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+The Project Gutenberg EBook You Never Know Your Luck, Parker, V2
+#113 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+
+
+Title: You Never Know Your Luck, Volume 2.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6286]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 5, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, V2***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 2.
+
+
+VI.       "HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
+VII.      A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+VIII.     ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+IX.       NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+X.        "S. O. S."
+XI.       IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+"HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
+
+The stillness of a summer's day in Prairie Land has all the
+characteristics of music.  That is not so paradoxical as it seems.
+The effect of some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the senses,
+a suspension of motion and aggressive life; to reduce existence to mere
+pulsation.  It was this kind of feeling which pervaded that region of
+sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story.  The sounds that
+sprinkled the general stillness were in themselves sleepy notes of the
+pervasive music of somnolent nature--the sough of the pine at the door,
+the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding beat of the steam-thresher
+out of sight hard by, the purring of the cat in the arms of Kitty Tynan
+as, with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the tale of a life
+as distant from that which she lived as she was from Eve.
+
+She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on; it even seemed to
+her she was listening to a theme beyond her sphere, like some shameless
+eavesdropper at the curtains of a secret ceremonial.  Once or twice she
+looked at her mother and at the Young Doctor, as though to reassure
+herself that she was not a vulgar intruder.  It was far more impressive
+to her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene at the Logan Trial
+when a man was sentenced to death.  It was strangely magnetic, this
+tale of a man's existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the
+mantelpiece, as it mechanically ticked off the time, seemed only part of
+some mysterious machinery of life.  Once a dove swept down upon the
+window-sill, and, peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital
+with its deep contralto note, and then fled like a small blue cloud
+into the wide and--as it seemed--everlasting peace beyond the doorway.
+
+There was nothing at all between themselves and the far sky-line save
+little clumps of trees here and there, little clusters of buildings and
+houses--no visible animal life.  Everything conspired to give a dignity
+in keeping with the drama of failure being unfolded in the commonplace
+home of the widow Tynan.  Yet the home too had its dignity.  The engineer
+father had had tastes, and he had insisted on plain, unfigured curtains
+and wallpaper and carpets, when carpets were used; and though his wife
+had at first protested against the unfigured carpets as more difficult to
+keep clean and as showing the dirt too easily, she had come to like the
+one-colour scheme, and in that respect her home had an individuality rare
+in her surroundings.
+
+That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background; for what her
+bright colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes
+and "Axminsters," such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the
+imagination.  It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous
+surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been
+arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the
+story; and if it were not a true tale told just as it happened.
+
+
+Perhaps the tale was the more impressive because of Crozier's deep
+baritone voice, capable, as it was, of much modulation, yet, except when.
+he was excited, having a slight monotone like the note of a violin with
+the mute upon the strings.
+
+This was his tale:
+
+"Well, to begin with, I was born at Castlegarry, in Kerry--you know the
+main facts from what I said in court.  As a boy I wasn't so bad a sort.
+I had one peculiarity.  I always wanted 'to have something on,' as John
+Sibley would say.  No matter what it was, I must have something on it.
+And I was very lucky--worse luck!"
+
+They all laughed at the bull.  "I feel at home at once," murmured the
+Young Doctor, for he had come from near Enniskillen years agone, and
+there is not so much difference between Enniskillen and Kerry when it
+comes to Irish bulls.
+
+"Worse luck, it was," continued Crozier, "because it made me confident
+of always winning.  It's hard to say how early I began to believe I could
+see things that were going to happen.  By the hour I used to shake the
+dice on the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes
+shut the numbers about to come up.  Of course now and then I saw the
+right numbers; and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated the
+gift I'd be able to be right nearly every time.  When I went to a horse-
+race I used to fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see beforehand
+the number of the winner.  Again sometimes I was very right indeed, and
+that deepened my confidence in myself.  I was always at it.  I'd try and
+guess--try and see--the number of the hymn which was on the paper in the
+vicar's hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with myself on it.
+I would bet with myself or with anybody available on any conceivable
+thing--the minutes late a train would be; the pints of milk a cow would
+give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would
+be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes.
+I was out against the universe.  But it wasn't serious at all--just a
+boy's mania--till one day my father met me in London when I came down
+from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street.  There
+was the thing that finished me.  I was twenty-one, and restless-minded,
+and with eyes wide open.
+
+"Well, he took me to Thwaite's where I was to become a member, and
+after a little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the
+committee--he was a member of it.  He told me to make myself at home,
+and I did so as soon as his back was turned.  Almost the first thing with
+which I became sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a
+fascination for me.  The binding was very old, and the leather was worn,
+as you will see the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels like
+a nice soap.  That book brought me here."
+
+He paused, and in the silence the Young Doctor pushed a glass of milk and
+brandy towards him.  He sipped the contents.  The others were in a state
+of tension.  Kitty Tynan's eyes were fixed on him as though hypnotised,
+and the Young Doctor was scarcely less interested; while the widow
+knitted harder and faster than she had ever done, and she could knit very
+fast indeed.
+
+"It was the betting-book of Thwaite's, and it dated back almost to the
+time of the conquest of Quebec.  Great men dead and gone long ago--near
+a hundred and fifty years ago-had put down their bets in the book, for
+Thwaite's was then what it is now, the highest and best sporting club in
+the world."
+
+Kitty Tynan's face had a curious look, for there was a club in Askatoon,
+and it was said that all the "sports" assembled there.  She had no idea
+what Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street would look like; but that did
+not matter.  She supposed it must be as big as the Askatoon Court House
+at least.
+
+"Bets--bets--bets by men whose names were in every history, and the names
+of their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons; and all betting on the
+oddest things as well as the most natural things in the world.  Some of
+the bets made were as mad as the bets I made myself.  Oh!  ridiculous,
+some of them were; and then again bets on things that stirred the world
+to the centre, from the loss of America to the beheading of Louis XVI.
+
+"It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis
+whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government
+which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six
+months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is
+now the United States if they revolted.  This would be cheek-by-jowl with
+a bet that an heir would be born to one new-married pair before another
+pair.  The very last bet made on the day I opened the book was that Queen
+Victoria would make Lord Salisbury a duke, that a certain gentleman known
+as S. S. could find his own door in St. James's Square, blindfold, from
+the club, and that Corsair would win the Derby.
+
+"For two long hours I sat forgetful of everything around me, while I read
+that record--to me the most interesting the world could show.  Every line
+was part of the history of the country, a part of the history of many
+lives, and it was all part of the ritual of the temple of the great god
+Chance.  I was fascinated, lost in a land of wonders.  Men came and went,
+but silently.  At last there entered a gentleman whose picture I had so
+often seen in the papers--a man as well known in the sporting world as
+was Chamberlain in the political world.  He was dressed spectacularly,
+but his face oozed good-nature, though his eyes were like bright bits of
+coal.  He bred horses, he raced this, he backed that, he laid against the
+other; he was one of the greatest plungers, one of the biggest figures on
+the turf.  He had been a kind of god to me--a god in a grey frock-coat,
+with a grey top-hat and field-glasses slung over his shoulder; or in a
+hunting-suit of the most picturesque kind--great pockets in a well-
+fitting coat, splendid striped waistcoat.  Well, there, I only mention
+this because it played so big a part in bringing me to Askatoon.
+
+"He came up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful
+Adam's fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and
+said, 'Do you mind--for one minute?' and he reached out a hand for the
+book.
+
+"I made way for him, and I suppose admiration showed in my eyes, because
+as he hastily wrote--what a generous scrawl it was!--he said to me,
+'Haven't we met somewhere before?  I seem to remember your face.
+
+"Great gentleman, I thought, because it was certain he knew he had never
+seen me before, and I was overcome by the reflection that he wished to be
+civil in that way to me.  'It's my father's face you remember, I should
+think,' I answered.  'He is a member here.  I am only a visitor.  I
+haven't been elected yet.'  'Ah, we must see to that!' he said with a
+smile, and laid a hand on my shoulder as though he'd known me many a
+year--and I only twenty-one.  'Who is your father?' he asked.  When I
+told him he nodded.  'Yes, yes, I know him--Crozier of Castlegarry; but
+I knew his father far better, though he was so much older than me, and
+indeed your grandfather also.  Look--in this book is the first bet I ever
+made here after my election to the club, and it was made with your
+grandfather.  There's no age in the kingdom of sport, dear lad,' he
+added, laughing--'neither age nor sex nor position nor place.  It's the
+one democratic thing in the modern world.  It's a republic inside this
+old monarchy of ours.  Look, here it is, my first bet with your
+grandfather--and I'm only sixty now!'  He smoothed the page with his hand
+in a manner such as I have seen a dean do with his sermon-paper in a
+cathedral puplit.  'Here it is, thirty-six years ago.' He read the bet
+aloud.  It was on the Derby, he himself having bet that the Prince of
+Wale's horse would win.  'Your grandfather, dear lad,' he repeated, 'but
+you'll find no bets of mine with your father.  He didn't inherit that
+strain, but your grandfather and your great-grandfather had it--sportsmen
+both, afraid of nothing, with big minds, great eyes for seeing, and a
+sense for a winner almost uncanny.  Have you got it by any chance?  Yes,
+yes, by George and by John, I see you have; you are your grandfather to a
+hair!  His portrait is here in the club--in the next room.  Have a look
+at it.  He was only forty when it was done, and you're very like him; the
+cut of the jib is there.'  He took my hand.  'Good-bye, dear lad,' he
+said; 'we'll meet-yes, we'll meet often enough if you are like your
+grandfather.  And I'll always like to see you,' he added generously.
+
+"'I always wanted to meet you,' I answered.  'I've cut your pictures out
+of the papers to keep them--at Eton and Oxford.'  He laughed in great
+good-humour and pride.  'So so, so so, and I am a hero then, with one
+follower!  Well, well, dear lad, I don't often go wrong, or anyhow I'm
+oftener right than wrong, and you might do worse than follow me--but no,
+I don't want that responsibility.  Go on your own--go on your own.'
