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 jealousies, petty possessions, the rights of one person in another. She brought the car around to a point from which the lake spread out under them in all the glory of deep emerald water and distant walls of sun-bronzed rock. The cottages and farm buildings grouped themselves beneath, and along the pebbly shore a rich league of grey-black and dark green pine forest linked the buildings and the mountains. Two frantic sheep dogs came barking to meet them.

An exclamation of delight escaped from the travel-weary guest.

"I'm glad you like it," remarked Louise, relenting.

"It's superb," Miriam replied. Again she gave Louise's shoulder a discreet pat, as the latter began the winding descent. "You very lucky woman!" she commented.

Riding, fishing, and hunting for the winter's supply of game enlivened the autumn months, and when the snow arrived, drifting through the canyons, obliterating all traces of roads and fences, there were snow-shoe and ski-journeys, skating on a swept portion of the lake, and dances before the great fireplace. Self-consciously at first, but soon without being aware of it, Louise reflected the sheen of her companion, and acquired objective glimpses of herself. There had been long discussions in which tastes and opinions had been sifted, and Louise's speech

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 and cast of thought subtly supervised. Throughout the program Keble made quiet entrances and exits, dimly realizing what was taking place, grateful for, yet a little distrustful of the gradual transformation. It was as though, in an atmosphere of peace, unknown forces were being secretly mobilized. There was a charm for him in the nightly fireside readings and conversations. When he was present they were likely to develop into a monologue of daring theories invented and sustained by Louise,—a Louise who had begun to take some of her girlish extravagances in earnest. In the end Keble found himself, along with Miriam Cread, bringing to bear against Louise's radicalism the stock counter arguments of his class.

This was disconcerting, for he had been in the habit of regarding himself as an innovator, with his back to the past and his gaze fixed upon the future; and although it was pleasant to find himself so often in accord with a highly civilized and attractive young woman just appreciably his senior, it was a set-back to his illusion of having graduated from the prejudices and short-sightedness of conventional society. For the sum total of his mental bouts with Louise was that she serenely but quite decisively relegated him to the ranks of the safe and sane. And "safe and sane" as she voiced the phrase meant something less commendable than "safe and sane" as he voiced it. For Keble "safe and sane" was of all vehicles the one which would carry him and his goods most adequately to his mortal destination. He had always

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 assumed that Louise had faith in the vehicle. Now he seemed to see her sitting on the tail-board, swinging her legs like a naughty child, ready to leap off at the approach of any conveyance that gave promise of more speed and excitement.

During his later school-days, Keble, by virtue of an ability to discriminate, had arrived at a point of self-realization that rendered his conformity to custom a bore to him but failed to provide him with the logical alternative. For this he had consulted, and responded to, the more refined manifestations of individualism in contemporary literature and art, to the extent of falling under the illusion that he himself was a thoroughgoing individualist. A victim of a period of social transition, he, like so many other young men of his generation, made the mistake of assuming that his doubts and objections were the effect of a creative urge within himself, whereas he had merely acquired a decent wardrobe of modern notions which distinguished him from his elders and, to his own eyes, disguised the inalterably conservative nature of his principles. Hence the almost irreconcilable combination: an instinctive abstemiousness and an Epicurean relish.

Whenever Louise, after some brilliant skirmish with the outriders of orthodoxy, came galloping into camp with the news that a direct route lay open to the citadel of personal freedom and personal morality, Keble found himself throwing up his cap in a sympathetic glee, but then he fell to wondering

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 whether the gaining of the citadel were worth the trampling down of fields, the possible breaking of church windows, the discomfort to neutral bystanders.

At such moments he suspected that he was in the wrong camp; that he had been led there through his admiration for daring spirits rather than a desire for the victory they coveted. It alarmed him to discover that the topsy-turvy fancies that had endeared Louise to him were not merely playful. It alarmed him to discover that she was ready to put her most daring theories into practise, ready to regard her own thoughts and emotions as so many elements in a laboratory in which she was free to experiment, in scientific earnest, at the risk of explosions and bad odors, all for the sake of arriving at truths that would be of questionable value. Certainly, to Keble's mind, the potential results, should the experiments be never so successful, were not worth the incidental damage,—not where one's wife was concerned. For him "safe and sane" meant the avoidance of risk. For Louise he suspected that "safe and sane" smacked of unwillingness to take the personal risks inevitable in any conquest of truth. That brought him to the consideration of "truth," and he saw that for him truth was something more tangible, and much nearer home, than it was for his wife. And he was in the lamentable situation of feeling that she was right, yet being constitutionally unable, or unwilling, or afraid, to go in her direction.

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 will feed and clothe the hog raiser while he raises the hog. Time has been when the price of hogs was set too low by the meat trust, then the half starved hog raisers quit raising hogs and the price had to be raised again to induce the farmers to return to the hog industry. Prices rise and prices fall, but on an average the farmer gets a bare living while the hog and pork manufacturers grow fat.

Tradition tells us that the cow man is the free born son of the boundless plain. A hale fellow well met, a happy-go-lucky kind of a chap. Independent—should say so; free man—no word for it.

Now let us see how things stand with the cow man. A steer has no value as long as it is a steer. Cattle raised in Texas are converted into beef in Kansas City or Chicago, and consumed as porterhouse or soup meat in New York, Berlin or Paris.

The ranch and the steer belong to the cattleman. To finish a steer for the market requires corn, and corn costs money. Like most farmers, the cow man is usually long on expectation and short on coin. So he borrows the money from the commission house at a more or less unreasonable rate of interest. To secure the commission house he mortgages the steers and agrees to deliver them at the stock yards any time the commission house may request it. He cannot take advantage, if there is such a thing, of a favorable market, but must deliver when told to.

But let us assume that our free-born cattleman is independent of the commission house. He takes his cattle. to the Kansas City Stockyards. This institution is controlled by the meat trust. Every morning the different firms composing this organization agree on the maximum price of cattle. Let us say this price is five cents per pound. There is still competition in the stock yard; every buyer tries to buy steers for less than five cents. It is a kind of Dutch auction, where the buyers beat the price down instead of up.

If your cattleman does not want to accept the top notch price of five cents, he may keep his steer in the stock yards by paying certain reasonable charges. He also may purchase feed for his animals at a figure usually charged the two-legged cattle at the Waldorf-Astoria or the St. Regis. In a short time the cattle eat their heads off. Our freeborn son of the prairie may have to sell them for less than he was offered in the first place and pay the board bill besides.


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 Miriam caught something of the true proportions in the situation, and it was her policy to remain negative in so far as possible, pressing gently on either side of the scales, as the balance seemed to require. She had a conscientious desire to help the other two attain a comfortable modus vivendi, but as the winter progressed it became increasingly evident to her that her efforts might end by having a contrary effect. Reluctantly she saw herself saddled with the rôle of referee. Furthermore, it seemed as though the mere presence of a referee implied, even incited, combat. Their evenings often ended on a tone of dissension, Louise soaring on the wings of some new radical conclusion; Keble anxiously counseling moderation; and Miriam, by right and left sallies, endeavoring, not always with success, to bring the disputants to a level of good-humored give and take.

On two or three occasions she had been tempted to withdraw entirely, feeling that as long as a third person were present to hear, the diverging views of husband and wife would inevitably continue to be expressed. But on reflection she realized that her withdrawal could in no sense reconcile their divergences. From Louise she had derived the doctrine that views must, and will, out, and that to conceal or counterfeit them is foolish and dishonest. As Miriam saw it, these two had come to the end of the first flush of excited interest in each other. Their ship had put to sea, the flags had been furled, the sails bent. They had reached the moment when it

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 was necessary to set a course. And they might be considered fortunate in having a fair-minded third person at hand to see them safely beyond the first reefs. It hadn't occurred to Miriam that she might be a reef.

With Louise nothing remained on the surface; the massage that polished her manners polished her thoughts, and with increasing facility in the technique of carrying herself came an increasing desire to carry herself somewhere. As a girl she had too easily outdistanced her companions. Until Miriam Cread's advent there had been no woman with whom to compete, and her intelligence had in consequence slumbered. Keble had transformed her from a girl into a woman; but Miriam made her realize the wide range of possibilities comprised under Womanhood, and had put her on her mettle to define her own particular character as a woman. Now her personality was fully awake, and her daily routine was characterized by an insatiable mental activity, during which she proceeded to a footing on many subjects about which she had never given herself the trouble to think. She had read more books than most girls, and had dined on weighty volumes in her father's library for the sake of their sweets; but under the pressure of her new intellectual intensity she found that, without knowing it, she had been nourished on their soups and roasts. The unrelated impressions that she had long been capturing from books and thrusting carelessly upon mental shelves now formed

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 a fairly respectable stock-in-trade. Every new book, every new discussion, every new incident furnished fuel to the motor that drove her forward.

But there was one moment, during the Christmas festivities, when the boldness of her recent thoughts, the inhibitive tightness of her new garments of correctitude, the fatigue of standing guard over herself, became intolerably irksome, when she looked away from Keble and Miriam and the Browns towards her tubby, bald-headed, serene little father, twinkling and smoking his beloved pipe before the fire: a moment when she longed to be the capricious, dreamy girl who had curled up at his feet during the winter evenings of her first acquaintance with the English boy from Hillside.

