“There! now see what you have done!  You two make more work than you do; and just see how you have stood the broom in the corner, instead of hanging it up, as I have told you a hundred times to do.  It is more trouble to teach you than it is to do things myself.  I wonder if you have just got through sweeping; such slow poking works, I could have done it twice over by this time.  I don’t see why I should be so tormented; other people have girls that amount to something.”  Mrs. Murray, down in her heart, believed there were no girls in all the kingdom like hers.  Florence was accustomed to this sort of talk, and yet it hurt her sensitive, affectionate nature every time.  The blue eyes took on no indignant light; instead, they filled with tears, which irritated her mother still more, and she said, with increased sharpness: 

“There, go away.  You are made of too fine stuff for common purposes; getting so touchy that not a word can be said to you.”

Counting time by her mother’s calendar, Florence had been a long time doing a little, but her nature was different from her mother’s, all her movements were gentle.  She had been reverently following her mother’s directions.  Her untiring patience ferreted dust out of every little corner where it had lodged in the furniture; she had mounted the step-ladder and dusted the pictures, had cleaned and polished all the little ornaments.  True, she lingered a moment over a book of engravings, and to kiss a little statuette of “Prayer,” but she thought she had done it all so nicely, and a little word of praise would have made her so happy.  It was hard, when she had done her best, to have only fault-findings.

At a very critical stage of affairs in the pastry-making, Nettie Blynn knocked at the side door.  She only wanted to see Maggie just a minute about the Christmas entertainment.  Maggie set down a half-beaten dish of eggs and ran.  The minute lengthened into many more, and the girls talked and talked, as girls will, forgetting all about time.  When Margaret returned to the kitchen she found her mother in a perfect fever of haste, and poor Florence trying to go two or three ways at once.

“Now, Margaret,” her mother began, “I might just as well depend upon the wind as you! drop everything and run the minute you are called.  That is just as much sense as Nettie Blynn has, running to the neighbours Saturday morning, and staying like that, when I have so much to do.  You don’t seem to care whether you help me or not.”

“Why, mother, how could I help it?” Margaret answered with spirit.  “I didn’t ask her to come, and I couldn’t tell her to go away.  Saturday morning is as good as any other time to her; she doesn’t have to work all day Saturday, and how should she know that I do?”

Just here the front door-bell gave a malicious ting-a-ling.  Mrs. Allan, an old friend who lived several miles out of town, had just a few minutes before train time; she was sure there was no one in the world she wanted to see so much as Mrs. Murray, and Mrs. Murray was just as sure that she herself wanted to see nobody just then, but there was no help for it.  She washed the dough from her hands, and saying to Margaret, as she hurriedly left the kitchen: