"Well, I'm sure, there's no getting to the bottom of you. I could understand your not thinking the shop genteel--some folks have such high and mighty notions--but it is not that with you. You know I've always said you were a born shopkeeper. I never kept any kind of accounts before you came, but I don't really think I made anything by the shop at all to speak of--I don't indeed! So many things got mislaid, and, when they cast up again, they were soiled and faded, and one thing and another. I showed Mr Brown your books, and told him what we had made last quarter, and he was perfectly astonished. I am sure he thinks you would be a treasure in a shop like his. My niece, Mary Ann, was capital company, and all her ways were the same as mine like, but she wasn't a shopkeeper like you. She was aye forgetting to put things back in their places, and there would be such a to-do when they were wanted again. Poor thing! I wonder if she's got quit of that lady-help, as she calls her--lady-hindrance is liker it, by my way of thinking! And then, Mona, I did hope you would see your way to being baptised. That was a great thing about Mary Ann. She was a member of the church, and that gave us so many more things to talk about like. She was as fond of the prayer-meeting as I was myself." "You will come and see me sometimes," Rachel said, a few days later. "That I will," Mona answered cordially. "I have promised to spend the summer holidays with some friends, but I will come to you for a week, in the first instance, if you will be kind enough to take me in,--the second week of August." And the reader will be glad to know that, if ever human being had a guilty conscience, Mona had one at that moment. The second week of August! How her heart beat at the thought of it! The examination would be over. With his short-sighted eyes, Dr Dudley would probably never have seen her at Burlington House; and down at Castle Maclean, with the sunshine dancing on the water, and the waves plashing softly on the beach below, she would tell him the whole story, before the lists came out and betrayed her. In the exultation of that moment, the very possibility of another failure did not occur to her. The lists would appear in the course of the week, and they two would con the results together. She would humble herself, if need were, and ask his pardon for having in a sense deceived him; but surely there would be no need. Everything would be easy and natural and beautiful--in the second week of August!