If Keble had divined that mood, if he could have stepped in and caught her out of it with an expert caress, if he had read the thought that was then in her mind,—namely that no amount of cleverness could suppress the yearning that her conjugal experience had so far failed to gratify,—if his eyes had penetrated her and not the flames, where presumably they envisaged the air castles he would soon be translating into stone and cement, then the yards of the matrimonial ship might have swung about, the sails have taken the breeze, and the blind helmsman have directed a course into a sharply defined future. At that moment Louise might have been converted, by a sufficiently subtle lover, into a passionate partner in the most prosaic of schemes. All she needed was

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 to be coaxed and driven gently, to a point not far off. It was too personal to be explained; and if he couldn't see it, then she must do what she could on her own initiative, at her expense and his.

The dreamy girl faded out of her eyes, and a self-contained, positive young woman rose from her seat with an easy directness, crossed the room to switch on the lights, and said, "Keble, I've just decided how I shall dispose of my Christmas present." For the benefit of the Browns she explained, "I had a colossal cheque in my stocking from a father-in-law who doesn't know what a spendthrift I am."

"What will you do with it?" asked her husband.

"Something very nice. You're sure to object."

"Is that what makes it nice: my objecting?"

"That makes it more exciting."

"Then let me object hard, dear."

Louise withstood the laughter that greeted Keble's score. "Do it immediately," she advised, "and have it over with; then I'll say what it is."

"Why not spare us a scene?" suggested Miriam. "We know what a brute he is."

"You're concerned in it," Louise replied. "I hope you won't object, for that would be fatal."

This gave Keble his opportunity for revenge against Miriam's "brute." "Mayn't we take Miriam's compliance for granted? We know what a diplomat she is."

Louise was now seated on the opposite side of the table, facing them. "Do you object, Papa?"

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 "On principle, yes, because it's sure to be something rash. As a matter of fact, no, because you're the only sensible rash person there is."

Louise was delighted. "It's Papa's stubborn belief in my common sense, more than anything else, that gives me the courage of my enlightened rashness," she proclaimed.

At this Keble turned with a smile to Miriam. "Now I see what you meant by brute. It's because I won't always acknowledge the enlightenment of rashness."

Miriam colored a little, to her great annoyance. "Really, you mustn't seek meanings in my random words."

"Oh, then it wasn't meant literally?"

"There aren't any literal brutes left; only figurative ones. Must I do penance for a levity I admit to have been uncalled for?"

"I'll let you off,—with the warning that I shall watch your remarks more closely in future."

"Then I can only defend myself by becoming the objectionable thing you called me!"

"Diplomat! Is that objectionable?"

"Rather. It implies the existence of things to be connived at. Once you've admitted diplomat you've admitted stakes, and rivalry."

Mrs. Brown was on what she called tender hooks. Her husband was waggishly of the opinion that the cheque would end by being spent on wagon loads of sugar for Sundown, that pampered circus beast.

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 "Has everybody finished objecting?"

Everybody had.

"Well, then, Miriam and I are going on a jaunt,—to New York and then South where it's warm."

"It's a sort of holiday from me, I gather?" said Keble when the others had done exclaiming.

Miriam's eyes turned in warning towards the speaker, whose lips broke into a smile, in relish of the "brute" which, diplomatically, was merely flashed across the room. This little passage arrested Louise, who had been for the twentieth time reminded, by Keble's detachment, of the inexplicable poem.

"Or yours from me," she replied. "What's sauce for the gander—"

Keble judged the moment opportune for bringing forth his best Port, and while the three men took a new lease of life, the women chatted excitedly about resorts and itineraries.

Louise's announcement had been especially welcome to Miriam. It promised an escape from umpiring,—from neutral-mindedness. Her cheeks burned a little.

The doctor was drifting back, along with Keble's superintendent, into the rigorous pioneer days of the Valley, the days before the branch line had been built into Witney, contrasting the primitive arrangements of that era with the recent encroachments of civilization. The logical development in the talk would be some reference to Keble's ambitious designs, which the spring would see well under way. Miriam

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 glanced up to see how he would receive the cue, which usually roused him to enthusiasm. He allowed it to pass, and she was intrigued to see on his face a look of boyish, wistful abstraction, and loneliness.

He felt her eyes on him, and turned as she looked away. She knew he disliked to be surprised in a self-revelatory mood, and she had time to notice his features assume their usual impersonal cast. That she regretted; the wistfulness had been ingenuous and touching. At times she felt that he deliberately submerged his most likable traits. That was a great pity, because it gave Louise new incentives to go off on her independent courses. Miriam felt that his self-consciousness had begun by hurting Louise, driving her to protect herself against a coldness she couldn't understand. The unfortunate result was that Louise had rather more than protected herself: had gradually attained a self-sufficiency that took Keble's coldness for granted, even inducing it. That was a moral advantage which Miriam's femininity resented, though nothing could have drawn the admission from her.

She was glad when Louise, by a new manoeuvre in the talk, gave her an excuse to go into the next room. For there were times when nothing sheathed the sharp edges of life so satisfactorily as a half hour at the piano.

Only when she had waved Keble farewell from the back of the train at Witney did Louise allow her-

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 self to dwell on the significance of the step she had taken. Keble's generous acquiescence in her plan merely underlined the little question that kept irritating her conscience. For all her skill she hadn't known how to assure Keble that she wasn't turning her back on him; for all her love she couldn't have admitted to him that she was setting out for a sanatorium, to undergo treatment for social ignorances in the hope of returning to him more fit than ever. With the train now bolting east, she had the nervous dread of a prospective patient.

Yet as province after province rolled by, and the dreary prairie began to be broken first by lakes and woods, then by larger and larger communities, graduating her approach into civilization, her natural optimism asserted itself in a typically vehement reaction. Now that there was no turning back, the obvious thing to do was to wring every possibility out of the experience to which she was committed. Nothing should be too superficial for her attention. To Miriam's relief her despondency gave place to a feverish activity of observation. She began to notice her fellow-travelers and to tick them off mercilessly, one by one, with all their worths and blemishes.

"Let's leave no stone unturned, Miriam," she said, imperatively, as they neared their first halting place. "I won't go home till I've done and seen and had one of everything. Then for the next eighty years I

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 shall be able to out-small-talk the most outrageous dude that ever dares cross my threshold."

She kept rein on the excitement caused in her by the hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of Toronto and Montreal, for from Miriam's lukewarmness she divined that they were at best but carbon copies of the hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of New York. So she contented herself with watching the movements of her companion, marveling at Miriam's easy way with porters and chambermaids, her ability to arrive on the right platform ten minutes before the right train departed, to secure the most pleasant rooms at the least exorbitant rate and order the most judicious dinners, all without fuss or worry. Having learned that traveling was one of the major modern arts, she added it to the list of subjects in which she was enrolled as student. By the time they had reached Fifth Avenue and put up at a hostelry that was still imposing, though it had been half forgotten in the mania for newer and gayer establishments, Louise was imperturbable.

During the next few days the experience that made the deepest impression on her was the religious earnestness with which one was expected to cultivate one's exterior. On a memorable, but modest visit to Winnipeg with her father,—who was attending a medical conference,—she had "gone in and bought" whatever she had been in need of. Never had she dreamt that so much art and science could be brought to bear on the merely getting of oneself

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 groomed. But after a few seances in the neighborhood of Fifty-Seventh Street, Louise threw herself into this strange new cult with characteristic fervor. This was partly due to the fact that Madame Adèle, the dressmaker, and Monsieur Jules, the hairdresser, had accomplished what good portrait painters often accomplish, and thrown into relief properties of body and soul of which she had never been aware.

At the end of a fortnight she had mastered many rites, and when the last frocks, hats, gloves, and slippers had arrived, and she had adapted her steps and gestures and rhythms to the unbelievable new picture she made, Miriam, for the first time since their association, expressed herself as satisfied.

"I've been waiting to see you dressed," she announced as they sat in the tea-room of a fashionable hotel. "It's the final test. And you pass—magna cum laude. Opposite you I feel dull and not at all what you would once have called distinguished-looking."

"Don't be absurd, Miriam," returned her pupil in an even tone, with a purified articulation that would have made Minnie Hopper stare. "I may cost eight hundred dollars more than you at the moment, but I look new, and you know it. Whereas you will always look good, without looking new, no matter if you're straight out of a bandbox. If I've made any progress at all, the proof of it is that I recognize the truth of what I've just said. . . . Not only that, but you can console yourself with the knowledge that if

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 you sit opposite me till Doomsday you'll never utter a syllable that couldn't be printed in a book of etiquette. Whereas I,—well, the mere fact that they've pulled out my lopsided eyebrow doesn't mean that before the sun sets I shan't do and say some inadvertent bêtise that will proclaim the pit from which I was digged and make you say to yourself, 'Why does she?'. . . . One comfort is that most of these expensive people here are even more plebeian, at least in their souls, than I am, and you're almost the only person in the world whom I can't fool. . . . Fancy not having you there to be genteel to, and to shock,—especially to shock! At any moment I may deliberately say something vulgar, dear. The temptation often comes over me in hot waves."

"The 'deliberately' redeems you. Most people are vulgar without knowing it; they would bite off their tongues if they knew. . . . As for inadvertence, you've made only one faux pas in days."

"Oh, dear! What?"

"Yesterday, at that awful house."

"Mrs. Pardy's? Why, darling, you took me there yourself, as a treat."

"Yes, but it was Elsa Pardy we went to leave cards for. Elsa was one of the nicest girls in Washington when I knew her there. I would never have looked her up in that casual way if I had foreseen such a fulsome sister-in-law."

Louise laughed at the recollection, snuggling into the thought that Mrs. Pardy could not be laid at her

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 door. Then came the thought of her alleged remissness. "I hope I didn't out-faux Mrs. P. . . . I wonder how Keble would like me to call him Mr. E."

"No wonder Elsa doesn't stay there."

"But, Miriam, my faux pas! I won't be done out of my daily correction."

Miriam smiled indulgently. "It was the merest trifle. Indeed if Mrs. Pardy had made it, it would have done her credit. For that matter she did, effusively, and if we hadn't been such fastidious folk we should have lauded her for it. And I do!"

"Miriam . . . before I throw a bun at you!"

"Well, my dear, you invited the woman to pay you a visit."

"Jolly kind of me, too. Is that all?"

"Heavens, it's enough!"

"I was merely returning a hospitality,—the hospitality of your friends."

"Don't tease."

"After all, what less could I do when she practically gave us her house and her chauffeur and her marble staircase and diamond bracelets and ancestral lemon groves in California."

"None of which we wanted, you see. Nor asked for a thing! Nor accepted a thing except under compulsion. The mere fact that one strays into a house that looks like a glorified Turkish bath and has it, as you say, given to one, doesn't put one under the slightest obligation. We merely sat on the edge of her golden chairs, regretted Elsa's absence, heard

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 about Mr. P.'s kidneys and sundry organs, and drank a cup of tea."

"And ate a cream puff. Don't slight that delicious, cordial, luxurious, fattening, vulgar cream puff. I ate two and longed for a third. That made it a grub-call, and I had to invite her back. I'll never outgrow that primitive custom. Besides, I took care to say, if she was ever in my part of the world. That made it pretty safe."

"Ah, that's just what made it an error. Not only because it was gratuitous, but because Mrs. Pardy is the sort of woman who would charter a private train to be in your part of the world in order, accidentally, to drop in on a young woman who makes the sort of impression you make,—for you do, you know. Especially when she finds out,—and be sure she'll investigate,—who the Eveleys are."

"Well, darling, let her come. She didn't bother me a bit. It would be rough on Keble, I suppose."

"Rough and warm," said Miriam a little testily. "She had the effect on me of heavy flannels in midsummer."

Louise gleefully pounced on her opportunity. ''"Fi donc!"donc! [sic]'' Miriam Cread conjuring up such incorrect things as flannels,—and it isn't anywhere near Doomsday!"

"It's near dressing time. And we must pack a little before dinner. After the theatre we'll be too tired."

"How shall we explain our sudden departure to

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 Mrs. Pardy? Before she sends out invitations to all her friends to 'meet' us!"

"We can have the measles. Or you're moving to Alaska."

"And if ever she and Mr. P. are in the Arctic Circle. . . . Measles wouldn't do the trick. She would come right in and nurse us. And give us her doctor and her florist. Frankly, dear, I rather like Mrs. Pardy; she's so hearty. I thought that was going to rhyme but it didn't."

"Come along. We're going to walk home, for exercise."

"In these heels? . . . Is fifty cents enough to leave the waiter?"

"Enough, good gracious! Leave the brute a quarter."

They made their way through a thronged corridor towards the street, and Miriam felt a proprietary pride in her companion, whose present restraint was as instinctively in keeping with her tailored costume, unostentatious fur, and defiant little hat, as her old flamboyance had been with her khaki breeches and willow switch.

"Since I've begun to spend money," Louise reflected, "I've been more and more oppressed by the unfairness of my having access to so much,—though of course it's nothing compared to what one sees flung about in this bedlam. But all these exaggerated refinements, and people taking notice,—while it excites me, I don't honestly care for it. There's

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 something as uncomfortable about it as there would be about 'boughten' teeth. Sartorial hysteria; the rash known as civilization; I keep saying phrases like that to myself. . . . After about the fifth time I think I'd bite that beauty woman. I like my face too well to have it rubbed out once a week!"

They turned into Fifth Avenue and joined the hordes let loose at this transition hour of the day. Against the grey buildings women were as bright as flowers, fulfilling, as Miriam reflected, the decorative function that trees fulfil on European boulevards.

"I had a cheque from Keble to-day," Louise continued. "As if we hadn't heaps already! It came in a charming letter. Keble in his letters is much more human than he is in the flesh. If I stayed away long enough I might forget that and fall romantically in love with him all over again. Which would be tragic. . . . He says he's happy, poor lamb, to know that I'm beginning to take an interest in life! But I wish he'd be candid and say he's miserable. Then I'd know what to do. When he so obstinately pretends to be happy and isn't, I'm lost. Miriam, look at that creature!"

It was a bizarrely clad woman, so thoroughly made over in every detail of appearance that there was scarcely a square inch of her original pattern left: a weird, costly fabrication that attracted the attention of everybody within range of vision or smell.

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 "Do you know who it is?" asked Miriam, amused at the startled look in her companion's eyes.

"No, do you? She looks Japanese."

"Merely East Side. It's Myra Pelter, the actress we're to see to-night in 'Three Blind Mice'."

Louise yielded to a temptation to turn and stare. "Now there you are, Miriam: the reductio ad absurdum of hectic shopping and beautifying. Isn't it enough to drive one into a nunnery! I'm glad we're on our way to the seashore, where there are at least 'such quantities of sand' and sky and water."

Miriam smiled doubtfully, a little wearily. "There will be quantities of transparent stockings and French perfumes, too, my dear."

"Well, I like frivolities, as such,—but only as such, mind you. From now on I ignore them the minute they try to be anything more. I think I'm going in for human souls. I'm already tired of looking at people as Adèle looks at them, or as if they were books in a shop window. I'm going to open a few and see what they're all about. . . . The worst of it is, you can't look at the last chapter of people and see how they end. You can only read them, as you can only read yourself, in maddeningly short instalments. They're always on the brink of new doings when you come to a 'to be continued'. And I've reached a point where I must have gists and summaries, must see what things are leading to, what's being driven at in this infuriating universe,—this multi-verse."

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 They had by this time reached their rooms, and Miriam was making a preliminary sorting of objects to be packed. "Don't you think," she ventured, "that you are inclined to be a little headlong as a philosopher?"

Louise was deftly choosing the articles of her toilette for the evening. "Oh, no doubt of it! But I'm too deep in my sea now to care. I simply swim on and on, after a shoal of notions."

"And splash a little," commented Miriam, with an abstracted air that saved the remark from being censorious. She was wondering whether she had been over-scrupulous in refusing the gown that Adèle had privately offered her by way of commission. And a little resentful that Adèle should dare offer it to her. Miriam was old enough to remember a day when such transactions were considered off-color, and it bothered her that she should be so old-fashioned as to be unable to accept the place assigned her in the callous new order, as some of her former friends, with the greatest complacence, seemed to have done. Suddenly, bereft of credit in a society to which she had once felt herself a necessary adjunct, catching occasional glimpses of faces that recalled school-days to her, and Newport and Paris, faces now hard, bright and mercenary, Miriam felt abandoned.

Her thoughts strayed westward and hovered. In Alberta she had been an exile; but not so acutely alone as here.

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The remaining weeks of their holiday accomplished even more towards Louise's worldly initiation, for she found herself dining and dancing and matching opinions in private palaces among an anomalous assortment of men and women. Before proceeding to Florida they paused in Washington, where friends of Miriam and Walter Windrom whirled them into the routine of that unique conglomeration of the provincial and the sophisticated. Left alone among them, Louise might for a while have been awed by pompous ladies whose husbands were senators from western states, and unimpressed by young men whose shoulders bore no trace of the burdens laid upon them by foreign governments. But Miriam's polite negativity towards the conspicuously grand, and her full and ready response to some of the unassuming furnished Louise with useful cues, and when Walter was of the party she was even more secure, for he had a faculty of accepting everything at its face value, while privately adding to or subtracting from the offering, with a twinkle in his eye, or a twinkle in his speech.

Walter's good-natured technique, Louise reflected, was more nearly akin to her own temperament than were Miriam's precisely graduated coolness and cordialities. Certain importunate people Miriam simply ignored, as though declining to give them a seat in her coach. Walter, while he was equally exclusive,

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 got over the necessity of inviting them into his coach by stepping out and walking a short distance with them. This method seemed to Louise not only more humane, but also braver than Miriam's, and certainly no less dignified. It was gentlemanly, too; and she objected, as only a woman can object, to feminine tactics.

At Palm Beach they were greeted by a free, open, careless life that suited Louise's mood better than anything their excursion had afforded her. She had decided that there was no hurry about "going in for human souls" and consequently spent many hours in roaming through deep-chaired hotel lounges, marble and wicker sun parlors, porches, pergolas, and terraces; and in strolling along the hot sands or across lawns shaded by flowering trees and edged with lotus pools. She also swam, played tennis, and chatted ad libitum with strangers.

On her return to Canada, under the escort of Keble, who had accepted her invitation to come and fetch them, she was brimming over with ideas for the embellishment of their projected home. Yet, though she knew Keble was eager to have her offer suggestions, she deliberately held them back. By declining to participate in it she would lessen its hold on her. It should be his castle, not hers.

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S the days were told off one by one in anticipation of the arrival of Trenholme Dare, the young architect and landscape gardener of Montreal, with his army of workmen, Louise became more conspicuously reticent, more conspicuously addicted to her books on socialism and metaphysics, her chats with the wives of luckless ranchers, her Quixotic jaunts north, south, east, and west in search of lonely school-teachers to be befriended, sick cattle to be disinfected, odd lots of provisions to be acquired from hard-up settlers. On the very day that a site was to be chosen for the foundation of her private greenhouse, she fled from Hillside and rode sixteen miles over the muddy roads of early spring for a mere ice-cream soda; yet when she had heard of the recurrence of little Annie Brown's chronic earache, she had foregone a dance at the Valley to sit up all night and heat linseed oil, smooth pillows, and sing old French ditties.

She realized the extent of her hostility to Keble's plans one day when a particular adverb escaped from her subconsciousness apropos of her husband's look of boyish pleasure and surprise, a sort of diffident

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 radiance in his face, as he glanced through a budget of documents which changed his status from that of a dependent young rancher on probation into an independent estate-holder. He seemed odiously contented, she thought, then checked herself. "Odiously" was the adverb, and in fear and wonder she rode down towards the range to reflect, to read herself a long, abundantly illustrated sermon on heartlessness, and, if possible, reduce herself to a state of remorse and penitence.

In this attempt she failed signally, and indeed went so far over into the opposite scale as to say with a passionate flick of the reins which made Sundown leap, "Then if we must, we must, that's all, and I'll be Nero. The sooner Rome burns the better. Vas-y donc, bonjour!"

The spring rains had set in, and water coursed down the usual channels with a volume and roar that attracted one's attention to brooklets which in other seasons flowed by unnoticed. Water lurked in every depression, as though the earth were some vast sponge, red and brown and green. Near the river, the road was washed away. In some places rude bridges that had served the previous summer were now rendered ridiculous through a capricious change in the course of the stream. The bi-weekly mail wagon had left deep ruts now filled with water the color of cocoa. The mountains were still topped with thick white snow and reminded her of frosted cakes. There was a heavy, rich fragrance and vigor

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 in the air. When a hare darted across the trail into the miniature forest of sage bushes, she, in spirit, darted with him, in a glee. As she cut herself a switch from a bush of willows she welcomed the drops of water that showered over her face and ran up her sleeve, as though, like some intelligent plant, she knew that the drops would make her grow. Even the mud that spattered her boots and stirrup straps she cheerfully accepted as seasonable. And she rode on at haphazard, as carelessly, yet with as much vigorous assurance as had been manifested by the hare. Like the hare she had no idea whither she was bound. Like the hare she was swiftly, gracefully making for the unknown destination. Temperamentally she was hare-like; that would make Keble a tortoise; and according to the fable he would win the race; that thought would bear investigation,—but not for the moment. For the moment she chose to intoxicate herself with the conviction that nothing in the world mattered. The ills that most people complained of,—ills like little Annie's earaches and her own increasing estrangement from her husband,—merely lent life an additional savor, and she could conceive of acquiring a taste for chagrin, as one acquired a taste for bitters; if not a taste, then at least an insensibility. Her whole philosophy amounted to a conviction of the necessity of behaving as though the odds weren't there.

There was only one thing that could have brought her atonement with the spring world nearer to per-

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 fection, and that would have been to have Keble riding at her side. Not the correct Keble who studied blue prints and catalogues, who read prose that sounded like poetry and poems that sounded like prose, but some idealized Keble who, with the same eyes, hair, hands, strength, honesty, and "nice back-of-his-neck," could do what the actual Keble could not do: keep ahead of her, command her, surprise, shock, and seduce her, snatch her off her feet and whirl her through space with a momentum that prevented thought,—the Keble, in short, who failed to exist but whom she loved against hope. Love was a mystery to which she had gladly abandoned herself, but which, while appearing to receive her with open arms, had remained as inscrutable at close range as it had been from a distance. When the arms folded about her she felt imprisoned and blinded; when she drew back for perspective the arms fell, or, what was still more disheartening, methodically turned to some unallied, if useful employment, leaving her restlessly expectant and vaguely resentful. The consequence of which was that her great supply of affection, like the cascades pouring down from the hills, spread over undefined areas, capriciously turned into new channels, leaving, here and there, little bridges of a former season spanning empty river beds. That very morning at breakfast Keble had said to her, "Good morning, dear, did you sleep well?" That phrase was a useless old bridge over a flat stretch of pebbles. To Miriam he had

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 said, "I've had a reply from the cement people; would you like to type some more tiresome letters to-day?" And that was a new bridge over God knew what.

She forgot that she had just been glorying in the conviction that nothing in the world mattered. Once she had said to her father that she sometimes wondered if anything were right. She blushed at a sudden humiliating guess as to what might make everything right. Humiliating because,—for all her fine theorizing,—it might be, after all, more physio- than psyhchopsycho [sic]-logical.

Keble's corner of creation had become a chaos of felled trees, excavations, foundations, ditches, scaffoldings, cement-mixers, tripods, lead pipe, packing-cases, tents, and Irish masons. Four years before, on returning to London from a journey around the world, he had heard his father say that a young man who had "anything in him" couldn't help desiring to exert himself even to the point of great sacrifice in the attainment of whatever most interested him. That remark had discouraged Keble, for he could imagine nothing for which he could have an overwhelming desire to sacrifice himself: least of all British politics, which was the breath in his father's nostrils.

The remark had sent him roaming again, not to see more of the world but to think. And, thanks to a hunting accident which confined him several weeks

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 to a log cabin in the wilds of Alberta, he had not only thought, but found the thing for which he desired to exert himself to the point of sacrifice. At the moment when the lure of a new country was driving from his memory the vapid gaieties of West End night clubs, he met a girl who seemed to be the human counterpart of all the mystery and spaciousness in nature which had cast a spell upon him. The acres which his father had acquired many years before for the mere fun of owning something in Canada were a jumble of forest primeval, clear waters, prairies, untamed animals. Louise was a jumble equally enticing. And the passion to reclaim the one became inextricably allied with a passion to reclaim the other. It mattered no more to him that his rivals in the latter case were cowboys than that, in the former, his opponents were inexperience and a sceptical family. In both cases he saw possibilities that others hadn't seen.

His forests and fields, being without a purpose of their own, yielded docilely to his axes and ploughshares and grouped themselves into the picture he had conceived of them. But his wife, after the first months of submission, had begun to sprout and spread with a capricious and bewildering luxuriance.

For some time he felt the change, but not until the arrival of Trenholme Dare did his feeling become statable. Not that there was any technical lack of affection or good will or loyalty; there was simply a great lack of common effort. The original trust and

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 enthusiasm had vanished, and since no one was to blame, he was beginning to be anxious about its return. At times he suspected that he ought, in some fashion, to assert himself. But, fundamentally humble, as well as proud, he could do nothing more than watch Louise's progress in a sort of despairing approbation, and go on cultivating his own garden.

What changes had taken place in himself, with increasing seriousness of purpose, he could not have said. The changes in Louise were multitudinous, in the sense that a tree in spring is more multitudinous than the same tree in winter. She had acquired foliage and blossoms. He trembled to see what the fruit would be. Once he had been priggish enough to wonder whether he could be contented with a wife brought up in such primitive simplicity; his priggishness received a final snub in Palm Beach, where instead of the impetuous creature whose cultivation he had once bumptiously promised himself to take in hand, he was met by a woman who had herself so completely in hand that she set the tone for everybody within range. Vaguely he suspected that the transformation was the result of a process undertaken with the intention of pleasing him. But to have claimed this would have seemed to him presumptuous. He now found in her a cautiousness, politeness, and undemonstrativeness that, to his dismay, he recognized as an echo of his own; and, their positions reversed, he had some conception of the hurt he must have inflicted on her. Whereupon he

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 longed for her old headlong assaults and gamineries,—longed for them for their warmth and for their value as examples to learn by.

The only encouraging factor in the situation was Louise's honesty. In that respect at least there was no change. He was convinced that she had told him only one lie in her life, and that was a pathetic fib for which he was more than ready to answer to Saint Peter, since it was a by-product of the process of self-improvement Louise had undertaken, as he suspected, to do him honor. Being the first lie, it was overdone: for Miriam Cread was, of all the women he could think of, perhaps the least like a Harristown schoolmistress. He had never challenged the story, and it had never been officially contradicted. Neither Louise nor Miriam knew that one day, in looking through a bundle of old illustrated weeklies, his eye had been arrested by the photograph of a group of people in the paddock at Ascot, prominent among whom was "Rear Admiral Cread of Washington, D. C. and his daughter," chatting with a dowdy old princess of the blood royal at the very moment,—as Keble took the trouble to calculate,—when Weedgie Bruneau was alleged to have been improving her acquaintance with Miriam in a remote normal school in the Canadian northwest.

How Miriam had got to Hillside, what she had come for, and why she stopped on, were questions whose answers were of no importance. Important was the fact that Miriam's presence had had the ef-

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 fect of an electrolized rod plunged into the chemical solution of his marriage. As a result of which Louise and he had separated into copper and NO3. In short he had relapsed into a rather flat solution, and she had come out a very bright metal.

Miriam was not a source of anxiety to him. Whatever machine she had dropped from, she had played fair. At times she was a positive boon: sweet, serene, solid. "I wish you could see her, my son," he had once written to Walter Windrom. "Even your flawless Myra Pelter's nose, if not put out of joint, would have to be furtively looked at in the mirror, just once, to see that it was still straight."

But the man from the machine.