+
+"A minute more and he was gone with a wave of the hand, and in excitement
+I picked up the betting-book.  It almost took my breath away.  He had
+staked a thousand pounds that the favourite of the Derby would not win
+the race, and that one of three outsiders would.  As I sat overpowered by
+the magnitude of the bet the door opened, and he appeared with another
+man, not one with whose face I was then familiar, though as a duke and
+owner of great possessions, he was familiar to society.  'I've put it
+down,' he said.  'Sign it, if it's all in order.' This the duke did,
+after apologizing for disturbing me.  He looked at me keenly as he turned
+away.  'Not the most elevating literature in the library,' he said,
+smiling ironically.  'If you haven't got a taste for it beyond control,
+don't cultivate it.'  He nodded kindly, and left; and again, till my
+father came and found me, I buried myself in that book of fate--to me.
+I found many entries in my grandfather's name, but not one in my father's
+name.  I have an idea that when a vice or virtue skips one generation, it
+appears with increased violence or persistence in the next, for, passing
+over my father into my defenceless breast, the spirit of sport went mad
+in me--or almost so.  No miser ever had a more cheerful and happy hour
+than I had as I read the betting-book at Thwaites'.
+
+"I became a member of Thwaite's soon after I left Oxford.  As some men go
+to the Temple, some to the Stock Exchange, some to Parliament, I went to
+Thwaite's.  It was the centre of my interest, and I took chambers in Park
+Place, St. James's Street, a few steps away.  Here I met again constantly
+the great sportsman who had noticed me so kindly, and I became his
+follower, his disciple.  I had started with him on a wave of prejudice in
+his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had
+staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could get
+with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred
+pounds.  What he won--to my youthful eyes-was fabulous.  There's no use
+saying what you think--you kind friends, who've always done something in
+life--that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to the
+turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport.  You must
+remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin
+of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in any
+generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the younger
+son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary for
+livelihood.  If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman, had
+lived, it's hard to tell what I should have become; for steered aright,
+given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have become
+ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another.  But there it
+was, she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me.  At Eton,
+at Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business of life.
+And when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left me, I had
+only one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman.  I had a name as
+a cricketer--"
+
+"Ah--I remember, Crozier of Lammis !" interjected the Young Doctor
+involuntarily.  "I'm a north of Ireland man, but I remember--"
+
+"Yes, Lammis," the sick man went on.  "Castlegarry was my father's place,
+but my mother left me Lammis.  When I got control of it, and of the
+securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn't long in
+making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader.
+He gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed
+horses of my own.  But the luck went against him at last, and then, of
+course, against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws
+the cash out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw
+also the whole internal economy out of your body--a ghastly, empty,
+collapsing thing."
+
+Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh.  She had once put two hundred dollars in
+a mine--on paper--and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in the
+lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more.  When she read a fatal
+telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty,
+collapsing feeling.
+
+Pausing for a moment, in which he sipped some milk, Crozier then
+continued: "At last my leader died, and the see-saw of fortune began for
+me; and a good deal of my sound timber was sawed into logs and made into
+lumber to build some one else's fortune.  When things were balancing
+pretty easily, I married.  It wasn't a sordid business to restore my
+fortunes--I'll say that for myself; but it wasn't the thing to do,
+for I wasn't secure in my position.  I might go on the rocks; but was
+there ever a gambler who didn't believe that he'd pull it off in a big
+way next time, and that the turn of the wheel against him was only to
+tame his spirit?  Was there ever a gambler or sportsman of my class who
+didn't talk about the 'law of chances,' on the basis that if red, as it
+were, came up three times, black stood a fair chance of coming up the
+fourth time?  A silly enough conclusion; for on the law of chances
+there's no reason why red shouldn't come up three hundred times; and so I
+found that your run of bad luck may be so long that you cannot have a
+chance to recover, and are out of it before the wheel turns in your
+favour.  I oughn't to have married."
+
+His voice had changed in tone, his look become most grave, there was
+something very like reverence in his face, and deprecating submission in
+his eyes.  His fingers fussed with the rug that covered his knees.
+
+"God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!" remarked the Young
+Doctor to himself, not erroneously reading the expression of Crozier's
+face and the tone of his voice.  "There's nothing so unnerving."
+
+"No, I oughtn't to have done it," Crozier went on.  "But I will say again
+it wasn't a sordid marriage, though she had great expectations, but not
+immediate; and she was a girl of great character.  She was able and
+brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and she knew her own mind,
+and was radiantly handsome."
+
+Kitty Tynan almost sniffed.  Through a whole fortnight she had, with a
+courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation
+for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what his
+wife was like.  She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman,
+delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw in
+the picture-papers.  She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat, with
+a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief
+crossed on her breast, holding a basket of flowers, while a King
+Charles spaniel gambolled at her feet.
+
+This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
+Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
+exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
+afraid of stepping on her train.  Was it strange she should think that?
+She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons according
+to her kind and from what she knew of life.  So she imagined Crozier's
+wife to have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who swept up the
+dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at all to the
+children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower than their
+ankles.  She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a man like
+Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in the witness-
+box as he did; who took the bullet of the assassin with such courage; who
+broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech on a filly's
+flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who, anyhow, couldn't
+be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn't a hand like a piece of
+steel and the skin of an antelope.  It was enough to make a cat laugh,
+or a woman cry with rage.
+
+"Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly handsome!"
+There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing woman, in
+velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and overbearing, like
+grey poplin.  Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the mirror-the half-
+length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her hands clench and her
+bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive calico frock, a thing
+for Chloe, not for Juno.
+
+She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
+deprecating homage, that "Hush-she-is-coming" in his eyes.  What a fool a
+man was where a woman was concerned!  Here she had been fighting herself
+for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the
+world, fit to command an array of giants; and she saw him now almost
+breathless as he spoke of a great wild-cat of a woman who ought to be by
+his side now.  What sort of a woman was she anyhow, who could let him go
+into exile as he had done and live apart from her all these years, while
+he "slogged away"--that was the Western phrase which came to her mind--to
+pull himself level with things again?  Her feet shuffled unevenly on the
+floor, and it would have been a joy to shake the in valid there with
+the rapt look in his face.  Unable to bear the situation without some
+demonstration, she got to her feet and caught up the glass of brandy
+and milk with a little exclamation.
+
+"Here," she said, holding the glass to his lips, "here, courage, soldier.
+You don't need to be afraid at a six-thousand-mile range."
+
+The Young Doctor started, for she had said what was in his own mind, but
+what he would not have said for a thousand dollars.  It was fortunate
+that Crozier was scarcely conscious of what she was saying.  His mind was
+far away.  Yet, when she took the glass from him again, he touched her
+arm.
+
+"Nothing is good enough for your friends, is it?" he said gratefully.
+
+"That wouldn't be an excuse for not getting them the best there was at
+hand," she answered with a little laugh, and at least the Young Doctor
+read the meaning of her words.
+
+Presently Crozier, with a sigh, continued: "If I had done what my wife
+wanted from the start, I shouldn't have been here.  I'd have saved what
+was left of a fortune, and I'd have had a home of my own."
+
+"Is she earning her living too?" asked Kitty softly, and Crozier did not
+notice the irony under the question.
+
+"She has a home of her own," answered Crozier almost sharply.  "Just
+before the worst came to the worst she inherited her fortune--plenty of
+it, as I got near the end of mine.  One thing after another had gone.
+I was mortgaged up to the eyes.  I knew the money-lenders from Newry to
+Jewry and Jewry to Jerusalem.  Then it was I promised her I'd bet no
+more--never again: I'd give up the turf; I'd try and start again.  Down
+in my soul I knew I couldn't start again--not just then.  But I wanted
+to please her.  She was remarkable in her way; she had one of the most
+imposing intelligences I have ever known.  So I promised.  I promised
+I'd bet no more."
+
+The Young Doctor caught Kitty Tynan's eyes by accident, and there was the
+same look of understanding in both.  They both knew that here was the
+real tragedy of Crozier's life.  If he had had less reverence for his
+wife, less of that obvious prostration of soul, he probably would never
+have come to Askatoon.
+
+"I broke my promise," he murmured.  "It was a horse--well, never mind.
+I was as sure of Flamingo as that the sun would rise by day and set by
+night.  It was a certainty; and it was a certainty.  The horse could win,
+it would win; I had it from a sure source.  My judgment was right, too.
+I bet heavily on Flamingo, intending it for my last fling, and, to save
+what I had left, to get back what I had lost.  I could get big odds on
+him.  It was good enough.  From what I knew, it was like picking up a
+gold-mine.  And I was right, right as could be.  There was no chance
+about it.  It was being out where the rain fell to get wet.  It was just
+being present when they called the roll of the good people that God
+wished to be kind to.  It meant so much to me.  I couldn't bear to have
+nothing and my wife to have all.  I simply couldn't stand--"
+
+Again the Young Doctor met the glance of Kitty Tynan, and there was, once
+more, a new and sudden look of comprehension in the eyes of both.  They
+began to see light where their man was concerned.
+
+After a moment of struggle to control himself, Crozier proceeded: "It
+didn't seem like betting.  Besides, I had planned it, that when I showed
+her what I had won, she would shut her eyes to the broken promise, and
+I'd make another, and keep it ever after.  I put on all the cash there
+was to put on, all I could raise on what was left of my property."
+
+He paused as though to get strength to continue.  Then a look of intense
+excitement suddenly possessed him, and there--passed over him a wave of
+feeling which transformed him.  The naturally grave mediaeval face became
+fired, the eyes blazed, the skin shone, the mouth almost trembled with
+agitation.  He was the dreamer, the enthusiast, the fanatic almost, with
+that look which the pioneer, the discoverer, the adventurer has when he
+sees the end of his quest.
+
+His voice rose, vibrated.  "It was a day to make you thank Heaven the
+world was made.  Such days only come once in a while in England, but when
+they do come, what price Arcady or Askatoon!  Never had there been so big
+a Derby.  Everybody had the fever of the place at its worst.  I was
+happy.  I meant to pouch my winnings and go straight to my wife and say,
+'Peccavi,' and I should hear her say to me, 'Go and sin no more.'  Yes,
+I was happy.  The sky, the green of the fields, the still, home-like,
+comforting trees, the mass of glorious colour, the hundreds of horses
+that weren't running and the scores that were to run, sleek and long, and
+made like shining silk and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to me--
+a horse-race heaven on earth.  There you have the state of my mind in
+those days, the kind of man I was."
+
+Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom
+Downs before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that
+bore him down.  He was terribly, exhaustingly alive.  Something possessed
+him, and he possessed his hearers.
+
+"It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away from
+the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
+ahead.  It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it
+to be for me.  The race was all Flamingo's own, and the mob was going
+wild, when all of a sudden a woman--the widow of a racing-man gone
+suddenly mad--rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle
+with a shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey
+came, a melee of crushed humanity.  And that was how I lost my last two
+thousand five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial."
+
+"Oh!  Oh!" said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns,
+her hands wringing.  "Oh, that was--oh, poor Flamingo!" she added.
+
+A strange smile shot into Crozier's face, and the dark passion of
+reminiscence fled from his eyes.  "Yes, you are right, little friend," he
+said.  "That was the real tragedy after all.  There was the horse doing
+his best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on
+him, stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon,
+feeling the psalm of success in his heart--yes, he knows, he knows what
+he has done, none so well!--and out comes a black, hateful thing against
+him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run.  I felt exactly as
+you do, and I felt that before everything else when it happened.  Then I
+felt for myself afterwards, and I felt it hard, as you can think."
+
+The break went from his voice, but it rang with reflective, remembered
+misery.  "I was ruined.  One thing was clear to me.  I would not live on
+my wife's money.  I would not eat and drink what her money bought.  No,
+I would not live on my wife.  Her brother, a good enough, impulsive lad,
+with a tongue of his own and too small to thresh, came to me in London
+the night of the race.  He said his sister had been in the country-down
+at Epsom--and that she bitterly resented my having broken my promise and
+lost all I had.  He said he had never seen her so angry, and he gave me a
+letter from her.  On her return to town she had been obliged to go away
+at once to see her sister taken suddenly ill.  He added, with an
+unfeeling jibe, that he wouldn't like the reading of the letter himself.
+If he hadn't been such a chipmunk of a fellow I'd have wrung his neck.
+I put the letter her letter-in my pocket, and next day gave my lawyer
+full instructions and a power of attorney.  Then I went straight to
+Glasgow, took steamer for Canada, and here I am.  That was near five
+years ago."
+
+"And the letter from your wife?" asked Kitty Tynan demurely and slyly.
+
+The Young Doctor looked at Crozier, surprised at her temerity, but
+Crozier only smiled gently.  "It is in the desk there.  Bring it to me,
+please," he said.
+
+In a moment Kitty was beside him with the letter.  He took it, turned it
+over, examined it carefully as though seeing it for the first time, and
+laid it on his knee.
+
+"I have never opened it," he said.  "There it is, just as it was handed
+to me."
+
+"You don't know what is in it?" asked Kitty in a shocked voice.  "Why,
+it may be that--"
+
+"Oh, yes, I know what is in it!" he replied.  "Her brother's confidences
+were enough.  I didn't want to read it.  I can imagine it all."
+
+"It's pretty cowardly," remarked Kitty.
+
+"No, I think not.  It would only hurt, and the hurting could do no good.
+I can hear what it says, and I don't want to see it."
+
+He held the letter up to his ear whimsically.  Then he handed it back to
+her, and she replaced it in the desk.
+
+"So, there it is, and there it is," he sighed.  "You have got my story,
+and it's bad enough, but you can see it's not what Burlingame suggested."
+
+"Burlingame--but Burlingame's beneath notice," rejoined Kitty.  "Isn't
+he, mother?"
+
+Mrs. Tynan nodded.  Then, as though with sudden impulse, Kitty came
+forward to Crozier and leaned over him.  The look of a mother was in her
+eyes.  Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than this man
+with the heart of a boy, who was afraid of his own wife.
+
+"It's time for your beef-tea, and when you've had it you must get your
+sleep," she said, with a hovering solicitude.
+
+"I'd like to give him a threshing first, if you don't mind," said the
+Young Doctor to her.
+
+"Please let a little good advice satisfy you," Crozier remarked ruefully.
+"It will seem like old times," he added rather bitterly.
+
+"You are too young to have had 'old times,'" said Kitty with gentle
+scorn.  "I'll like you better when you are older," she added.
+
+"Naughty jade," exclaimed the Young Doctor, "you ought to be more
+respectful to those older than yourself."
+
+"Oh, grandpapa!" she retorted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+
+The harvest was over.  The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved
+like a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose
+in innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye.  The ground appeared
+bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could
+take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn
+sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert.  The land now, all stubble,
+still looked good for anything.  If bare, it did not seem starved.  It
+was naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down
+after the fight.  Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it
+was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed the
+fibre of its being to no disadvantage.  And overhead the joy of the
+prairie grew apace.
+
+September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and
+shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come into
+the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of nature
+recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength, a
+battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and
+energy.  Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must
+strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
+evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those
+colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his eyes.
+There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of pensiveness--
+the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian summer soon to
+come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to the past and
+forget that to-morrow was all in all.
+
+Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than
+elsewhere.  Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself
+in the delicate contentment of the sunset.  There were many who took it
+all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something
+from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at all,
+save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose
+solicitous friend is the sun.  These heeded it little, even though a
+good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north
+Atlantic and the German Ocean.  From Erin and England and the land o'
+cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity
+as to the permanency of such conditions, and then settled down to take it
+as it was, endless days of sunshine and stirring vivacious air--as though
+they had always known it and had it.
+
+There were exceptions, and these had joy in what they saw and felt
+according to the measure of their temperament.  Shiel Crozier saw and
+felt much of it, and probably the Young Doctor saw more of it than any
+one; stray people here and there who take no part in this veracious tale
+had it in greater or less degree; fat Jesse Bulrush was so sensitive to
+it that he, as he himself said, "almost leaked sentimentality" and Kitty
+Tynan possessed it.  She was pulsing with life, as a bird drunken with
+the air's sweetness sings itself into an abandonment of motion.
+
+Before Crozier came she had enjoyed existence as existence, wondering
+often why it was she wanted to spring up from the ground with the idea
+that she could fly, if she chose to try.  Once when she was quite a
+little girl she had said to her mother, "I'm going to ile away," and her
+mother, puzzled, asked her what she meant.  Her reply was, "It's in the
+hymn."  Her mother persisted in asking what hymn; and was told with
+something like scorn that it was the hymn she herself had taught her only
+child--"I'll away, I'll away to the Promised Land."
+
+Kitty had thought that "I'll away" meant some delicious motion which was
+to ile, and she had visions of something between floating and flying as
+being that blessed means of transportation.
+
+As the years grew, she still wanted to "ile away" whenever the spirit of
+elation seized her, and it had increased greatly since Shiel Crozier
+came.  Out of her star as he was, she still felt near to him, and as
+though she understood him and he comprehended her.  He had almost at once
+become to her an admired mystery, which, however, at first she did not
+dare wish to solve.  She had been content to be a kind of handmaiden to a
+generous and adored master.  She knew that where he had been she could in
+one sense never go, and yet she wanted to be near him just the same.
+This was intensified after the Logan Trial and the shooting of the man
+who somehow seemed to have made her live in a new way.
+
+As long ago as she could recall she had, in a crude, untutored way, been
+fond of the things that nature made beautiful; but now she seemed to see
+them in a new light, but not because any one had deliberately taught her.
+Indeed, it bored her almost to hear books read as Jesse Bulrush and Nurse
+Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his operation, to
+help him pass away the time.  The only time she ever cared to listen--
+at school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for the printed
+page--was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or recited.  Then
+she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but by the music of
+the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying feeling; and she
+got something out of it which had in one sense nothing to do with the
+verses themselves or with the conception of the poet.
+
+Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read.  He was a
+born sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to Kitty
+during Crozier's illness.  Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse
+contrived to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too;
+for he was a picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and
+clean linen--he always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and
+he had a taste in ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought by
+the yard.  He was, in fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for
+material things, as he had shown in the land proposal on which Shiel
+Crozier's fortunes hung, but with no gift for carrying them out, having
+neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose.  Yet he was an
+agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found
+himself "an old bach," as he called himself, in love at last with a
+middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent
+eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.
+
+Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
+volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
+the bedside of the wounded man.  Jesse had been away so much in different
+parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
+had a real chance to make permanent impression.  By accident, however,
+his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at the
+moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer
+feelings.
+
+It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened to
+his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville, and
+Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest.  His content
+was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was lovely,
+as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their cordial,
+ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the divine
+lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice rising
+and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse; though it meant
+nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound was using it
+on her behalf.
+
+This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty
+understood.  Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a
+mistress of his heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did not
+talk.  That, to him, was the best thing of all.  She was a superb
+listener, and he was a prodigious talker--was it not all appropriate?
+
+One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little
+knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made
+a pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point.  He found her in her
+usual place, with a look almost pensive on her face.  He did not notice
+that, for he was excited and elated.
+
+"I want to read you something I've written," he said, and he drew from
+his pocket a paper.
+
+"If it's another description of the timber-land you have for sale-please,
+not to me," she answered provokingly, for she guessed well what he held
+in his hand.  She had seen him writing it.  She had even seen some of the
+lines scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing careful if not
+swift and skillful manufacture.  One of these crumpled-up bits of paper
+she had in her pocket now, having recovered it that she might tease him
+by quoting the lines at a provoking opportunity.
+
+"It's not that.  It's some verses I've written," he said, with a wave of
+his hand.
+
+"All your own?" she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and
+he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of
+aloes on her tongue.
+
+"Yes.  Yes.  I've always written verses more or less--I write a good many
+advertisements in verse," he added cheerfully.  "They are very popular.
+Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses in
+commerce as in affairs of the heart.  But if you'd rather not, if it
+makes you tired--"
+
+"Courage, soldier, bear your burden," she said gaily.  "Mount your horse
+and get galloping," she added, motioning him to sit.
