'Lizbeth of the Dale. Mary Esther Miller MacGregor
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the lane. She dreaded to meet her aunt, knowing by sad experience that as soon as that lady's eye fell upon her, not only would all the misdemeanors of which she was conscious appear silhouetted against Miss Gordon's perfection, but dozens of unsuspected sins would spring to light and stand out black in the glare.
She peeped through the tangle of alders and saw that Aunt Margaret was now talking to Annie, with her back to the lane, and the same instant she spied a way of escape. The lane ran straight past the big stone house and down to the line of birches that bordered the stream, forming the road by which Mr. MacAllister reached his old mill, lying away down there in the hollow. Down in the lower part of the lane where the birches grew, William Gordon was wont to walk in the evenings, and here Elizabeth, with infinite relief, spied him just coming into view from beyond a curve. He was walking slowly with bent head, his long, thin hands clasped behind him. At his side was a young man, of medium height, thick-set, and powerful-looking. This was Mr. Tom Teeter, who worked the farm upon which The Dale stood, and lived only a few hundred yards from the Gordons. Mr. Teeter was an Irishman, with a fine gift for speech-making. He was much sought after, for tea-meetings and during political campaigns, and had won the proud alliterative name of Oro's Orator. Tom was now holding forth hotly upon the "onparalleled rascality and treachersome villainousness" of the Opposition in the Ontario Legislature.
Elizabeth, her eyes alight, ran swiftly past the gate towards her father. She loved each member of her family with all the might of her passionate heart; but she held for her father an especially tender regard. Her love for him had in it something of the sacred grief that clung about the memory of her dead mother, something too of mother-love itself, felt in a longing to comfort and protect him. The stoop of his thin shoulders, the silvering hair on his bowed head, and the sound of his gentle voice all appealed to Elizabeth's heart in the same way as when Jamie cried from a hurt. Whenever he looked unusually sad and abstracted, his little daughter yearned to fling her arms about his neck and pet and caress him. But Elizabeth knew better. Such conduct would be courting death by ridicule at the hands of the Gay Gordons.
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