He was entirely self-made, and, as Keble was the first to admit, a tremendously good job. Miriam's comment was that, though his thumbs were too thin-waisted for a Hercules and his shoulders too broad for an Apollo, he was undoubtedly of divine descent. Louise, on first seeing him, had shrugged her shoulders and said, under her breath, the one word: "Cocksure."

Keble's impression of Dare was recorded in his latest letter to Windrom, with whom, as a relief from his recent solitary self-catechism, he had resumed a more intensive correspondence. "He takes possession of you," wrote Keble, "Chiefly, I think, with his voice, which is more palpable than most men's handshakes: one of those voices that contain chords as well as single tones, that sink and spread,

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 then draw together into the sound of hammer on steel, and scatter into a laugh which is like a shower of sparks. If I were a sculptor I would model him in bronze fifteen feet high and label him the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first. If I owned a monopoly of the world's industry I would make him general manager. If I were the sovereign people I would cheerfully and in a sort of helpless awe make him dictator, all the while deploring and failing to understand his views. He would simply thunder forth policies in a voice full of chromatic thirds, and with frantic, nervous huzzahs I would bear him shoulder-high to the throne."

Dare struck Keble as a philosopher who through excess of physical energy had turned to mechanical science. Or perhaps a born engineer whose talent for organizing matter had a sort of spiritual echo. At one moment he would make his facts support his philosophical speculations; at the next his philosophy, like a gigantic aeroplane, would mount into the sky with tons of fact stowed away in neat compartments. The result was that Keble didn't know whether to marvel at the load Dare could mount with, or be alarmed at the whirling away into space of so much solid matter.

"Contact with this chap," wrote Keble, "has taught me this, that to me who,—it must alas be admitted,—am merely on the brink of understanding my epoch, individuality has seemed almost an end in itself, as though the object of life were achieved

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 when the flower blossomed. (I remember romantic nights during my furloughs in Paris when I paid mute tribute to long-haired, be-sandalled creatures who were, to my excessively English eyes, 'being individual'). But egos are passé; mass ego, it seems (or egi) have come in. For Dare the blossoming, even the fructifying, are incidental. His interest (at least in the reflective lulls after dinner, for during the daytime he's the most practical of men) extends to the cosmic activity which is (in some manner I have yet to comprehend) rendered possible by the virtually automatic living and procreating and dying of millions upon millions of violets and pine trees and rabbits and ladies and gentlemen and glaciers and republics and solar systems. He assaults the subject with these stimulating volleys of odds and ends.

"Now imagine, Walter, for only you can, the effect of all this on my wife. It's turning into 'a case unprecedented', and before long I may, like Bunthorne, have to be 'contented with a tulip or li-lie'. Louise long ago talked me into a cocked hat. Miriam, through the mysterious licence she had been endowed with, kept up a semblance of intellectual alto to Louise's dizzy soprano. But now, oh dear me now, Miriam and I aren't even in tempo with her, much less in key. My household,—I still claim it as mine through force of habit, which is always imperative with me,—has become a china shop for the

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 taurean and matadorean antics of two of the most ruthlessly agile products of the age.

"Louise is for the moment (and you can only define her momentarily) an interpreting link between Dare (twenty-first century) and me (nineteenth). Her original association with me awakened her consciousness to a delicate scale of weights and measures in matters of taste and opinion. When she had acquired my acuteness of perception she discovered that she was naturally endowed with Alpine talents that made my hilltop look like a mound. From her easy victories over Miriam and me she concluded that there were endless enterprises awaiting her. When she was alone she began to feel herself operating on a higher gear, making for herself new speed records. Now that I look back, I know that my cautiousness, in more than one crisis, gave her ample excuse for going her own gait. I have it from her lips that she has kept her love (whatever we mean by that enormously capacious word) for me brightly burning, as I, in all the welter, have done. Her religious nature, for want of a cult, has always centered round an exquisite instinct which I suspect to be a sort of sublimated eroticism: something that I suppose no man ever understands,—or would some other man? That's the devilish puzzle of it. Yet almost without being aware of it she seems to have kindled new fires before an altar so much more important and all-embodying than her feeling for me or mere anybody else that the light of her little lamp

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 of constancy is like the light of a star in the blaze of noon.

"What one does in a case like that is more than I know. All I am sure of at this moment is you, my son, a lighthouse that flashes at dependable intervals through my fogs. Do you, for one, stay a little in the rear of the procession if every one else gets out of sight. I don't deserve it of you; I merely exact it,—again through force of habit: the same habit that, in our school holidays suffered me to play with your yacht on the Kensington round pond after I had wrecked my own."

Miriam, who had watched Louise as one watches an acrobat,—with excitement and dread,—felt herself in a sense frustrated by Louise's continued apathy. If it had been punctuated by new verbal heresies, new feats of talk with Trenholme Dare, now the dominating figure at Hillside, Miriam, like Keble, would at least have been able to account for it even had she failed to sympathize. But Louise's indifference seemed to have spread even to the realm of ideas, and there had been very few acrobatic displays of late. Possibly Louise was in love; but if so, it would have been much more like her to say so, flatly.

The effect of this on Miriam was to make her more sharply conscious of the anomaly of her rôle. More than once she had argued that her mission was

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 at an end, but in each instance Louise had induced her to remain. Having yielded at first with a faint sense of guilt, Miriam had come through custom to accept her position with all its ambiguities. As Keble's activities increased, she had stepped into the breach and relieved him of many daily transactions, delighted at being able to offer a definite service for the cheque which was left on her dressing table every month. Keble ended by turning over to her his ledgers and most of his correspondence.

But her feeling of guilt recurred at moments when the house seemed to be an armed camp, with Keble and herself deep in their estimates; and Louise inciting Dare to phantastic metaphysical speculation. At such moments her mind persisted in criticizing Louise. It was not exactly that she lacked confidence in her, for Louise was in her own fashion surefooted and loyal. But Miriam was a little appalled at the extensity of the ground Louise could be surefooted on, the sweeping nature of her conception of loyalty. Louise, scorner of the ground, was all for steering in a direct line to her goal and ignoring the conventional railway routes whose zigzags were conditioned by topographical exigencies not pertinent to fliers. Her loyalty would not fail Keble, for she could cherish him in the spirit without subscribing to him in the letter. Louise's loyalty might be expressed in idioms which were not to be found in Keble's moral vocabulary. Just as there were some eternal truths which could be expressed more ade-

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 quately in French than in English, so, conceivably, there might be vital experiences which Louise could obtain more adequately through the agency of some man other than Keble; certainly she would not acknowledge any law that attempted to prevent her doing so, had she a mind to it.

There were times when Miriam felt herself to be an interpreter; more than once in tête-à-têtes with Keble she had found herself de-coding some succinct remark of Louise's to explain away a worried line in his forehead, and it was on those occasions that she had felt especially guilty,—not because she ran the risk of giving an unfair interpretation, but because it was conceivable that, had she not been there to decipher, Louise would have taken more pains to employ a language Keble could understand.

This qualm she could dispel by reminding herself that at the time of her advent Louise and Keble had been drifting apart through very lack of an interpreter. Then it was Keble's language which had been too precious for his wife, and Louise herself had taken energetic steps to increase her vocabulary to meet the demand. Would Keble take steps to learn her new words? At least there was evidence that he suffered at not being able to speak them. But after all Keble was a man, and no man should be expected to grope in the irrational mazes of a woman's psychology. It was a woman's duty to make herself intelligible to the man who loved her; Miriam was tenaciously sure of this. Yet Louise nowadays

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 made no effort to share her ideas with Keble; she merely challenged him to soar with her, and when he, thinking of Icarus, held back, she went flying off with Dare, who certainly made no effort to bear any one aloft, but whose powerful rushing ascensions either filled you with a desire to fly or bowled you over.

Dare, for all his impetuosity, was, like Louise, prodigiously conscientious; but like her he was more concerned with the sense of a word than with its orthography. He was too certain of the organic and creative nature of experience to live according to any formula. You felt unwontedly safe with him, just as you did with Louise, but safe from dangers that only he had made you see, dangers on a remote horizon. As you ambled along, with nothing more ominous than a cloud of dust or a shower of rain to disturb your pedestrian serenity, Louise and Dare would swoop down, armed to the teeth, gleefully to assure you that nothing fatal would happen, that accidents to limb held no terrors for moral crusaders worthy the name; then, leaving you to stand there in bewilderment, they would swoop off again to catch up with unknown squadrons beyond the rim of vision, whence, for the first time, a muffled sound of bombing came to your ears. And your knees would begin to tremble, not on their account,—oh dear no, they could take care of themselves,—but on your own. Suddenly your pedestrian course

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 seemed drab to you,—long, weary, prosaic; but you lacked wings, weapons, zeal, and endurance.

Louise was a Spartan both morally and physically. She could ignore transgressions of the social code as easily as she could ignore bodily discomforts. Recently Miriam had seen an example of each. When Pearl Beatty, the schoolteacher, had been made the topic of scandalous gossip which echoed through the Valley, Louise in defiance of her husband and the public had fetched Pearl to the ranch for a week-end, and said to her in effect, "Pearl dear, I'll see that you don't lose your job, provided you don't lose your head. If it's a man you want, wait till you find the right one, then bring him here and I'll protect you both. But if it's a lot of men you want you can't go on teaching school in our Valley; it's too complicated. The only way to play that game with pleasure and profit,—and I doubt whether you're really vicious enough,—is to save your money, go to a big city, buy some good clothes, and sit in the lobby of the leading commercial hotel until fate's finger points." As a result of this manoeuvre some of Pearl's thoughtless exuberance rushed into a channel of devotion to Louise, who seized the occasion to build up in the girl a sense of her own value and then bullied the Valley into respecting it.