+
+A moment later he was pouring out his soul through a pleasing voice, from
+fat lips, flanked by a high-coloured healthy cheek like a russet apple:
+
+              "Like jewels of the sky they gleam,
+               Your eyes of light, your eyes of fire;
+               In their dark depths behold the dream
+               Of Life's glad hope and Love's desire.
+
+              "Above your quiet brow, endowed
+               With Grecian charm to crown your grace,
+               Your hair in one soft Titian cloud
+               Throws heavenly shadows on your face."
+
+"Well, I've never had verses written to me before," Kitty remarked
+demurely, when he had finished and sat looking at her questioningly.
+"But 'dark depths'--that isn't the right thing to say of my eyes!  And
+Titian cloud of hair--is my hair Titian?  I thought Titian hair was
+bronzy-tawny was what Mr. Burlingame called it when he was spouting,"
+--her upper lip curled in contempt.
+
+"It isn't you, and you know it," he replied jerkily.  She bridled.
+"Do you mean to say that you come and read to me without a word of
+explanation, so that I shouldn't misunderstand, verses written for
+another?  Am I to be told now that my eyes aren't eyes of light and eyes
+of fire, that I haven't got a Grecian brow?  Do you dare to say those
+verses don't fit me--except for the Titian hair and heavenly shadows?
+And that I've got no right to think they're meant for me?  Is it so, that
+a man that's lived in my mother's house for years, eating at the same
+table with the family, and having his clothes mended free, with supper to
+suit him and no questions asked--is it so, that he reads me poetry, four
+lines at a stretch, and a rhyme every other line, and then announces it
+isn't for me!"
+
+Her eyes flashed, her bosom palpitated, her hand made passionate
+gestures, and she really seemed a young fury let loose.  For a moment he
+was deceived by her acting; he did not see the lurking grin in the depths
+of her eyes.
+
+Her voice shook with assumed passion.  "Because I didn't show what I felt
+all these years, and only exposed my real feelings when you read those
+verses to me, do you think any man who was a gentleman wouldn't in the
+circumstances say, 'These verses are for you, Kitty Tynan'?  You betrayed
+me into showing you what I felt, and then you tell me your verses are for
+another girl!"
+
+"Girl! Girl! Girl!" he burst out.  "Nurse is thirty-seven--she told me
+so herself, and how could I tell that you--why, it's absurd!  I've only
+thought of you always as a baby in long skirts"--she spasmodically drew
+her skirts down over her pretty, shapely ankles, while she kept her eyes
+covered with one hand--"and you've seen me makin' up to her ever since
+Crozier got the bullet.  Ever since he was operated on, I've--"
+
+"Yes, yes, that's right," she interrupted.  "That's manly!  Put the blame
+on him--him that couldn't help himself, struck by a horse-thief's bullet
+in the dark; him that's no more to blame for your carryings on while
+death was prowling about the door there--"
+
+"Carryings on!  Carryings on!" Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and
+indignant.  The little devil, to put him in a hole like this!  "Carryings
+on!  I've acted like a man all through--never anything else in your
+house, and it's a shame that I've got to listen to things that have
+never been said of me in all my life.  My mother was a good, true woman,
+and she brought me up--"
+
+"Yes, that's it, put it on your mother now, poor woman!  who isn't here
+to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two
+girls so placed they couldn't help themselves--just doing kind acts for a
+sick man."  Suddenly she got to her feet.  "I tell you, Jesse Bulrush,
+that you're a man--you're a man--"
+
+But she could keep it up no longer.  She burst out laughing, and the
+false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: "That
+you're a man after my own heart.  But you can't have it, even if you are
+after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in
+there!"  She tossed a hand towards the house.
+
+By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting.  "Well, you wicked
+little rip--you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up
+like that!  Why, never on the stage was there such--!"
+
+"It's the poetry made me do it.  It inspired me," she gurgled.  "I felt
+--why, I felt here"--she pressed her hand to her heart "all the pangs of
+unrequited love--oh, go away, go back to the house and read that to her!
+She's in the sitting-room, and my mother's away down-town.  Now's your
+chance, Claude Melnotte."
+
+She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
+towards the house.  "You're good enough for anybody, and if I wasn't so
+young and daren't leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
+I'm thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!"  She laughed till the tears came into her
+eyes.  "This is as good as--as a play."
+
+"It's the best acted play I ever saw, from 'Ten Nights in a Bar-room' to
+'Struck Oil,'" rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed yet
+beaming.  "But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses worth
+anything?  Do you think she'll like them?"
+
+Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read
+deepened in her eyes.  "Nurse 'll like them--of course she will," she
+said gently.  "She'll like them because they are you.  Read them to her
+as you read them to me, and she'll only hear your voice, and she'll think
+them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh a
+thousand pounds.  It doesn't matter to a woman what a man's saying or
+doing, or whether he's so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that
+under everthing he's saying, 'I love you.'  A man isn't that way, but a
+woman is.  Now go."  Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.
+
+"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" he said admiringly.
+
+"Then be a father to me," she said teasingly.
+
+"I can't marry both your mother and nurse."
+
+"P'r'aps you can't marry either," she replied sarcastically, "and I know
+that in any case you'll never be any relative of mine by marriage.  Get
+going," she said almost impatiently.
+
+He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, "I'll let you
+hear some of my verses one day when you're more developed and can
+understand them."
+
+"I'll bet they beat mine," he called back.
+
+"You'll win your bet," she answered, and stood leaning against a tree
+with a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes.  When he had
+disappeared, sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper,
+unfolded it, and laid it on her knee.  "It is better," she said.  "It's
+not good poetry, of course, but it's truer, and it's not done according
+to a pattern like his.  Yes, it's real, real, real, and he'll never see
+it--never see it now, for I've fought it' all out, and I've won."
+
+Then she slowly read the verses aloud:
+
+"Yes, I've won," she said with determination.  So many of her sex have
+said things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their
+decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never,
+never, never do.  Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a
+new force awakened in her character.
+
+For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the
+little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house.  She was
+thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom
+in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social
+pale.  Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world
+beyond this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the
+conscience of a man or woman was the only law.  She was not lawless in
+mind or spirit.  She was only rebelling gainst a situation in which she
+was bound hand and foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive
+desire, if she wished to do so.
+
+Here was a man who was married, yet in a real sense who had no wife.
+Suppose that man cared for her, what a tragedy it would be for them to be
+kept apart!  This man did not love her, and so there was no tragedy for
+both.  Still all was not over yet--yes, all was "over and over and over,"
+she said to herself as she sprang to her feet with a sharp exclamation of
+disgust--with herself.
+
+Her mother was coming hurriedly towards her from the house.  There was a
+quickness in her walk suggesting excitement, yet from the look in her
+face it was plain that the news she brought was not painful.  "He told me
+you were here, and--"
+
+"Who told you I was here?"
+
+"Mr. Bulrush."
+
+"So it's all settled," she said, with a little quirk of her shoulders.
+
+"Yes, he's asked her, and they're going to be married.  It's enough to
+make you die laughing to see the two middle-aged doves cooing in there."
+
+"I thought perhaps it would be you.  He said he would like to be a father
+to me."
+
+"That would prevent me if nothing else would," answered the widow of
+Tyndall Tynan.  "A stepfather to an unmarried girl, both eyeing each
+other for a chance to find fault--if you please, no thank you!"
+
+"That means you won't get married till I'm out of the way?" asked Kitty,
+with a look which was as much touched with myrrh as with mirth.
+
+"It means I wouldn't get married till you are married, anyway," was the
+complacent answer.
+
+"Is there any one special that--"
+
+"Don't talk nonsense.  Since your father died I've only thought of his
+child and mine, and I've not looked where I might.  Instead, I've done my
+best to prove that two women could live and succeed without a man to earn
+for them; though of course without the pension it couldn't have been done
+in the style we've done it.  We've got our place!"
+
+There is a dignity attached to a pension which has an influence quite its
+own, and in the most primitive communities it has an aristocratic
+character which commands general respect.  In Askatoon people gave Mrs.
+Tynan a better place socially because of her pension than they would have
+done if she had earned double the money which the pension brought her.
+
+"Everybody has called on us," she added with reflective pride.
+
+"Principally since Mr. Crozier came," added Kitty.  "It's funny, isn't
+it, how he made people respect him before they knew who he was?"
+
+"He would make Satan stand up and take off his hat, if he paid Hades a
+visit," said Mrs. Tynan admiringly.  "Anybody'd do anything for him."
+
+Kitty eyed her mother closely.  There was a strange, far-away, brooding
+look in Mrs. Tynan's eyes, and she seemed for a moment lost in thought.
+
+"You're in love with him," said Kitty sharply.
+
+"I was, in a way," answered her mother frankly.  "I was, in a way, a kind
+of way, till I knew he was married.  But it didn't mean anything.  I
+never thought of it except as a thing that couldn't be."
+
+"Why couldn't it be?" asked Kitty, smothering an agitation rising in her
+breast.
+
+"Because I always knew he belonged to where we didn't, and because if he
+was going to be in love himself, it would be with some girl like you.
+He's young enough for that, and it's natural he should get as his profit
+the years of youth that a young woman has yet to live."
+
+"As though it was a choice between you and me, for instance!"
+
+Mrs. Tynan started, but recovered herself.  "Yes.  If there had been any
+choosing, he'd not have hesitated a minute.  He'd have taken you, of
+course.  But he never gave either of us a thought that way."
+
+"I thought that till--till after he'd told us his story," replied Kitty
+boldly.
+
+"What has happened since then?" asked her mother, with sudden
+apprehension.
+
+"Nothing has happened since.  I don't understand it, but it's as though
+he'd been asleep for a long time and was awake again."
+
+Mrs. Tynan gravely regarded her daughter, and a look of fear came into
+her face.  "I knew you kept thinking of him always," she said; "but you
+had such sense, and he never showed any feeling for you; and young girls
+get over things.  Besides, you always showed you knew he wasn't a
+possibility.  But since he told us that day about his being married and
+all, has--has he been different towards you?"
