And then she was too busy to fret. There was Grandpa who needed more help every morning with his dressing, and every evening with the Hindmost Hymn. There was her mother, whose tasks must now grow lighter each year, there was Jimmie to be helped with his lessons on Saturdays, there was a Sunday school class with two of the bad Martin children in it, and there was Mary's trousseau to help prepare against the wedding at Christmastime. For the courtship of MacGillivray's man had proceeded at a furious pace and through Ellen had been engaged for five years, Mary was to be the first to marry. And so, Christina's hands were very full, and John would often say to her, after an unusually busy day, or when a letter came from Sandy bewailing her lot: "Just wait, Christine. In another year who knows what will happen?" And Christina's heart was content. As Mary had to keep up her teaching until the Christmas holidays, and her evenings were mostly spent with the young man who drove over from Port Stewart quite a remarkable number of times a week, there was much to do in the preparation of her clothes. Ellen had stopped her own embroidering, to wait until Bruce was through college, and she took to doing towels and table-napkins and doilies for Mary. "I can't help thinking that it's a dreadful waste for you to get married," declared Christina, one Saturday afternoon as they all sewed furiously in the big roomy kitchen. "You're just throwing away a teacher's certificate. My! If I had Greenwood school I'd never get married!" And Mary and Ellen laughed and looked at each other knowingly from their respective heights far above Christina's head. She tried to keep up her studies by following Jimmie's course, and stayed home on Friday nights from the Temperance meeting to help him with his lessons. One evening they had a long hunt through "The Lady of the Lake" for a line about the Harebell which Jimmie must quote in an essay. They were sitting around the long kitchen table, all except Mary who was out driving in the moonlight. Ellen was at one end writing to Bruce as usual, John at the other, reading the daily paper, Mrs. Lindsay was knitting, and Uncle Neil was strumming out fragments of old songs on his violin, his stockinged feet comfortable on the damper of the stove. Even Uncle Neil's memory could not produce the Harebell, and Jimmie went rummaging through the book impatiently. "Gavin Grant would tell me if he was here," Jimmie said. "He knows all this stuff off by heart." "And plenty more," put in Uncle Neil to the tune of "Oh wert thou in the cauld blast?" "Gavin's mind is well stored. Mr. Sinclair says he reads Carlyle in the evenings with the Grant girls. I wonder if you could match that anywhere in this country?"