As for physical courage, only a few days previously Louise, uttering an occasional "Oh damn!" to relieve her agony, had stoically probed with a needle deep under her thumb-nail to release a gathering that

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 had formed as a result of rust poisoning, while Miriam stood by in horror.

Far deeper than her dread of anything Louise might do was a dread engendered by lack of confidence in herself. Within herself there was some gathering of emotion for which, unlike Louise, she hadn't the courage to probe. As she had told Louise at their first meeting, responsibility could frighten her; and she now shrank before the responsibility of her inclinations. The most she dared admit to herself was that she was growing too fond of the life around her. In her first youth she had fancied herself a real person in a pleasantly artificial setting, mildly enamoured of glittering symbols of life; in this faraway corner, renovated by solitude, physical exertion, and obligatory self-analysis, she saw herself as an artificial person in a pleasantly real setting, enamoured of life itself. She had come to teach, and had remained to learn. In the old days a horse had been a sleek toy upon which one cantered in Rock Creek Park or Rotten Row or the Monte Pinchio gardens until a motor came and fetched one home to lunch. A dog had been a sort of living muff. Camping expeditions had been an elaborate means of relaxing overwrought nerves. Nowadays a horse was a friend who uncomplainingly bore one great distances, who discovered the right path when one was lost. A dog was a companion who escorted one through fearsome trails, who retrieved the grouse one hit, and kept watch by night at the cabin

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 door. Camping expeditions were a serious means to some explorative end; one slept on the hard ground under a raincoat simply because there was nothing else to sleep on, and eagerly looked forward to doing it again. Men and women whom one would once have sent down to the kitchen for a cup of tea were now one's convives. And far from losing caste on this level, one acquired a useful perspective of society and a new conception of one's identity. Association with a girl like Pearl Beatty, for instance, not only opened one's eyes at last to some blunt facts about one's own nature, but also furnished the clue to scandals concerning which one had been stupidly supercilious in the days when life consisted in the automatic fulfilment of projects announced beforehand on pieces of cardboard.

Yet for the first time in a dozen years she was not sure of herself. So far she had been loyal in thought as well as deed, but the present inventory of herself revealed claims for which she had also little rebellious gusts of loyalty. Louise herself counted for something in this development, since however much one might deprecate Louise's bold convictions, one couldn't deny that they were often ingratiating. "It's more honorable to hoist your own sail and sail straight on a reef than it is to be towed forever!" When Louise tossed off remarks of that sort one was tempted to lengths of experiment that one would once have drastically disapproved. Louise's philosophy might end by producing inedible

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 fruits, but meanwhile there was no denying the charm of the blossoms she flaunted under one's windows and virtually defied one not to smell.

As long as Louise was plying at verbal thunder and lightning, Miriam's confidence in herself underwent to qualms. For at such times, she, in comparison with Louise, personified all that was discreet. But when Louise's effervescences died down, when the last waterspout of her exultant proclamations had collapsed on a lake of apathy too deep and dark to be penetrated, Miriam felt the wavelets radiating to the shore at her feet, gently communicating a more daring rhythm to her own desires.

The first definite effect of these reflections was Miriam's decision to leave. Otherwise she would be forced to come to an understanding with herself and run the risk of discovering that she was ready to—steal.

It was late in September. Dare's army of workmen were fighting against time to complete the exteriors of the new house and outbuildings before winter. Miriam drew rein as her horse reached the top of the hill from which she had obtained her first glimpse of the lake more than a year ago. The sun was not yet up, but the world was expecting it. The lake which only yesterday had been an emerald was now a long, flat pearl encircled in a narrow, faintly amethystine mist which like a scarf of gauze broke the perpendicular lines of the farthermost shore. In it were mirrored the colossal rocks forming the

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 jagged V of the canyon, and threadbare clouds of pale rose and jade, lemon and amber. The oily brown log cottages silhouetted near the outlet had the pictorial value of black against the living pearl of the water, and Louise's flower beds were banked with something mauve dulled by dew. Frost-bitten, orange-red geraniums in wooden urns raised high on crooked tree-stumps made hectic blurs on each side of the main cottage. Farther off, and higher than the tops of the pine trees which rose above the pervasive lavender mist, were clusters of yellow and crimson foliage and slender tree trunks that stood out like strokes of Chinese white. Higher yet were stretches of rusty gorse which finally straggled off to bare patches of buff-hued turf ending in the rock walls of Hardscrapple, whose irregular peaks, four thousand feet above, were faintly edged with silver light.

At the end of the pine ridge to the right of the lake, surmounting a broad meadow, standing out from the wooded slope of the mountain, and bringing the whole landscape to a focus, was the Castle with its severe lines, its broad balconies and high windows. One terrace dominated the lake, while another looked over the top of the pine ridge towards the distant valley where the river twisted its way for thirty miles through a grey-green sage plain broken by occasional dark islands of pine and bounded on the farther side by patchy brown and green risings culminating in a lumpy horizon.

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 Everything visible for fifty miles had been stained bright with the hues of the changing season, only to be softened by the clinging mist, which seemed to hush as well as to veil.

From three kitchens,—Louise's, Mrs. Brown's, and the workmen's encampment,—white ribbons of smoke rose straight up as though to reinforce the pale, exhausted clouds. Grendel, Miriam's retriever, was standing in the wet grass, one paw held up and tail motionless as though awaiting confirmation of a hint of jack-rabbits. An acrid odour gave body to the air: an odour whose ingredients included the damp earth, the bark of the firs, the bunches of rust-colored berries, the leather of the saddle, and the warm vitality of the horse. Once there was a sound of whinnying from the slopes beneath, and once a distant sound of splashing,—Keble or Dare at his morning plunge in the lake.

How splendid to be a man, with a man's vigorous instincts! Even the pipes they smoked at night were condonable, when you thought of the strong teeth that clenched their stems, the strong fingers that twisted the stems out during the cleaning process, and the earnestness that went into the filling and lighting, the contented bodily collapse, as of giants refreshed, that followed the first puff.

Splendid to be a man, certainly. But how much more wonderful to be at the disposal of some clean, earnest, boyish creature who would be comfortingly gigantic when one felt helpless, enticingly indolent

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 when one felt strong. As for being a victim to a capacity for tenderness which one had no right to indulge,—that was simply unfair.

The sound of loose planks disturbed by running feet came up to her on the motionless air. It was Keble, in sandals and dressing gown, returning from the boat-slip to the cottage. She leaned forward and patted her horse.

Near the foot of the winding road she drew rein again. Grendel had dashed ahead to play practical jokes on a colony of hens. Joe was chopping wood. Mona was moving tins in the dairy. Annie Brown was at the pump, getting water on her "pinny". Some one was whistling. Grendel barked at the top of his lungs and came bounding back through the grass. The sun was beginning to turn the mountain peaks into brass and bronze. The flat pallid clouds were trailing away. A flush of blue crept over the sky.

Miriam's throat ached with the kind of happiness that is transformed at birth into pain. She remembered the remark she had made to Louise on first descending this road: "You very lucky woman!"

Half an hour later, at the breakfast table, she was struck by the pallor of Louise's cheeks, which normally glowed. Louise was chatting with a show of good spirits that failed to hoodwink her. She broke open an egg with a slight feeling of vexation, for it was nerve-racking to be faced daily with a human puzzle. She was more than willing to be sorry for

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 Louise, but one couldn't quite be sorry until one knew why.

A moment later their eyes met. Louise gave her a characteristically friendly smile, and suddenly Miriam guessed. She was assailed by a nameless envy, a nameless resentment, sincere compassion, then, by a strange relief that left her almost comically weak.

When breakfast was finished and the men were out of the room she went to Louise, grasped her by the shoulders, looked into her eyes with kindly inquiry, then, having been assured, said, "My dear, why didn't you tell me? Or rather, how could I have failed to see!"

To Miriam's amazement Louise bit her lips and trembled,—Louise, the Spartan! Miriam kissed her cold cheek and gave her arm an affectionate pat. She felt awkward. "What's there to be afraid of?" she scoffed. "You of all people!"

"It's not fear," Louise quietly contradicted. "It's disgust."

"How does Keble take it?"

"He is as blind as you were. And I haven't been able to bring myself to telling him. That explains better than anything my state of mind. He will be so odiously glad."

Miriam was shocked.

"Yes, odiously," Louise petulantly repeated. "I know it's abominable of me to talk like this. But he

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 will be so suffocatingly good and kind. . . Oh Miriam!"

She burst into tears and let Miriam's arms receive her. "I loathe hysterical women," she sobbed, then turned to Miriam with appealing eyes. "You will stay won't you?"

Miriam hesitated. The decision she had come to on her solitary ride broke down as other similar decisions had done.

"Why, yes, dear,—yes, of course I'll see you through it," she replied, and allowed Louise's grateful caress to silence a little exulting voice within her.

A singular, poignant peace brooded over Hillside through the long months of Miriam's second winter at the ranch. While the outer world stood transfixed with cold, its lakes and streams frozen and its heart stifled under the snow, the people indoors went about their tasks and diversions with an orderliness that recalled old times to Louise and Keble and tended to persuade Miriam that her doubts about herself had been exaggerated.

