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Jane wished it, too. If one could but fly in the darkness over rivers and mountains and forests to the Island for just that one night! What fun they would have running round putting turnip and pumpkin Jack-o’-lanterns on gate-posts and perhaps helping to carry off somebody’s gate.

“What are you laughing at, darling?” asked mother.

“A letter from home,” said Jane thoughtlessly.

“Oh, Jane Victoria, isn’t this your home?” cried mother piteously.

Jane was sorry she had spoken. But she had to be honest. Home! A little house looking seaward … a white gull … ships going up and down … spruce woods … misty barrens … salt air cold from leagues of gulf … quiet … silence. THAT was home … the only home she knew. But she hated to hurt mother. Jane had begun to feel curiously protective about mother … as if, somehow, she must be shielded and guarded. Oh, if she could only talk things over with mother … tell her everything about dad … find out everything. What fun it would be to read those letters to mother! She did read them to Jody. Jody was as much interested in the Lantern Hill folks as Jane herself. She began sending messages to Polly and Shingle and Min.

The elms around 60 Gay turned a rusty yellow. Far away the red leaves would be falling from the maples … the autumn mists would be coming in from the sea. Jane opened her notebook and ticked off October.

November was a dark, dry, windy month. Jane scored a secret triumph over grandmother one week of it.

“Let me make the croquettes for lunch, Mary,” she begged one day. Mary consented very sceptically, remembering that there was plenty of chicken salad in the refrigerator if the croquettes were ruined. They were not. They were everything croquettes should be. Nobody knew who had made them, but Jane had the fun of watching folks eat them. Grandmother took a second helping.

“Mary seems to have learned how to make croquettes properly at last,” she said.

Jane wore a poppy on Armistice Day because dad was a D.S. She was hungry to hear about him but she would not ask her Island correspondents. They must not know she and dad did not exchange letters. But sometimes there was a bit about him in some of the letters … perhaps only a sentence or two. She lived for and by them. She got up in the night to re-read the letters they were in. And every Saturday afternoon she shut herself up in her room and wrote him a letter which she sealed up and asked Mary to hide in her trunk. She would take them all to dad next summer and let him read them while she read his diary. She made a little ritual of dressing up to write to dad. It was delightful to be writing to him, while the wind howled outside, to father so far away and yet so near, telling him everything you had done that week, all the little intimate things you loved.

The first snow came one afternoon as she wrote, in flakes as large as butterflies. Would it be snowing on the Island? Jane hunted up the morning paper and looked to see what the weather report in the Maritimes was. Yes … cold, with showers of snow … clearing and cold at night. Jane shut her eyes and saw it. Great soft flakes falling over the grey landscape against the dark spruces … her little garden a thing of fairy beauty … egg flakes in the empty robin’s nest she and Shingle knew of … the dark sea around the white land. “Clearing and cold at night.” Frosty stars gleaming out in still frostier evening blue over quiet fields thinly white with snow. Would dad remember to let the Peters in?

Jane ticked off November.

Christmas had never meant a great deal to Jane. They always did the same things in the same way. There were neither tree nor stockings at 60 Gay and no morning celebration because grandmother so decreed. She said she liked a quiet forenoon and she always went to the service in St Barnabas’s, though, for some queer reason of her own, she always wanted to go alone that day. Then they all went for lunch to Uncle William’s or Uncle David’s and there was a big family dinner at night at 60 Gay, with the presents in display. Jane always got a good many things she didn’t want especially and one or two she did. Mother always seemed even a little gayer on Christmas than on any other day … too gay, as if, Jane in her new wisdom felt, she were afraid of remembering something if she stopped being gay for a moment.

But the Christmas season this year had a subtle meaning for Jane it had never possessed before. There was the concert at St Agatha’s for one thing, in which Jane was one of the star performers. She recited another habitant poem and did it capitally … because she was reciting to an audience of one a thousand miles away and didn’t care a hoot for grandmother’s scornful face and compressed lips. The last number was a tableau in which four girls represented the spirits of the four seasons kneeling around the Christmas spirit. Jane was the spirit of autumn with maple-leaves in her russet hair.

