The summers' suns and winters' frosts and the eternal summer and winter winds had burned and browned the soft, fair skin of her earlier days.

The anxieties inevitable to the struggle with poverty had lined her face and whitened her hair.

But her eyes shone still with the serene light of a soul that carries within it the secret of triumph over the carking cares of life.
Seated beside her was her eldest daughter Kathleen, sewing; and stretched upon the floor lay Nora, frankly idle and half asleep, listening to the talk of the other two.

Their talk turned upon the theme never long absent from their thought--that of ways and means.
"Tell you what, Mummie," droned Nora, lazily extending her lithe young body to its utmost limits, "there is a simple way out of our never ending worries, namely, a man, a rich man, if handsome, so much the better, but rich he must be, for Kathleen.

They say they are hanging round the Gateway City of the West in bunches.