+
+"Not a thing, not a word," was the reply; "but--but there's a difference
+with him in a way.  I feel it when I go in the room where he is."
+
+"You've got to stop thinking of him," insisted the elder woman
+querulously.  "You've got to stop it at once.  It's no good.  It's bad
+for you.  You've too much sense to go on caring for a man that--"
+
+"I'm going to get married," said Kitty firmly.  "I've made up my mind.
+If you have to think about one person, you should stop thinking about
+another; anyhow, you've got to make yourself stop.  So I'm going to
+marry--and stop."
+
+"Who are you going to marry, Kitty?  You don't mean to say it's John
+Sibley !"
+
+"P'r'aps.  He keeps coming."
+
+"That gambling and racing fellow!"
+
+"He owns a big farm, and it pays, and he has got an interest in a mine,
+and--"
+
+"I tell you, you shan't," peevishly interjected Mrs. Tynan.  "You shan't.
+He's vicious.  He's--oh, you shan't!  I'd rather--"
+
+"You'd rather I threw myself away--on a married man?" asked Kitty
+covertly.
+
+"My God--oh, Kitty!" said the other, breaking down.  "You can't mean it
+--oh, you can't mean that you'd--"
+
+"I've got to work out my case in my own way," broke in Kitty calmly.
+"I know how I've got to do it.  I have to make my own medicine--and take
+it.  You say John Sibley is vicious.  He has only got one vice."
+
+"Isn't it enough?  Gambling--"
+
+"That isn't a vice; it's a sport.  It's the same as Mr. Crozier had.
+Mr. Crozier did it with horses only, the other does it with cards and
+horses.  The only vice John Sibley's got is me."
+
+"Is you?" asked her mother bewilderedly.
+
+"Well, when you've got an idea you can't control and it makes you its
+slave, it's a vice.  I'm John's vice, and I'm thinking of trying to cure
+him of it--and cure myself too," Kitty added, folding and unfolding the
+paper in her hand.
+
+"Here comes the Young Doctor," said her mother, turning towards the
+house.  "I think you don't mean to marry Sibley, but if you do, make him
+give up gambling."
+
+"I don't know that I want him to give it up," answered Kitty musingly.
+
+A moment later she was alone with the Young Doctor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+
+"What's this you've been doing?" asked the Young Doctor, with a
+quizzical smile.  "We never can tell where you'll break out."
+
+"Kitty Tynan's measles!" she rejoined, swinging her hat by its ribbon.
+"Mine isn't a one-sided character, is it?"
+
+"I know one of the sides quite well," returned the Young Doctor.
+
+"Which, please, sir?"
+
+The Young Doctor pretended to look wise.  "The outside.  I read it like a
+book.  It fits the life in which it moves like the paper on the wall.
+But I'm not sure of the inside.  In fact, I don't think I know that at
+all."
+
+"So I couldn't call you in if my character was sick inside, could I?"
+she asked obliquely.
+
+"I might have an operation, and see what's wrong with it," he answered
+playfully.
+
+Suddenly she shivered.  "I've had enough of operations to last me
+awhile," she rejoined.  "I thought I could stand anything, but your
+operation on Mr. Crozier taught me a lesson.  I'd never be a doctor's
+wife if I had to help him cut up human beings."
+
+"I'll remember that," the Young Doctor replied mockingly.
+
+"But if it would help put things on a right basis, I'd make a bargain
+that I wasn't to help do the carving," she rejoined wickedly.  The Young
+Doctor always incited her to say daring things.  They understood each
+other well.  "So don't let that stand in the way," she added slyly.
+
+"The man who marries you will be glad to get you without the anatomy," he
+returned gallantly.
+
+"I wasn't talking of a man; I was talking of a doctor."
+
+He threw up a hand and his eyebrows.  "Isn't a doctor a man?"
+
+"Those I've seen have been mostly fish."
+
+"No feelings--eh?"
+
+She looked him in the eyes, and he felt a kind of shiver go through him.
+"Not enough to notice.  I never observed you had any," she replied.  "If
+I saw that you had, I'd be so frightened I'd fly.  I've seen pictures of
+an excited whale turning a boat full of men over.  No, I couldn't bear to
+see you show any feeling."
+
+The dark eyes of the Young Doctor suddenly took on a look which was a
+stranger to them.  In his relations with women he was singularly
+impersonal, but he was a man, and he was young enough to feel the Adam
+stir in him.  The hidden or controlled thing suddenly emerged.  It was
+not the look which would be in his eyes if he were speaking to the woman
+he wanted to marry.  Kitty saw it, and she did not understand it, for she
+had at heart a feeling that she could go to him in any trouble of life
+and be sure of healing.  To her he seemed wonderful; but she thought of
+him as she would have thought of her father, as a person of authority and
+knowledge--that operation showed him a great man, she thought, so
+skillful and precise and splendid; and the whole countryside had such
+confidence in him.
+
+She regarded him as a being apart; but for a moment, an ominous moment,
+he was almost one with that race of men who feed in strange pastures.
+She only half saw the reddish glow which came swimming into his eyes, and
+she did not realise it, for she did not expect to find it there.  For an
+instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of woman
+life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material being,
+the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence.  It was the emergence
+of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he had never
+married and had never dallied!  But in a moment it was gone again--driven
+away.
+
+"What a wicked little flirt you are!" he said, with a shake of the head.
+"You'll come to a bad end, if you don't change your ways."
+
+"Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what's the matter with
+me," she retorted.  "Sometimes in operating for one disease we come on
+another, and then there's a lot of thinking to be done."
+
+The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive
+gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing.  "If you were going to
+operate on me, what would it be for?" she asked more flippantly than her
+face showed.
+
+"Well, it's obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike
+for the cancer love," he answered, with a direct look.
+
+She flushed and changed on the instant.  "Is love a cancer?" she asked.
+All at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something very
+like anger quickened in her.
+
+"Unrequited love is," he answered deliberately.  "How do you know it is
+unrequited?" she asked sharply.
+
+"Well, I don't know it," he answered, dismayed by the look in her face.
+"But I certainly hope I'm right.  I do, indeed."
+
+"And if you were right, what would you do--as a surgeon?" she
+questioned, with an undertone of meaning.
+
+"I would remove the cause of the disease."
+
+She came close and looked him straight in the eyes.  "You mean that he
+should go?  You think that would cure the disease?  Well, you are not
+going to interfere.  You are not going to manoeuvre anything to get him
+away--I know doctors' tricks.  You'd say he must go away east or west to
+the sea for change of air to get well.  That's nonsense, and it isn't
+necessary.  You are absolutely wrong in your diagnosis--if that's what
+you call it.  He is going to stay here.  You aren't going to drive away
+one of our boarders and take the bread out of our mouths.  Anyhow, you're
+wrong.  You think because a girl worships a man's ability that she's in
+love with him.  I adore your ability, but I'd as soon fall in love with a
+lobster--and be boiled with the lobster in a black pot.  Such conceit men
+have!"
+
+He was not convinced.  He had a deep-seeing eye, and he saw that she was
+boldly trying to divert his belief or suspicion.  He respected her for
+it.  He might have said he loved her for it--with a kind of love which
+can be spoken of without blushing or giving cause to blush, or reason for
+jealousy, anger, or apprehension.
+
+He smiled down into her gold-brown eyes, and he thought what a real woman
+she was.  He felt, too, that she would tell him something that would give
+him further light if he spoke wisely now.
+
+"I'd like to see some proof that you are right, if I am wrong," he
+answered cautiously.
+
+"Well, I'm going to be married," she said, with an air of finality.
+
+He waved a hand deprecatingly.  "Impossible--there's no man worth it.
+Who is the undeserving wretch?"
+
+"I'll tell you to-morrow," she replied.  "He doesn't know yet how happy
+he's going to be.  What did you come here for?  Why did you want to see
+me?" she added.  "You had something you were going to tell me.  Hadn't
+you?"
+
+"That's quite right," he replied.  "It's about Crozier.  This is my last
+visit to him professionally.  He can go on now without my care.  Yours
+will be sufficient for him.  It has been all along the very best care he
+could have had.  It did more for him than all the rest, it--"
+
+"You don't mean that," she interrupted, with a flush and a bosom that
+leaped under her pretty gown.  "You don't mean that I was of more use
+than the nurse--than the future Mrs. Jesse Bulrush?"
+
+"I mean just that," he answered.  "Nearly every sick person, every sick
+man, I should say, has his mascot, his ministering angel, as it were.
+It's a kind of obsession, and it often means life or death, whether the
+mascot can stand the strain of the situation.  I knew an old man--down by
+Dingley's Flat it was, and he wanted a boy--his grand-nephew-beside him
+always.  He was getting well, but the boy took sick and the old man died
+the next day.  The boy had been his medicine.  Sometimes it's a
+particular nurse that does the trick; but whoever it is, it's a great
+vital fact.  Well, that's the part you played to Mr. Shiel Crozier of
+Lammis and Castlegarry aforetime.  He owes you much."
+
+"I am glad of that," she said softly, her eyes on the distance.
+
+"She is in love with him in spite of what she says," remarked the Young
+Doctor to himself.  "Well," he continued aloud, "the fact is, Crozier's
+almost well in a way, but his mind is in a state, and he is not going to
+get wholly right as things are.  Since things came out in court, since he
+told us his whole story, he has been different.  It's as though--"
+
+She interrupted him hastily and with suppressed emotion.  "Yes, yes, do
+you think I've not noticed that?  He's been asleep in a way for five
+years, and now he's awake again.  He is not James Gathorne Kerry now; he
+is James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, and--oh, you understand: he's back again
+where he was before--before he left her."
+
+The Young Doctor nodded approvingly.  "What a little brazen wonder you
+are!  I declare you see more than--"
+
+"Yet you won't have me?" she asked mockingly.  "You're too clever for
+me," he rejoined with spirit.  "I'm too conceited.  I must marry a girl
+that'd kneel to me and think me as wise as Socrates.  But he's back
+again, as you say, and, in my view, his wife ought to be back again
+also."
