. "I declare for't, 'Rill," sputtered old Mrs Scattergood, one day when Janice happened to be present, "you'll have the hull town talkin' abeout you. You're in an' aout of Hopewell Drugg's jest as though you belonged there." "I'm surely doing no harm, mother," said the little spinster, mildly. "Everyone knows how this poor child needs somebody's care." "Wal! let the 'somebody' be somebody else," snapped the old lady. "I sh'd think you'd be ashamed." "Ashamed of what, mother?" asked Miss 'Rill, with more spirit than she usually displayed. "You know well enough what I mean. Folks will say you're flingin' yourself at Hopewell Drugg's head. An' after all these years, too. I----" "Mother!" exclaimed her daughter, in a low voice, but earnestly. "Don't you think you did harm enough long, long ago, without beginning on that tack now?" "There! that's the thanks one gets when one keeps a gal from makin' a perfect _fule_ of herself," cried the old lady, bridling. "S'pose you'd been jest a drudge for Hopewell, all these years, Amarilla Scattergood?" "I might not have been a drudge," said Miss 'Rill, softly, flushing over her needlework. "At least my life--and his--would have been different." "Ye don't know how lucky you be," snapped her mother. "And this is all the thanks I git for tellin' Hopewell Drugg that he'd brought his pigs to the wrong market." "At least," said the spinster, with a sigh, "he will never worry you on that score again, mother--he nor any other man. When a woman gets near to forty, with more silver than gold in her hair, and the best of her useless life is behind her, she need expect no change in her estate, that's sure." "Ye might be a good deal wuss off," sniffed her mother. "Perhaps that is so," agreed Miss 'Rill, with a sudden hard little laugh. "But don't _you_ take pattern by me, Janice, no matter what folks tell you. Mrs. Beasely is better off than I am. She has the memory of doing for somebody whom she loved and who loved her. While I----Well, I'm just an old maid, and when you say that about a woman, you say the worst!" "Why, the idee!" exclaimed her mother, with wrath. "I call that flyin' right in the face of Providence." "I don't believe that God ever had old maids in the original scheme of things." "Humph! didn't He?" snapped Mrs. Scattergood. "Then why is there so many more women than men in the world? Will you please tell me that, Amarilla?" and this unanswerable argument closed what Janice realized was not the first discussion of the unpleasant topic, between the ex-schoolteacher and her sharp-tongued mother. CHAPTER XXVI JUST HOW IT ALL BEGAN