To break the monotony of correspondence, books, cards, and skiing trips there had been countless boxes to unpack in the unfinished house on the hill: boxes of furnishings and ornaments, music to try over and books to catalogue. To give unity to the winter, there was the dramatic suspense of waiting

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 for the human miracle. The attitude of Louise combined tolerance of Keble's solicitude with amusement at Miriam's half-embarrassed excitement. For the rest she accepted with common sense a situation which she privately regarded as an insult on the part of fate.

The apathy which Miriam had noted so uneasily in the early autumn had not disappeared, although it had lost its trance-like fixity, in the place of which had come a more regular attention to daily tasks, a quiet competence. Miriam's admiration for Louise had steadily grown, despite her distrust of Louise's intellectual "climbing" and her half-acknowledged envy of Louise's power to enslave Keble, to give Dare Rolands for his Olivers, and to bind maids and cooks, farm hands and horse wranglers, neighbors and creditors together in a fanatical vassalage. On none of her slaves did Louise make arbitrary demands. If she exhorted or scolded them, it was always apropos of their success or failure in being true to themselves. If Miriam's admiration ever wavered, it was on occasions when Louise, carried away by her own élan, cut capers merely to show what capers she could cut,—like an obstreperous child shouting, "Watch me jump down three steps at a time."

But recently Louise had not been cutting capers, and as she sat before a fire that gave the lie to the incredible temperature that reigned beyond the storm doors, calmly stitching garments for an infant whose

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 advent was distasteful to her, Miriam regarded her with the protective affection she might have felt for a sister ten years her junior.

"I can't make you out," she said. "In your place I would be obnoxiously proud of myself."

"When I was first married I wanted him. Then as time went on I hoped there wouldn't be any him at all. Saw to it, in fact. I've been negligent."

"Why him?" Miriam inquired.

"Because it's my duty to produce a member of the ancient and honorable House of Lords. His forebears expect it. As for me, I'd rather have a monkey."

Grimness had replaced the old zest and elasticity, and Miriam noted with surprise that this single fact completely altered the personality of the household. If the present mood proved permanent, she reflected, the Castle, for all their pains, would have the character of a house to let.

Dare had left in the late autumn and would return in the spring, perhaps remaining for the house-warming which was to be the occasion of a visit by members of Keble's family. At the time of Dare's departure Miriam had watched Louise with intense curiosity. She had longed to know the nature of the rôle played by Louise's heart in her relation with Dare,—a relation which both so freely acknowledged to be exhilarating. During one of their final evenings Louise had said to Dare, "When you leave Hillside I shall climb to the top of Hardscrapple, chant a

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 hymn to the sun, and dive head first into the canyon, for there won't be anything to live for, except Keble and Miriam, and they're only the land I'm a fish on, whereas you're the water I'll be a fish out of!"

To which Dare had instantly retorted, "Indeed I'm not the water you're a fish in. I'm the whale you're a swordfish attacking, and I shall be glad to get back east where there's nothing I can't either swallow or out-swim."

Miriam had been exasperated at not being able to read between the bantering lines. For there must be a situation, she reasoned; two such abounding persons, no matter how adroit, could never have got so far into each others' minds without having got some distance into each other's blood.

But the situation, whatever it was, was not divulged, and Miriam was denied whatever solace her own unruly heart might have derived from the knowledge that Keble's wife's heart was also unruly.

Whether Louise's sense of duty had a share in it or not, a "him" was duly produced and ecstatically made at home. Even his mother ended by admitting that he was "not a bad little beast." She had vetoed Keble's plan to import a nurse from England, and had trained Katie Salter for the post. As motherhood had once been Katie's passionate avocation, Louise could think of no better way to translate into deeds the spirit of her outlandish funeral sermon on neighborliness than to promote Katie from the wash-house to the nursery.

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 Keble and Miriam came in from an hour's skating one afternoon late in December to find Louise at the tea-table submitting to Katie's proud account of the prodigy's gain in weight. She was mildly amused to learn that the tender hair on the back of babies' heads was worn off by their immoderate addiction to pillows.

Keble leaned over the perambulator, not daring to put his finger into the trap of his son's microscopic hand lest its coldness have some dire effect. He had an infatuated apprehension of damage to his child, having so recently learned the terrific physical cost of life. His tenderness for the infant had a strange effect on Louise. It made her wish that she were the baby. Tears gathered in her eyes as she watched him, still aglow from his exercise and fairly hanging on Katie's statistics.

She began to pour tea as Miriam threw aside her furs and drew up a chair. Miriam had hoped, in common with Keble and Katie Salter, that Louise's indifference would disappear as if by magic when the baby came within range of the census. She was forced to admit, however, that Louise was not appreciably more partial to her son than to Elvira Brown or Dicky Swigger.

"Could you desert him long enough to drink a cup of tea?" Louise inquired after a decent interval. She liked the solemn manner in which Keble talked to the future member of the House of Lords. Like Gladstone addressing the Queen, Keble addressed

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 the baby as though it were a public meeting. "You must make due allowance for the incurable knick-knackery of woman kind," he was saying, as he smoothed out a lace border in which two tiny fingers had become entangled and against which,—or something equally unjust,—a lusty voice was beginning to protest.

"He's not as polite as you are, if he does take after you," Louise commented when Keble had praised the toasted cheese cakes.

Keble judged this a fair criticism, and Miriam was of the opinion that a polite baby would be an unendurable monstrosity. "I like him best of all," she said, "when he kicks and twists and screams 'fit to bust his pram', as Katie says. Although I'm also quite keen about him when he's dining. Yes, thanks, and another cheese cake . . . And his way of always getting ready to sneeze and then not, that's endearing. And his dreams about food."

"You wouldn't find them half as endearing if you had to wake up in the middle of the night and replenish him."

"Oh I say, Weedgie! Must you always speak of him as though he were a gas-tank, or a bank account!"

"Pass me your cup. After skating you also want a lot of replenishing, like your greedy heir. Now let's for goodness' sake talk about something else,—the New Year's dance for instance."

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 Keble was always ready nowadays to talk on any subject in which Louise showed signs of interest. The recognized household term for it was "trying to be the water Louise is a fish in."

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N England there were several thousand acres which Keble would one day automatically take over. In Canada, creating his own estate, he could enjoy a satisfaction known only to the remotest of his ancestors. And as his wilderness became productive he acquired, atavistically, the attitude of a squire towards the people whose livelihood depended on him. He housed them comfortably; he listened to their claims and quarrels; he hired, discharged, and promoted with conscientious deliberation; and every so often he wrote letters to the provincial parliament about the state of the roads.

"Now it's time to amuse them," Louise had suggested. "People don't remember that you have installed expensive lighting plants for their benefit, but they never forget a lively party."

Thus was sown the seed of the New Year's dance which was to be held in the hall and reception rooms of the empty new house. Invitations were issued to every soul at Hillside, and a poster tacked to the bulletin board of the Valley post office announced that anybody who cared to make the journey would be welcome.

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 Preparations for this evening revived Louise's spirits as nothing had done in months. No detail was left to chance. Keble, held responsible for the music, endeavored for days to whip up the sluggish dance rhythms of the Valley bandmaster. "I've done everything but stand on my head and beat time with my feet," he reported in desperation, "and they still play the fox-trots as though they were dirges. Fortunately the Valley knows no better."

Miriam superintended the decorating of the rooms, aided by the "hands", who, like Birnam Wood, advanced across the white meadow obliterated under a mass of evergreens.

Only one contretemps occurred. A few days after Christmas Mrs. Boots, the minister's wife, accompanied by Mrs. Sweet, wife of the mail carrier, made her way to the Castle and warned Louise that her dance would conflict with the " service" at the Valley church.

New Year's fell on a Saturday, and to postpone the ball one night would involve dancing into the early hours of the Day of Rest. Keble had made arrangements to leave on Saturday for the east, on a short business trip to London. To hold the entertainment over until Monday would therefore be out of the question.

Louise had a characteristic inspiration. "Why not turn the library into a chapel!" she exclaimed, kindling at the prospect of an extra dramatic item on her program, "And pause at midnight for spir-

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 itual refreshments! I'll make everybody file in and kneel, Mr. Boots can say a prayer, and we'll all sing a little hymn—perfect!"

"And then go on dancing!" cried Mrs. Boots, in horror.

Mrs. Sweet reflected the horror on her friend's face. Then her disapproving glances traveled to a corner of the hall where some noisy girls were making paper chains and lanterns under the direction of Pearl Beatty.

Louise saw that she had given pain to the minister's wife. "Forgive me," she said impulsively. "I'm such a heathen! But if I were a Christian I'm sure it wouldn't disturb my conscience to dance and pray alternately; indeed each would gain by the contrast. What's the point of a religion that has to be kept in a cage?"

Mrs. Boots could have found answers if she had been given time to catch her breath, but before she had a word ready Louise was shaking her cordially by the hand and consigning her to a maid who was to take the ladies to the cottage and comfort them with tea and a sight of the baby before the mail sleigh returned to the Valley.

