When
the earliest blackbird awoke and began to sing, while it was yet gray
twilight, Janet would be up and at her work. She had an ambition to be
a great poet. No less than this would serve her. But not even her father
had known, and no other had any chance of knowing. In the black leather
chest, which had been her mother's, upstairs, there was a slowly growing
pile of manuscript, and the editor of the local paper received every
other week a poem, longer or shorter, for his Poet's Corner, in an
envelope with the New Dalry postmark. He was an obliging editor, and
generally gave the closely written manuscript to the senior office boy,
who had passed the sixth standard, to cut down, tinker the rhymes,
and lope any superfluity of feet. The senior office boy "just spread
himself," as he said, and delighted to do the job in style. But there
was a woman fading into a gray old-maidishness which had hardly ever
been girlhood, who did not at all approve of these corrections. She
endured them because over the signature of "Heather Bell" it was a joy
to see in the rich, close luxury of type her own poetry, even though
it might be a trifle tattered and tossed about by hands ruthless and
alien--those, in fact, of the senior office boy.
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