But there was a note of anxiety in the reproof nevertheless.

“I’m not exaggerating, Esther!  She did.  Even Miss Bremner asked her what she was going to do with them all.”

The elder girl’s fingers tightened upon the small hand she held.  Her red lips set themselves in a firm line.  In face of a danger which she could see and measure Esther had courage enough.  And she had faced this particular danger before.

“Mother will tell me all about it, no doubt,” she said calmly.  “Did she get me something pretty, too?”

“Yes.  It’s a surprise.”

“And when she got all the pretty things I suppose she told the clerks to charge them?”

“Oh, no.  She paid for them out of her purse.”

Esther was conscious of a swift reaction.  The things were paid for.  Of course Jane had exaggerated.  Children have no sense of value.  Some dainty things, Mrs. Coombe was sure to buy; but, as Esther well knew, her slender stock of money would hardly have run to “piles” and “heaps.”  And of course she had been unjust in fearing that Mary had gone into debt.  They had one experience of that kind, an experience which had ended in a solemn promise that it would never happen again.  Mary understood the position as well as she did.

As the girl’s thought trailed naturally into the problem paths of every day, her weeks of freedom, her new interests, the strange experience in the manse garden seemed already remote.  With the little frown of accustomed perplexity slipping in between her straight, black brows, her deeper agitation quieted.  The unusual has no antidote so effective as the commonplace.

They found Mrs. Coombe waiting for them on the veranda.  Lying back in the shade, in her white dress she looked very much at her ease.  Yet a quick observer might have noticed a certain anxiety in the glance she tried to render merely welcoming.  She was thinner than she had been; tired lines dragged at the corners of the pouting mouth and dark circles showed plainly through their dusting of pearl powder.  Changes which creep in unnoticed when one sees a person every day are startlingly apparent when absence has forced a clearer focus.  Esther had known that her step-mother had changed, was changing, but as she bent over her now, the extent of the change shocked her.  With a tightening at her heart she wondered what her father would say if he could see the difference wrought by one short year.  Pearl powder, lavishly used, is not becoming, especially when it sifts into multitudes of fine lines; nor can powder or anything else brighten a dull, yellowing skin which in health would still be delicately clear and firm.

But the dulled eyes and the faded face were only the symptoms of the real change in Mary Coombe.  The thing itself lay deeper.  Striving to express a subtlety which would not lend itself to words, Esther had more than once told herself that her mother was “not the same woman.”  Yet it was only to-day, as she stooped to kiss her, that the startling, literal truth of the phrase struck home.  The outside changes were nothing—­it was the woman herself who had changed.