Ann and Her Mother

"A wild night," Mrs. Douglas said, looking over her shoulder at the curtained windows, and drawing her chair nearer the fire. "This is the sort of night your father liked to sit...

The thaw came suddenly, and, almost in a night, the snow went, leaving the moorlands like some vast sponge. The air was full of the rushing of a great west wind and the noise of...

The December day had run its short and stormy course and the sun was going down in anger, with streaks of crimson and orange, and great purple clouds. Only over the top of the f...

For two days it was as if an enchantment had been thrown over Dreams, so great a quiet held the house. Marget and Mysie went about their work hardly speaking at all; Mrs. Dougla...

"Mother," said Ann one evening, "do you realise that we are not getting on at all well with your _Life_? Marget has developed this passion for coming in and recalling absurd thi...

It was a wonderfully comfortable room, brightly yet softly lit, and warmed by a noble fire. There was a pleasant space and emptiness about it, an absence of ornaments and irrele...

"And now," said Ann, "we're done with Kirkcaple and must tackle Glasgow. And the Tatler is sitting on my MS., and that won't improve its appearance. Odd the passion that cat has...

"Well, I don't know whether you would call it wrong or right. Mr. Philip Scott sends me back my MS., with his criticism of it. I agree with most of the things he says: my langua...

Two nights later, when the stars had come out to look down at the Green Glen and the curtains were drawn in Dreams, Ann sat down before a small table on which lay a pile of pape...

When Mr. Philip Scott came to lunch at Dreams he stayed a long time--so long that Marget remarked to Mysie in the kitchen, "That man is surely het at hame that he's sittin' here...

The arrival of the post was almost the only excitement at Dreams, and on the days that the Indian and South African mails came, Mrs. Douglas could do nothing but pore over the p...

Marget stood in the middle of the room pleating her black silk apron between her fingers. She wanted to be asked to sit down, for she had heard Ann and her mother talking of the...

With the last days of November winter descended with real earnest on the Green Glen. For thirty-six hours snow fell, blotting out the paths, piling great drifts in the hollows,...

The next evening when Ann sat down with an air of determination at the writing-table she asked: "Shall I make another stride, Mother? Go on another seven years? It's fine to wea...

"Now that the visitors are gone," said Ann, "we'll go on with our wedding number. Who complained of the dullness of the Green Glen? Three visitors--the whole neighbourhood you m...

Evening had come again to Dreams, but Ann, instead of being found at her writing-table, was stretched flat in the largest and softest of the many comfortable chairs the room con...

"... It was our favourite occupation, your father's and mine, when we had an hour together by the fire, to dream of the good times we would have when he retired. When we got ver...

"... When Rosamund was six months old we left Kirkcaple. It was a great uprooting. You don't live thirteen years in a place in close touch with the people without becoming deepl...

"I don't know," said Mrs. Douglas, "when I first realised what was expected of me as a minister's wife. I suppose I just grew to it. At first I visited the people and tried to t...

On these winter evenings in the Green Glen, when the wind and the rain beat upon the house, and Ann by the fireside wrote down her mother's life, Marget made many errands into t...

Inchkeld was a most pleasant place in which to have one's home--a city set among hills and watered by a broad river; and surely no young and witless couple ever had a kinder and...

November is a poor time to go to a new place, and Kirkcaple certainly looked a most unattractive part of the world when we arrived on a cold, wet afternoon. 'The queer-like smel...

Ann's pen was held aloft in amaze, as she looked across at her mother seated at the other side of the fire in her very own chair that had stood by the nursery fireside in long p...

"I know it will," she said. "I can feel it doing it. It's that old _Life_ of yours--I can't make it sound right. Sir Walter Raleigh talks somewhere of men whose true selves are...