“Your granddaughter is going to be a very handsome girl,” a lady told grandmother. “She doesn’t resemble her lovely mother, of course, but there is something very striking about her face.”

“Handsome is as handsome does,” said grandmother in a tone which implied that, judged by that standard, Jane hadn’t the remotest chance of good looks. But Jane didn’t hear it and wouldn’t have cared if she had. She knew what dad thought about her bones.

Jane could not send presents to the Island … she had no money to buy them. An allowance was something Jane had never had. So she wrote a special letter to all her friends instead. They sent her little gifts which gave her far more delight than the fine ones she got in Toronto.

Min’s ma sent her a packet of summer savoury.

“Nobody here cares for summer savoury,” said grandmother, meaning that she didn’t. “We prefer sage.”

“Mrs Jimmy John always uses savoury in her stuffing and so do Min’s ma and Mrs Big Donald,” said Jane.

“Oh, no doubt we are sadly behind the times,” said grandmother, and when Jane opened the packet of spruce-gum Young John had sent her grandmother said, “Well, well, so LADIES chew gum nowadays. Other times, other manners.”

She picked up the card Ding-dong had sent Jane. It had on it the picture of a blue and gold angel under which Ding-dong had written, “This looks like you.”

“I have always heard,” said grandmother, “that love is blind.”

Grandmother certainly had the knack of making you feel ridiculous.

But even grandmother did not disdain the bundle of driftwood old Timothy Salt expressed up. She let Jane burn it in the fireplace on Christmas eve, and mother loved the blue and green and purple flames. Jane sat before it and dreamed. It was a very cold night … a night of frost and stars. Would it be as cold on the Island and would her geraniums freeze? Would there be a thick white fur on the windows at Lantern Hill? What kind of a Christmas would dad have? She knew he was going to Aunt Irene’s for dinner. Aunt Irene had written Jane a note to accompany her gift of a pretty knitted sweater and told her so. “With a few of his old friends,” said Aunt Irene.

Would Lilian Morrow be among the old friends? Somehow Jane hoped not. There was always a queer little formless, nameless fear in her heart when she thought of Lilian Morrow and her caressing “‘Drew.”

Lantern Hill would be empty on Christmas. Jane resented that. Dad would take Happy with him and the poor Peters would be all alone.

Jane had one thrill on Christmas Day nobody knew anything about. They went to lunch at Uncle David’s and there was a copy of Saturday Evening in the library. Jane pounced on it. Would there be anything of dad’s in it? Yes, there was. Another front page article on “The Consequences of Confederation in Regard to the Maritime Provinces.” Jane was totally out of her depth in it, but she read every word of it with pride and delight.

Then came the cat.

They had had dinner at 60 Gay and were all in the big drawing-room, which even with a fire blazing on the hearth still seemed cold and grim. Frank came in with a basket.

“It’s come, Mrs Kennedy,” he said.

Grandmother took the basket from Frank and opened it. A magnificent white Persian cat was revealed, blinking pale green eyes disdainfully and distrustfully at everybody. Mary and Frank had discussed that cat in the kitchen.

“Whatever has the old dame got into her noddle now?” said Frank. “I thought she hated cats and wouldn’t let Miss Victoria have one on any consideration. And here she’s giving her one … and it costing seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars for a cat!”

“Money’s no object to her,” said Mary. “And I’ll tell you what’s in her noddle. I haven’t cooked for her for twenty years without learning to read her mind. Miss Victoria has a cat on that Island of hers. Her grandmother wants to cut that cat out. She isn’t going to have Andrew Stuart letting Miss Victoria have cats when she isn’t allowed to have them here. The old lady is at her wit’s end how to wean Miss Victoria away from the Island and that’s what this cat means. Thinks she—a real Persian, costing seventy-five dollars and looking like the King of All Cats, will soon put the child out of conceit with her miserable common kittens. Look at the presents she give Miss Victoria this Christmas. As if to say, ‘You couldn’t get anything like that from your father!’ Oh, I’m knowing her. But she’s met her match at last or I’m mistaken. She can’t overcrow Miss Victoria any longer and she’s just beginning to find it out.”

“This is a Christmas present for you, Victoria,” said grandmother. “It should have been here last night but there was some delay … somebody was ill.”

