IN WHICH MISS PAMELA POUNCE DEMONSTRATES THE VALUE OF VIRTUE TO HER FAMILY AND HER FRIENDS “And I’m sure, my dear,” said Mrs. Pounce, the tears welling in her eyes as she gazed lovingly at her eldest daughter, “’tis the golden girl you’ve been to us!” “Ah, you wait, mother!” cried Pamela. “Just you wait! If I don’t finish paying off that there mortgage with the new spring fashions, call me Tabbishaw, that’s all I say.” The force of condemnation for vulgar stupidity could go no further on Miss Pounce’s lips. Farmer Pounce, seated before the kitchen fire, turned his big, grizzled head to cast a glance no less affectionate than his wife’s upon the good daughter. “This time last year,” he said; then, in a ruminating voice, “ah, ’twas a black look-out! As much as I could do to squeeze the interest on the borrowed money and the expenses of the new loan. And Sir Jasper, with his eye on the farm this long while, turning the screw on me, he and lawyer Grinder between them. Cruel hard terms they made me, cruel hard, but there, ’twasn’t as if I didn’t know their little game. Aye, aye, they were but waiting, the both of them, to sell me up and get me out of it all; the land my father’s father’s father called his own.” Mrs. Pounce wept at the mere recollection. Where would they have been, they and the little ones, but for the golden girl? Pamela winked away a bright tear of sympathy. Everything about this girl was bright; the spring of her chestnut hair from her white forehead, which itself shone as with a kind of luminosity, the glance of her full, shrewd eyes, the smile that curved her lips. Oh, above all, it was Pamela’s smile that was bright with the gaiety and joy of life! “Pish, you dears,” she said now, and covered up her emotion with just one of those flashing smiles. “Don’t be making too much of it. All those months I wasted at old Tabbishaw’s didn’t I know in my spirit it would all come right? Wasn’t I sure the whole time”--she played with her capable fingers in the air--“that there was a fortune in these hands once I could get them proper to work? And I tell you now, without vanity--oh, I ain’t got a mite of vanity about it, ’tis my gift, the way pigs is father’s gift--give me a yard of ribbon, a feather, and a bit of straw, and I’ll turn you out two guineas before you can say ‘knife.’” “Dear, to be sure,” mused Mrs. Pounce, forgetting to knead her scones. “And think of the Christmas dinner we’ve had. A turkey fit for the Queen’s table, though I says it as shouldn’t. And me having to sell every one of my lovely birds last year and keep father on the salt beef, Christmas and all! And there’s Susie, such a picture in the bonnet you trimmed for her, at morning service, that I’d never be surprised if Farmer Fleet’s son were to come to the scratch to-night at Sir Jasper’s barn dance, I shouldn’t indeed.”