The Golden Woman

Joan lost no time in carrying out the Padre's wishes. Such was her changed mood, such was the strength of her new-born hope, such was the wonderful healing his words had administered to her young mind, that, for the time at least, her every cloud was dispersed, lost in a perfect sheen of mental calm.

The change occurred from the moment of her return home. So changed indeed was she that her rough but faithful housekeeper, dull of perception to all those things outside the narrow focus of her life in domestic service, caught a faint glimpse of it without anything approaching a proper understanding. She realized an added energy, which seriously affected her own methods of performing her duties and caused her to make a mental note that her young mistress was assuming "airs" which did not fit in with her inexperience of those things amidst which she, the farm-wife, had floundered all her life. She heard her moving about the house, her joy and hope finding outlet in song such as had never echoed through the place before. And promptly she set this new phase down to the result of her associations with the young "scallawag" Buck. She noted, too, an added care in her toilet, and this inspired the portentous belief that she was "a-carryin' on" with the same individual. But when it came to a general "turning-out" of the living-rooms of the house, a matter which added an immense amount of effort to her own daily duties, her protest found immediate vent in no uncertain terms.

It came while the midday dinner was in preparation. It rose to boiling-point amidst the steam from her cooking pots. Finally it bubbled over, much as might one of her own kettles.

Joan was standing in the kitchen giving her orders preparatory to departing to the camp, whither she was going to mail her letter to her aunt at Beasley's store.

"You see," she was saying, "I'll have to make some changes in the house. I'm expecting my aunt from St. Ellis to come and stay with me. She won't be able to do with the things which have been sufficient for me. She will have my room. I shall buy new furniture for it. I shall get Beasley to order it for me from Leeson Butte. Then I shall use the little room next yours. And while we're making these changes we'll have a general housecleaning. You might begin this afternoon on the room I am going to move into."

The old woman turned with a scarlet face. It may have been the result of the heat of cooking. Then again it may have had other causes.