Everybody looked at Jane as if they expected her to go into spasms of delight.

“Thank you, grandmother,” said Jane flatly.

She didn’t like Persian cats. Aunt Minnie had one … a pedigreed smoke-blue … and Jane had never liked it. Persian cats were so deceptive. They looked so fat and fluffy, and then when you picked them up, expecting to enjoy a good satisfying squeeze, there was nothing to them but bones. Anybody was welcome to their Persian cat for all of Jane.

“Its name is Snowball,” said Grandmother.

So she couldn’t even name her own cat. But grandmother expected her to like the cat and Jane went to work heroically in the following days trying to like it. The trouble was, the cat didn’t want to be liked. No friendliness ever warmed the pale green fire of its eyes. It did not want to be petted or caressed. The Peters had been lapsters, with eyes of amber, and Jane from the first had been able to talk to them in their own language. But Snowball refused to understand a word she said.

“I thought … correct me if I’m wrong … that you professed to be fond of cats,” said grandmother.

“Snowball doesn’t like me,” said Jane.

“Oh!” said grandmother. “Well, I suppose your taste in cats is on a par with your taste in friends. And I don’t suppose there is very much that can be done about it.”

“Darling, COULDN’T you like Snowball a little more?” pleaded mother, as soon as they were alone. “Just to please your grandmother. She thought you would be delighted. Can’t you pretend to like it?”

Jane was not very good at pretending. She looked after Snowball faithfully, combed and brushed him every day, saw that he had the right kind of food and plenty of it, saw that he did not get out in the cold and take pneumonia … would not have cared in the least if he had. She liked pussies who went out boldly on their own mysterious errands and later appeared on the doorstep pleading to get in where there was a warm cushion and a drop of cream. Snowball took all her attention as a matter of course, paraded about 60 Gay, waving a plumy tail and was rapturously adored by all callers.

“Poor Snowball,” said grandmother ironically.

At this unlucky point Jane giggled. She couldn’t help it. Snowball looked so little desirous of pity. Sitting on the arm of the chesterfield, he was monarch of all he surveyed and quite happy about it.

“I like a cat I can hug,” said Jane. “A cat that likes to be hugged.”

“You forget you are talking to me, not to Jody,” said grandmother.

After three weeks Snowball disappeared. Luckily Jane was at St Agatha’s or grandmother might have suspected her of conniving at his disappearance. Everybody was away and Mary had left the front door open for a few moments. Snowball went out and apparently wandered into the fourth dimension. A lost-and-found ad. had no results.

“He’s been stole,” said Frank. “That’s what comes of having them expensive cats.”

“It’s not me that’s sorry. He had to be more pampered than a baby,” said Mary. “And I’m not of the opinion Miss Victoria will break her heart about it either. She’s still hankering after her Peters … she’s not one to change and the old lady can put that in her pipe and smoke it.”

Jane couldn’t pretend any great grief and grandmother was very angry. She smouldered for days over it and Jane was uncomfortable. Perhaps she had been ungrateful … perhaps she hadn’t tried hard enough to like Snowball. Anyhow, on the night the big white Persian suddenly materialized on the street corner, as she and mother were waiting for the Bloor car amid a swirl of snow, and wrapped itself around her legs in an apparent frenzy of recognition and hoarse miaows, Jane yelped with genuine delight.

“Mummy … mummy … here’s Snowball.”

That she and mother should be standing alone on a street corner, waiting for a car on a blustery January night was an unprecedented thing. There had been doings at St Agatha’s that night … the senior girls had put on a play and mother had been invited. Frank was laid up with influenza and they had to go with Mrs Austen. Before the play was half through Mrs Austen had been summoned home because of sudden illness in her family and mother had said, “Don’t think of us for a moment. Jane and I can go home perfectly well on the streetcars.”

Jane always loved a ride on a streetcar, and it was twice as much fun with mother. It was so seldom she and mother went anywhere alone. But when they did, mother was such a good companion. She saw the funny side of everything and her eyes laughed to Jane’s when a joke popped its head up. Jane was sorry when they got off at Bloor for that meant they were comparatively near home.

“Darling, how can this be Snowball?” exclaimed mother. “It does look like him, I admit … but it’s a mile from home… .”