+
+"She ought to be here," was Kitty's swift reply, "though I think mighty
+little of her--mighty little, I can tell you.  Stuckup, great tall stork
+of a woman, that lords it over a man as though she was a goddess.  Wears
+diamonds in the middle of the day, I suppose, and cold-blooded as--as a
+fish."
+
+"She ought to have married me, according to your opinion of me.  You said
+I was a fish," remarked the Young Doctor, with a laugh.
+
+"The whale and the catfish!"
+
+"Heavens, what spite!" he rejoined.  "Catfish--what do you know about
+Mrs. Crozier?  You may be brutally unjust--waspishly unjust, I should
+say."
+
+"Do I look like a wasp?" she asked half tearfully.  She was in a strange
+mood.
+
+"You look like a golden busy bee," he answered.  But tell me, how did you
+come to know enough about her to call her a cat?"
+
+"Because, as you say, I was a busy golden bee," she retorted.
+
+"That information doesn't get me much further," he answered.
+
+"I opened that letter," she replied.
+
+"'That letter'--you mean you opened the letter he showed us which he had
+left sealed as it came to him five years ago?"  The Young Doctor's face
+wore a look of dismay.
+
+"I steamed the envelope open--how else could I have done it!  I steamed
+it open, saw what I wanted, and closed it up again."
+
+The Young Doctor's face was pale now.  This was a terrible revelation.
+He had a man's view of such conduct.  He almost shrank from her, though
+she stood there as inviting and innocent a specimen of girlhood as the
+eye could wish to see.  She did not look dishonourable.
+
+"Do you realise what that means?" he asked in a cold, hard tone.
+
+"Oh, come, don't put on that look and don't talk like John the
+Evangelist," she retorted.  "I did it, not out of curiosity, and not to
+do any one harm, but to do her good--his wife."
+
+"It was dishonourable--wicked and dishonourable."
+
+"If you talk like that, Mr. Piety, I'm off," she rejoined, and she
+started away.
+
+"Wait--wait," he said, laying firm fingers on her arm.  "Of course you
+did it for a good purpose.  I know.  You cared enough for him for that."
+
+He had said the right thing, and she halted and faced him.  "I cared
+enough to do a good deal more than that if necessary.  He has been like a
+second father to me, and--"
+
+Suddenly a light of humour shot into the eyes of both.  Sheil Crozier as
+a "father" to her was too artificial not to provoke their sense of the
+grotesque.
+
+"I wanted to find out his wife's address to write to her and tell her to
+come quick," she explained.  "It was when he was at the worst.  And then,
+too, I wanted to know the kind of woman she was before I wrote to her.
+So--"
+
+"You mean to say you read that letter which he had kept unopened and
+unread for five long years?"  The Young Doctor was certainly disturbed
+again.
+
+"Every word of it," Kitty answered shamelessly, "and I'm not sorry.  It
+was in a good cause.  If he had said, 'Courage, soldier,' and opened it
+five years ago, it would have been good for him.  Better to get things
+like that over."
+
+"It was that kind of a letter, was it--a catfish letter?"
+
+Kitty laughed a little scornfully.  "Yes, just like that, Mr. Easily
+Shocked.  Great, showy, purse-proud creature!"
+
+"And you wrote to her?"
+
+"Yes--a letter that would make her come if anything would.  Talk of tact
+--I was as smooth as a billiard-ball.  But she hasn't come."
+
+"The day after the operation I cabled to her," said the Young Doctor.
+
+"Then you steamed the letter open and read it too?" asked Kitty
+sarcastically.
+
+"Certainly not.  Ladies first-and last," was the equally sarcastic
+answer.  "I cabled to Castlegarry, his father's place, also to Lammis
+that he mentioned when he told us his story.  Crozier of Lammis, he was."
+
+"Well, I wrote to the London address in the letter," added Kitty.
+"I don't think she'll come.  I asked her to cable me, and she hasn't.  I
+wrote such a nice letter, too.  I did it for his sake."
+
+The Young Doctor laid his hands on both her shoulders.  "Kitty Tynan, the
+man who gets you will get what he doesn't deserve," he remarked.
+
+"That might mean anything."
+
+"It means that Crozier owes you more than he can guess."
+
+Her eyes shone with a strange, soft glow.  "In spite of opening the
+letter?"
+
+The Young Doctor nodded, then added humorously: "That letter you wrote
+her--I'm not sure that my cable wouldn't have far more effect than your
+letter."
+
+"Certainly not.  You tried to frighten her, but I tried to coax her, to
+make her feel ashamed.  I wrote as though I was fifty."
+
+The Young Doctor regarded her dubiously.  "What was the sort of thing you
+said to her?"
+
+"For one thing, I said that he had every comfort and attention two
+loving women and one fond nurse could give him; but that, of course, his
+legitimate wife would naturally be glad to be beside him when he passed
+away, and that if she made haste she might be here in time."
+
+The Young Doctor leaned against a tree shaking with laughter.
+
+"What are you smiling at?" Kitty asked ironically.  "Oh, she'll be sure
+to come--nothing will keep her away after being coaxed like that!" he
+said, when he could get breath.
+
+"Laughing at me as though I was a clown in a circus!" she exclaimed.
+"Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she--the cat--wrote
+that fiendish letter to is in trouble."
+
+"It was a fiendish letter, was it?" he asked, suddenly sobered again.
+"No, no, don't tell me," he added, with a protesting gesture.  "I don't
+want to hear.  I don't want to know.  I oughtn't to know.  Besides, if
+she comes, I don't want to be prejudiced against her.  He is troubled,
+poor fellow."
+
+"Of course he is.  There's the big land deal--his syndicate.  He's got a
+chance of making a fortune, and he can't do it because--but Jesse Bulrush
+told me in confidence, so I can't explain."
+
+"I have an idea, a pretty good idea.  Askatoon is small."
+
+"And mean sometimes."
+
+"Tell me what you know.  Perhaps I can help him," urged the Young Doctor.
+"I have helped more than one good man turn a sharp corner here."
+
+She caught his arm.  "You are as good as gold."  "You are--impossible,"
+he replied.
+
+They talked of Crozier's land deal and syndicate as they walked slowly
+towards the house.  Mrs. Tynan met them at the door, a look of excitement
+in her face.  "A telegram for you Kitty," she said.
+
+"For me!" exclaimed Kitty eagerly.  "It's a year since I had one."
+
+She tore open the yellow envelope.  A light shot up in her face.  She
+thrust the telegram into the Young Doctor's hands.
+
+"She's coming; his wife's coming.  She's in Quebec now.  It was my
+letter--my letter, not your cable, that brought her," Kitty added
+triumphantly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+
+It was as though Crozier had been told of the coming of his wife, for
+when night came, on the day Kitty had received her telegram, he could not
+sleep.  He was the sport of a consuming restlessness.  His brain would
+not be still.  He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and
+make it vacuous.  It would not relax.  It seized with intentness on each
+thing in turn, which was part of his life at the moment, and gave it an
+abnormal significance.  In vain he tried to shake himself free of the
+successive obsessions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging
+him after them, a slave lashed to the wheels of a chariot of flame.
+
+At last it was the land deal and syndicate on which his future depended,
+and the savage fate which seemed about to snatch his fortune away as it
+had done so often before; as it had done on the day when Flamingo went
+down near the post at the Derby with a madwoman dragging at the bridle.
+He had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would
+have enabled him to pass the crisis of his life.  Wife, home, the old
+fascinating, crowded life--they had all vanished because of that vile
+trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the
+wilderness through years that brought no fruit of his labours.  Yet here
+was his chance, his great chance, to get back what he had and was in the
+old misspent days, with new purposes in life to follow and serve; and it
+was all in cruel danger of being swept away when almost within his grasp.
+
+If he could but achieve the big deal, he could return to wife and home,
+he could be master in his own house, not a dependent on his wife's
+bounty.  That very evening Jesse Bulrush, elated by his own good fortune
+in capturing Cupid, had told him as sadly as was possible, while his own
+fortunes were, as he thought, soaring, that every avenue of credit seemed
+closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan company, would
+let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him to hold his place
+in the syndicate; while each of the other members of the clique had
+flatly and cheerfully refused, saying they were busy carrying their own
+loads.  Crozier had commanded Jesse not to approach them, but the fat
+idealist had an idea that his tongue had a gift of wheedling, and he
+believed that he could make them "shell out," as he put it.  He had
+failed, and he was obliged to say so, when Crozier, suspecting, brought
+him to book.
+
+"They mean to crowd you out--that's their game," Bulrush had said.
+"They've closed up all the ways to cash or credit.  They're laying to do
+you out of your share.  Unless you put up the cash within the four days
+left, they'll put it through without you.  They told me to tell you
+that."
+
+And Crozier had not even cursed them.  He said to Jesse Bulrush that it
+was an old game to get hold of a patent that made a fortune for a song
+while the patentee died in the poor-house.  Yet that four days was time
+enough for a live man to do a "flurry of work," and he was fit enough to
+walk up their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when
+a man was out for war.
+
+Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and
+in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little and
+big things to torture him--remembrances of incidents when debts and
+disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the
+elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face.  It
+was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but
+one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years.  It
+was the first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the
+operation which saved his life--the face of Kitty Tynan.
+
+And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face
+had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence.  Kitty
+had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after
+he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was
+startlingly true.  It was as though, while he was living under an assumed
+name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the
+far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry.  His wife and
+the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived out,
+which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the present.
+Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her had
+seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of his own
+name and the telling if his story had produced a complete psychological
+change in him mentally and bodily.  The impersonal feeling which had
+marked his relations with the two women of this household, and with all
+women, was suddenly gone.  He longed for the arms of a woman round his
+neck--it was five years since any woman's arms had been there, since he
+had kissed any woman's lips.  Now, in the hour when his fortunes were
+again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a fair
+race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another face
+came between.
+
+All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife was
+living, came to him.  He had never for an instant thought of her as dead,
+but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him.  If his wife was
+living!  Living?  Her death had never been even a remote possibility to
+his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death.  Beneath
+all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a romancist to
+whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.