Whatever the concourse of the faithful at the watch-night service, there was never an instant's doubt as to the triumph of the forces of evil. From the moment when Keble and the wife of the Mayor of Witney, followed by Louise and the Mayor, stepped out at the head of a "grand march" until day-

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 break on the first of January when a winded band played a doleful version of "God Save the King", the festivities went forward with irresistible momentum. Keble made a speech, and then with true British fortitude danced with every female guest. Miriam, acting on orders, solicited dances from bashful cowboys, and once, in the grip of an honest lad who seemed to have mistaken her for a pump, she caught the eyes of Keble, in the grip of the new laundress, who was bolting towards a wall with him. And they hadn't dared to burst out laughing.

Louise darted in and out, setting everything on fire, making the dour laugh and the obstreperous subside, launching witty sallies and personal broadsides, robbing Pearl of her plethora of partners and leading them captive to the feet of girls who, after living for days on the exciting prospect, were now sitting against the wall with their poor red hands in their laps, enjoying it, vicariously.

For Louise the evening would have been perfect but for one disturbing remark which she overheard in the supper room. Minnie Swigger, whose brand new "Kelly green" satin had lost something of its splendor when contrasted with the simple black velvet in which Louise was sheathed, had watched Miriam pass by in company with Pearl Beatty and Jack Wallace, the proprietor of the Valley livery stable, and had vouchsafed her criticism in an ungrateful voice which carried to Louise's ears: "She's supposed to be his secretary. Either WeedgeWeedgie [sic]

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 is blind, or she holds Miss Cread over his head as an excuse for her own little game. Nobody but her could get away with it."

Louise wheeled about and walked up to Minnie. "Get away with what?" she inquired evenly.

Minnie was too startled to reply for a moment, then with the defiance born of a bad conscience she said, "I don't care if you did hear me. It certainly looks funny, and that's not my fault. And Pearl Beatty there, as big as life! When you make a fuss over her decent fellows like Jack Wallace get the idea she's all right."

"Isn't she?"

"If you call that all right!"

"Being all right is minding your own business. You're a nice little thing, Minnie, but you don't. Not always. Don't try to mind mine; it's far too much for you."

What the natives thought was in itself a matter of indifference, but if "things," as Minnie alleged, did "look funny", it was just conceivable that the natives, for all their ignorance, saw the situation at Hillside in a clearer perspective than any of the actors. Keble's departure was, therefore, in a sense opportune.

Although it meant twenty-four hours without sleep, Louise and Miriam next morning insisted on accompanying Keble as far as the Valley. The four

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 took breakfast, along with Dr. Bruneau, at the Canada House as Miriam's guests. They were weary, a little feverish, and inclined to be silent. Keble alone chatted with a volubility that betrayed his nervousness, his regret at the separation, and his excitement at the prospect of revisiting the home he had long ago abandoned. Louise was pale, and kept hiding in the depths of her fur coat. Miriam and the doctor sustained Keble's talk, but could not relax the tension. The stage was due in fifteen minutes.

Suddenly Louise jumped up from the table, which was being cleared by an ill-kempt waitress with whom Keble had danced a few hours previously. "I nearly forgot . . . the snapshots of Baby for his grandmother. They're still at the drug-store. I'll run over and get them."

"Let me go, dear," Keble had risen.

"We'll go together," Louise proposed, and Miriam noted an eager light in his eyes.

On the snowy road he tucked his glove under Louise's arm, and they picked their way across in silence to the drug-store.

When she had obtained the photographs and thrust them into an inner pocket of his coat, they returned more slowly towards the hotel.

"It will seem very strange," he said, "without you and the monkey. I can't tell you how disappointed I am at your refusing to come home with me."

"A change from us will do you good . . . You're

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 to give my love and the monkey's to everybody, and tell them I'm looking forward very much to their visit."

Keble stopped in the middle of the deserted street, to face her with appealing eyes, and rested a hand on her arm. "Weedgie, that's all so pathetically trite, for you! Tell me, sans facons, why wouldn't you come, and why wouldn't you let me take the snapshots of you as well as the monkey?"

She was a little timid. This was the Louise with whom he had originally fallen love, and whom he remembered even through her noisiest performances. "Because I'm perverse. I want your people, if they are going to make my acquaintance at all, to get their first impression of me in my own setting." She couldn't confess that she would have been gratified if his people had been a few degrees more pressing in their invitations to her. "If they like me in spite of it, or even if they don't, I shall feel at least square with myself. But if they were to find me passable in their setting, then come out here and pooh-pooh the Valley, I should be—oh, hurt and angry."

Keble shook her gently. "Rubbish!"

"Mrs. Windrom thought me crude," she said, entirely without rancor. In her heart she thought Mrs. Windrom crude.

"Walter didn't," Keble retorted. "And Walter's little finger is worth more than his mother's eternal soul."

"Walter is a man, dear. Mrs. Boots doesn't like

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 me, and her soul is worth thousands of little fingers,—or toes, rather." She was stroking his coon-skin coat.

"Toes, rather? . . . Oh, I see—Boots, toes."

Without warning he caught her in his arms and kissed her. "You preposterous person!" he laughed, a little abashed by his flare of passion.

They returned silently to the hotel porch, where they were joined by Miriam and the doctor. The stage had arrived and they were discussing the state of the mountain road. Keble climbed into the sleigh.

When everyone had said good-bye, and the horses had been set into motion, Keble turned to Miriam with a parting admonition regarding business letters, then added, "Keep an eye on Louise, now that she's come to life again. And do give the monkey an occasional piece of sugar."

The last injunction was a facetious allusion to a remark made some weeks previously by Mr. Brown, who had declared that Keble was spoiling the baby as much as his wife spoiled her circus horse.

When the stage had disappeared, Louise turned to Miriam with an air of being lost. "Isn't it strange," she said, "to think of going back alone! I never realized before how completely it's Keble that makes the ranch go round. I feel like la délaissée,—you know the girl in the ditty: qui pleure nuit et jour."

"Good gracious, Louise, don't tell me you're turning sentimental on top of everything."

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 "It would only be re-turning. I've always been sentimental under the surface. At least I used to be with my dolls. And for some reason I've felt like a little girl this morning."

A cloud passed over Miriam's sky. Lack of sleep and the dissipation of the last week would sufficiently account for it. Faint lines indicated the inner boundaries of her cheeks, and her eyes had lost their agate-like clarity.

"You look like a tired little girl," she said sadly. "I feel all of eighty."

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T was the second anniversary of the death of Billy Salter. A summer breeze played over the hillock which was surmounted by two small tombstones. The branches of the trees which had sheltered the grave-diggers from hail on the day of the funeral were now tossing in a frantic effort to extend their shade to the rows of asters with which Katie and Louise had bounded the two graves.

"Seems less lonesome for Billy, don't it, Mrs. Eveley, when Rosie has a flower bed too," Katie had commented. Rosie Dixon had died before Billy was born, but her span of life had been as limited as his own, which had the effect of making them seem contemporaries.

As Katie had expressed it, "If both were living to-day Rosie would be twenty-nine and Billy fourteen, just going into long pants; but really they're only the same age—both twelve, poor babies!"

Louise recalled the remark this August afternoon as she and Trenholme Dare tied their horses to neighboring trees and ascended towards the deserted graves. "I couldn't help feeling that Katie had stumbled on an interesting idea," she said.

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 "She had," Dare agreed. "If Katie was a savant she might have developed it into an epoch-making theory of time."

"How far ahead would that have got her?"

"Not an inch. Metaphysicians are higher in the air, and their altitude gives them a more panoramic view, but they are traveling towards eternity at exactly the same speed as Katie and not a whit faster. The value of intricate theories is that they are reducible to homely, concrete observations like Katie's. Conversely the beauty of Katie's homely discovery is that it can be elevated into a formula and re-applied, even canonized, along with Newton's apple and adventures of other scientific saints. It's like art: the glory of music is that it is made up of vulgar sounds, and the saving grace of vulgar sounds is that they can all get to a musical heaven."

Louise was sitting on the grass, gazing down towards grey plains which merged into the distant brown hills, which in turn merged into a sky whose blue gave an impression of actual depth. It was not a canopy to-day but an ocean of air, or rather,—since it was bodiless and unglazed,—an ocean's ghost, with small clouds, like the ghosts of icebergs, drifting across its waveless surface.

The breeze which tossed the branches and stirred Sundown's mane came to sport with her own hair. Her hat lay at her feet, and with an arm limply outstretched she wielded a switch, flicking the dusty toes of her riding boots.

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 "By all that," she said, "you imply that philosophizing doesn't get one anywhere. Yet you philosophize as never was, and you seem to be getting ahead like a comet."

"Philosophy isn't the propeller, it's the log that records the progress and adventures of the mind at sea. If by philosophizing you mean the mental gymnastics which toughen thought for subsequent applied mentality, I dare say philosophy can be said to get one ahead; but it doesn't make one wiser in any real sense. The savant knows more than Katie Salter about the nature of the ingredients of life, but that doesn't make him a better liver than Katie. No doubt the man who can enunciate a theory of relativity is more commendable to God than the woman who can only prevent your son from eating angle-worms, for God's evolution depends on intelligence, and Herr Doktor Einstein is more intelligent than Katie Salter, unbedingt. But God is strangely ungrateful; he treats them both alike, giving us all impartially the status of drops in the salty ocean of eternity. What we call our life is merely the instant when we are phosphorescent; the savant may be more luminously phosphorescent than you and me, but before he can say Jack Robinson he has relapsed into the ocean and new drops of salty water have formed, comprising left-over particles of dead hims and yous and mes, forming a new identity which is tossed up into birth to be luminous for a moment and say Jack Robinson and then disintegrate in favor of still further

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