Cinderella in more senses than one, for never had the city seemed more dirty or more deserted, or indeed, more stifling.  Winter and its festivities were a dream laid away in moth balls.  Surely Cinderella’s life had held no greater contrasts!  To this day the odour of matting brings back to Honora the sense of closed shutters; of a stifling south wind stirring their slats at noonday; the vision of Aunt Mary, cool and placid in a cambric sacque, sewing by the window in the upper hall, and the sound of fruit venders crying in the street, or of ragmen in the alley—­“Rags, bottles, old iron!” What memories of endless, burning, lonely days come rushing back with those words!

When the sun had sufficiently heated the bricks of the surrounding houses in order that he might not be forgotten during the night, he slowly departed.  If Honora took her book under the maple tree in the yard, she was confronted with that hideous wooden sign “To Let” on the Dwyer’s iron fence opposite, and the grass behind it was unkempt and overgrown with weeds.  Aunt Mary took an unceasing and (to Honora’s mind) morbid interest in the future of that house.

“I suppose it will be a boarding-house,” she would say, “it’s much too large for poor people to rent, and only poor people are coming into this district now.”

“Oh, Aunt Mary!”

“Well, my dear, why should we complain?  We are poor, and it is appropriate that we should live among the poor.  Sometimes I think it is a pity that you should have been thrown all your life with rich people, my child.  I am afraid it has made you discontented.  It is no disgrace to be poor.  We ought to be thankful that we have everything we need.”

Honora put down her sewing.  For she had learned to sew—­Aunt Mary had insisted upon that, as well as French.  She laid her hand upon her aunt’s.

“I am thankful,” she said, and her aunt little guessed the intensity of the emotion she was seeking to control, or imagined the hidden fires.  “But sometimes—­sometimes I try to forget that we are poor.  Perhaps —­some day we shall not be.”

It seemed to Honora that Aunt Mary derived a real pleasure from the contradiction of this hope.  She shook her head vigorously.

“We shall always be, my child.  Your Uncle Tom is getting old, and he has always been too honest to make a great deal of money.  And besides,” she added, “he has not that kind of ability.”

Uncle Tom might be getting old, but he seemed to Honora to be of the same age as in her childhood.  Some people never grow old, and Uncle Tom was one of these.  Fifteen years before he had been promoted to be the cashier of the Prairie Bank, and he was the cashier to-day.  He had the same quiet smile, the same quiet humour, the same calm acceptance of life.  He seemed to bear no grudge even against that ever advancing enemy, the soot, which made it increasingly difficult for him to raise his flowers.  Those which would still grow he washed tenderly night and morning with his watering-pot.  The greatest wonders are not at the ends of the earth, but near us.  It was to take many years for our heroine to realize this.