+
+It was impossible to sleep.  He tossed from side to side.  Once he got up
+in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought
+of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a
+sudden impulse seized him.  He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went to
+the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out.  With the
+feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he knew,
+ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any cruelty,
+of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of the candle
+when he thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of his room
+gently closing.  Laying the letter down, he went to the door and opened
+it.  There was no one stirring.  Yet he had a feeling as though some one
+was there in the darkness.  His lips framed the words,
+
+"Who is it?  Is any one there?" but he did not utter them.
+
+A kind of awe possessed him.  He was Celtic; he had been fed on the
+supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable
+experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry,
+and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical.  It is hard to
+tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness of
+the other room-the living-room of the house.  He was in a state of
+trance, almost, a victim of the night.  But as he closed the door softly
+the words of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he
+found her brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain.  The last
+two verses of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was
+swayed by the superstition of bygone ancestors:
+
+         "Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
+          Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
+          Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown
+          Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
+
+         "When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+          Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+          I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
+          'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"
+
+He went to bed again, but sleep would not come.  The verses of the lament
+kept singing in his brain.  He tossed from side to side, he sought to
+control himself, but it was of no avail.  Suddenly he remembered the bed
+of boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her
+meeting with the Young Doctor the previous day.  Before he was shot he
+used to sleep in the open in the summer-time.  If he could get to sleep
+anywhere it would be there.
+
+Hastily dressing himself in flannel shirt and trousers, and dragging a
+blanket from the bed, he found his way to the bedroom door, went into the
+other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open into the
+night.  All at once he was conscious of another presence in the room, but
+the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved himself for
+succumbing to fantasy.  Finding the front door in the dark, he opened it
+and stepped outside.  There was no moon, but there were millions of stars
+in the blue vault above, and there was enough light for him to make his
+way to the place where he had slept "hereaway and oft."
+
+He knew that the bed of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his,
+and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet,
+infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth.
+He found the place and threw himself down.  Why, here were green boughs
+under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there!  Kitty--it
+was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing,
+thinking that he might want to sleep in the open again after his illness.
+Kitty--it was she who had so thoughtfully served him; Kitty, with the
+instinct of strong, unselfish womanhood, with the gift of the outdoor
+life, with the unpurchasable gift of friendship.  What a girl she was!
+How rich she could make the life of a man!
+
+         "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+          Held my hand, and laid his cheek warm against my brow,
+          Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies
+          Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"
+
+How different she was, this child of the West, of Nature, from the woman
+he had left behind in England, the sophisticated, well-appointed, well-
+controlled girl; too well-controlled even in the first days of married
+life; too well-controlled for him who had the rushing impulses of a
+Celtic warrior of olden days.  Delicate, refined, perfectly poised, and
+Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope!  Mona--Kitty,
+the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life, each in her own
+way, as none others had done, they floated before his eyes till sight and
+feeling grew dim.  With a last effort he strove to eject Kitty from his
+thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the race of life, and he
+must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly, even in exile from her,
+run straight, even with that unopened, bitter, upbraiding letter in the--
+
+He fell asleep, and soon and slowly and ever so dimly the opal light of
+the prairie dawn crept shyly over the landscape.  With it came stealing
+the figure of a girl towards the group of trees where lay the man of
+Lammis on the bed of green boughs which she had renewed for him.  She had
+followed him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through
+the night--near him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him and
+the kind, holy night before the morrow came which belonged to the other
+woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to any man
+in whose arms she ever had lain.  And the pity and the tragedy of it was
+that he loved his wife--the catfish wife.  The sharp, pitiless instinct
+of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come of late to
+him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near him now, was
+only the reflection of what he felt for his wife.  She knew the
+unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet what
+she must put away from herself after to-morrow.  Those verses she wrote
+--they were to show that she had conquered herself.  Yet, but a few hours
+after, here she was kneeling outside his door at night, here she was
+pursuing him to the place where he slept.  The coming of the other woman
+--she knew well that she was something to this man of men--had roused in
+her all she had felt, had intensified it.
+
+She trembled, but she drew near, accompanied by the heavenly odours of
+the freshened herbs and foliage and the cool tenderness of the river
+close by.  In her white dress and loosened hair she was like some spirit
+of a new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home.  It
+was all so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the
+bushes and the night.  Noiselessly she stole over the grass and into the
+shadows of the trees where he lay.  Again and again she paused.  What
+would she do if he was awake and saw her?  She did not know.  The moment
+must take care of itself.  She longed to find him sleeping.
+
+It was so.  The hazy light showed his face upward to the skies, his
+breast rising and falling in a heavy, luxurious sleep.
+
+She drew nearer and nearer till she was kneeling beside him.  His face
+was warm with colour even in the night air, warmer than she had ever seen
+it.  One hand lay across his chest and one was thrown back over his head
+with the abandon of perfect rest.  All the anxiety and restlessness which
+had tortured him had fled, and his manhood showed bold and serene in the
+brightening dusk.
+
+A sob almost broke from her as she gazed her fill, then slowly she leaned
+over and softly pressed her lips to his--the first time that ever in love
+they had been given to any man.  She had the impulse to throw her arms
+round him, but she mastered herself.  He stirred, but he did not wake.
+His lips moved as she withdrew hers.
+
+"My darling!" he said in the quick, broken way of the dreamer.
+
+She rose swiftly and fled away among the trees towards the house.
+
+What he had said in his sleep--was it in reality the words of
+unconsciousness, or was it subconscious knowledge?--they kept ringing
+in her ears.
+
+"My darling!" he had said when she kissed him.  There was a light of joy
+in her eyes now, though she felt that the words were meant for another.
+Yet it was her kiss, her own kiss, which had made him say it.  If--but
+with happy eyes she stole to her room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+"S. O. S."
+
+At breakfast next morning Kitty did not appear.  Had it been possible she
+would have fled into the far prairie and set up a lonely tabernacle
+there; for with the day came a reaction from the courage possessing her
+the night before and in the opal wakening of the dawn.  When broad
+daylight came she felt as though her bones were water and her body a wisp
+of straw.  She could not bear to meet Shiel Crozier's eyes, and thus it
+was she had an early breakfast on the plea that she had ironing to do.
+She was not, however, prepared to see Jesse Bulrush drive up with a buggy
+after breakfast and take Crozier away.  When she did see them at the gate
+the impulse came to cry out to Crozier; what to say she did not know, but
+still to cry out.  The cry on her lips was that which she had seen in the
+newspaper the day before, the cry of the shipwrecked seafarers, the
+signal of the wireless telegraphy, "S. O. S."--the piteous call, "Save
+Our Souls!"  It sprang to her lips, but it got no farther except in an
+unconscious whisper.  On the instant she felt so weak and shaken and
+lonely that she wanted to lean upon some one stronger than herself; as
+she used to lean against her father, while he sat with one arm round her
+studying his railway problems.  She had been self-sufficient enough all
+her life,--"an independent little bird of freedom," as Crozier had called
+her; but she was like a boat tossed on mountainous waves now.
+
+"S. O. S.!-Save Our Souls!"
+
+As though she really had made this poignant call Crozier turned round in
+the buggy where he sat with Jesse Bulrush, pale but erect; and, with a
+strange instinct, he looked straight to where she was.  When he saw her
+his face flushed, he could not have told why.  Was it that there had
+passed to him in his sleep the subconscious knowledge of the kiss which
+Kitty had given him; and, after all, had he said "My darling" to her and
+not to the wife far away across the seas, as he thought?  A strange
+feeling, as of secret intimacy, never felt before where Kitty was
+concerned, passed through him now, and he was suddenly conscious that
+things were not as they had ever been; that the old impersonal
+comradeship had vanished.  It disturbed, it almost shocked him.
+Whereupon he made a valiant effort to recover the old ground, to get out
+of the new atmosphere into the old, cheering air.
+
+"Come and say good-bye, won't you?" he called to her.
+
+"S. O. S.--S. O. S.--S. O. S.!" was the cry in her heart, but she called
+back to him from her lips, "I can't.  I'm too busy.  Come back soon,
+soldier."
+
+With a wave of the hand he was gone.  "Not a care in the world she has,"
+Crozier said to Jesse Bulrush.  "She's the sunniest creature Heaven ever
+made."
+
+"Too skittish for me," responded the other with a sidelong look, for he
+had caught a note in Crozier's voice which gave him a sudden suspicion.
+
+"You want the kind you can drive with an oatstraw and a chirp--eh, my
+friend?"
+
+"Well, I've got what I want," was the reply.  "Neither of us 'll kick
+over the traces."
+
+"You are a lucky man," replied Crozier.  "You've got a remarkably big
+prize in the lottery.  She is a fine woman, is Nurse Egan, and I owe her
+a great deal.  I only hope things turn out so well that I can give her a
+good fat wedding-present.  But I shan't be able to do anything that's
+close to my heart if I can't get the cash for my share in the syndicate."
+
+"Courage, soldier, as Kitty Tynan says," responded Jesse Bulrush
+cheerily.  "You never know your luck.  The cash is waiting for you
+somewhere, and it'll turn up, be sure of that."
+
+"I'm not sure of that.  I can see as plain as your nose how Bradley and
+his clique have blocked me everywhere from getting credit, and I'd give
+five years of my life to beat them in their dirty game.  If I fail to get
+it at Aspen Vale I'm done.  But I'll have a try, a good big try.  How far
+exactly is it?  I've never gone by this trail."
+
+Bulrush shook his head reprovingly.  "It's too long a journey for you to
+take after your knock-out.  You're not fit to travel yet.  I don't like
+it a bit.  Lydia said this morning it was a crime against yourself, going
+off like this, and--"
+
+"Lydia?--oh yes, pardonnez-moi, m'sieu'!  I did not know her name was
+Lydia."
+
+"I didn't either till after we were engaged."  Crozier stared in blank
+amazement.  "You didn't know her name till after you were engaged?  What
+did you call her before that?"
+
+"Why, I called her Nurse."  answered the fat lover.  "We all called her
+that, and it sounded comfortable and homelike and good for every day.
+It had a sort of York-shilling confidence, and your life was in her hands
+--a first-class you-and-me kind of feeling."
