Souls can be mistaken though, sometimes, if consciences never
can; and Brother Adversity contradicted mine by darting out again to see
what I was doing, ordering me to stop, and doing it all himself.
I ran to beg for immediate bed-linen while he annexed a portion of the
family woodpile, and we met outside my mistress's door. On the threshold
I confidently expected her grateful ladyship to say: "What _are_ you
doing with that wood, Dane?" But she was too much crushed under her own
load of cold and discomfort to object to his and wish it transferred to
me. I'd knelt down to make a funeral pyre of paper roses, when in a
voice low yet firm my brother ordered me to my feet. This wasn't work
for girls when men were about, he grumbled; and perhaps it was as well,
for I never made a wood fire in my life. As for him, he might have been
a fire-tamer, so quickly did the flames leap up and try to lick his
hands. When it was certain that they couldn't go stealthily crawling
away again, he shot from the room, and in two minutes was back with the
big kettle of hot water under whose weight I should have staggered and
fallen, perhaps.
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