+
+"Why don't you stick to it, then?"
+
+"She doesn't want it.  She says it sounds so old, and that I'd be calling
+her 'mother' next."
+
+"And won't you?" asked Crozier slyly.  "Everything in season," beamed
+Jesse, and he shone, and was at once happy and composed.  Crozier
+relapsed into silence, for he was thinking that the lost years had been
+barren of children.  He turned to look at the home they had left.  It was
+some distance away now, but he could see Kitty still at the corner of the
+house with a small harvest of laundered linen in her hand.
+
+"She made that fresh bed of boughs for me--ah, but I had a good sleep
+last night!" he added aloud.  "I feel fit for the fight before me."  He
+drew himself up and began to nod here and there to people who greeted
+him.
+
+In the house behind them at that moment Kitty was saying to her mother,
+"Where is he going, mother?"
+
+"To Aspen Vale," was the reply.  "If you'd been at breakfast you'd have
+heard.  He'll be gone two days, perhaps three."
+
+Three days!  She regretted now that she had not said to herself,
+"Courage, soldier," and gone to say good-bye to him when he called to
+her.  Perhaps she would not see him again till after the other woman--
+till after the wife-came.  Then--then the house would be empty; then the
+house would be so still.  And then John Sibley would come and--
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+Three days passed, but before they ended there came another telegram from
+Mrs. Crozier stating the time of her expected arrival at Askatoon.  It
+was addressed to Kitty, and Kitty almost savagely tore it up into little
+pieces and scattered it to the winds.  She did not even wait to show it
+to the Young Doctor; but he had a subtle instinct as to why she did not;
+and he was rather more puzzled than usual at what was passing before his
+eyes.  In any case, the coming of the wife must alter all the relations
+existing in the household of the widow Tynan.  The old, unrestrained,
+careless friendship could not continue.  The newcomer would import an
+element of caste and class which would freeze mother and daughter to the
+bones.  Crozier was the essence of democracy, which in its purest form is
+akin to the most aristocratic element and is easily affiliated with it.
+He had no fear of Crozier.  Crozier would remain exactly the same; but
+would not Crozier be whisked away out of Askatoon to a new fate,
+reconciled to being a receiver of his wife's bounty.
+
+"If his wife gets her arms round his neck, and if she wants to get them
+there, she will, and once there he'll go with her like a gentleman," said
+the Young Doctor sarcastically.  Admiring Crozier as he did, he also had
+underneath all his knowledge of life an unreasonable apprehension of
+man's weakness where a woman was concerned.  The man who would face a
+cannon's mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could
+crumple with one hand.
+
+The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and Kitty
+met the train.  The local operator had not divulged to any one the
+contents of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators
+on the platform.  As the great express stole in almost noiselessly, like
+a tired serpent, Kitty watched its approach with outward cheerfulness.
+She had braced herself to this moment, till she looked the most buoyant,
+joyous thing in the world.  It had not come easily.  With desperation she
+had fought a fight during these three lonely days, till at last she had
+conquered, sleeping each night on Crozier's star-lit bed of boughs and
+coming in with the silver-grey light of dawn.  Now she leaned forward
+with heart beating fast; but with smiling face and with eyes so bright
+that she deceived the Young Doctor.
+
+There was no sign of inward emotion, of hidden troubles, as she leaned
+forward to see the great lady step from the train--great in every sense
+was this lady in her mind; imposing in stature, a Juno, a tragedy queen,
+a Zenobia, a daughter of the gods who would not stoop to conquer.  She
+looked in vain, however, for the Mrs. Crozier she had imagined made no
+appearance from the train.  She hastened down the platform still with
+keen eyes scanning the passengers, who were mostly alighting to stretch
+their legs and get a breath of air.
+
+"She's not here," she said at last darkly to the Young Doctor who had
+followed her.
+
+Then suddenly she saw emerge from a little group at the steps of a car
+a child in a long dress--so it seemed to her, the being was so small and
+delicate--and come forward, having hastily said good-bye to her fellow-
+passengers.  As the Young Doctor said afterwards, "She wasn't bigger than
+a fly," and she certainly was as graceful and pretty and piquante as a
+child-woman could be.
+
+Presently, with her alert, rather assertive blue eyes she saw Kitty, and
+came forward.  "Miss Tynan?" she asked, with an encompassing look.
+
+Now Kitty was idiomatic in her speech at times, and she occasionally used
+slang of the best brand, but she avoided those colloquialisms which were
+of the vocabulary of the uneducated.  Indeed, she had had no inclination
+to use them, for her father had set her a good example, and she liked to
+hear good English spoken.  That was why Crozier's talk had been like
+music to her; and she had been keen to distinguish between the rhetorical
+method of Augustus Burlingame, who modelled himself on the orators of all
+the continents, and was what might be called a synthetic elocutionist.
+Kitty was as simple and natural as a girl could be, and as a rule had
+herself in perfect command; but she was so stunned by the sight of this
+petite person before her that, in reply to Mrs. Crozier's question, she
+only said abruptly
+
+"The same!"
+
+Then she came to herself and could have bitten her tongue out for that
+plunge into the vernacular of the West; and forthwith a great prejudice
+was set up in her mind against Mona Crozier, in whose eyes she caught a
+look of quizzical criticism or, as she thought, contemptuous comment.
+That for one instant she had been caught unawares and so had put herself
+at a disadvantage angered her; but she had been embarrassed and
+confounded by this miniature goddess, and her reply was a vague echo of
+talk she heard around her every day.  Also she could have choked the
+Young Doctor, whom she caught looking at her with wondering humour, as
+though he was trying to see "what her game was," as he said to her
+afterwards.
+
+It was all due to the fact that from the day of the Logan Trial, and
+particularly from the day when Shiel Crozier had told his life-story,
+she had always imagined his wife as a stately Amazonian being with the
+carriage of a Boadicea.  She had looked for an empress in splendid
+garments, and--and here was a humming-bird of a woman, scarcely bigger,
+than a child, with the buzzing energy of a bee, but with a queer sort of
+manfulness too; with a square, slightly-projecting chin, as Kitty came to
+notice afterwards; together with some small lines about the mouth and at
+the eyes, which came from trouble endured and suffering undergone.  Kitty
+did not notice that, but the Young Doctor took it in with his embracing
+glance, as the wife saluted Kitty with her inward comment, which was:
+
+"So this is the chit who wrote to me like a mother!"  But Mona Crozier
+did not underestimate Kitty for all that, and she wondered why it was
+that Kitty had written as she did.  One thing was quite clear: Kitty had
+had good intentions, else why have written at all?
+
+All these thoughts had passed through the mind of each, with a good many
+others, while they were shaking hands; and the Young Doctor summoned his
+man to carry Mona's hand-luggage to the extra buggy he had brought to the
+station.  One of the many other thoughts that were passing through three
+active minds was Kitty's unspoken satire:
+
+"Just think; this is the woman he talked of as though she was a moving
+mountain which would fall on you and crush you, if you didn't look out!"
+
+No doubt Crozier would have repudiated this description of his talk, but
+the fact was he had unconsciously spoken of Mona with a sort of hush in
+his voice; for a woman to him was something outside real understanding.
+He had a romantic mediaeval view, which translated weakness and beauty
+into a miracle, and what psychologists call "an inspired control."
+
+"She's no bigger than--than a wasp," said Kitty to herself, after the
+Young Doctor had assured Mrs. Crozier that her husband was almost well
+again; that he had recovered more quickly than was expected, and had
+gained strength wonderfully after the crisis was passed.
+
+"An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you," was Kitty's
+further inward comment, "and that's why he was always nervous when he
+spoke of her."  Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed
+the tiny lines about the tiny mouth, and the fine-spun webs about the
+bird-bright eyes.
+
+The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward
+suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward
+fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more
+offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most,
+spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey--and this, a
+journey across a continent.  Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and
+fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold
+of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the
+decision of every step and gesture.  Kitty noticed all this, and she said
+to herself,
+
+"Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo," and she instinctively felt the
+little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she ever
+wore, or had ever worn.
+
+"Sensible of her not to bring a maid," commented the Young Doctor
+inwardly.  "That would have thrown Kitty into a fit.  Yet how she manages
+to look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is
+beyond me--and Crozier so rather careless in his ways.  Not what you
+would call two notes in the same key, she and Crozier," he reflected as
+he told her she need not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of
+the checks for it.
+
+"My husband--is--is he quite better now?" Mrs. Crozier asked with sharp
+anxiety, as the two-seated "rig" started away with the ladies in the back
+seat.
+
+"Oh, better, thanks to him," was Kitty's reply, nodding towards the Young
+Doctor.
+
+"You have told him I was coming?"
+
+"Wasn't it better to have a talk with you first?" asked Kitty meaningly.
+
+Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried,
+then she looked Kitty in the eyes.
+
+"You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it," was
+her enigmatical reply.  "And of course you will tell me.  You did not let
+him know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?"
+
+"Oh, you got his cable?" questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph
+in her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor.  It did reach
+him, and he replied to the question.
+
+"We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country planned
+his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did not,
+unfortunately, take you into account."
+
+The little lady blushed, or flushed.  "May I ask how you know this to be
+so, if it is so?" she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in
+her tone, as it seemed to Kitty.
+
+"The Logan Trial--I mentioned it in my letter to you," interposed Kitty.
+"He was shot for the evidence he gave at the trial.  Well, at the trial
+a great many questions were asked by a lawyer who wanted to hurt him,
+and he answered them."
+
+"Why did the lawyer want to hurt him?" Mona Crozier asked quickly.
+
+"Just mean-hearted envy and spite and devilry," was Kitty's answer.
+"They were both handsome men, and perhaps that was it."
+
+"I never thought my husband handsome, though he was always distinguished
+looking," was the quiet reply.
+
+"Ah, but you haven't seen him at all for so long!" remarked Kitty, a
+little spitefully.
+
+"How do you know that?"  Mrs. Crozier was nettled, though she did not
+show it; but Kitty felt it was so, and was glad.
+
+"He said so at the Logan Trial."
+
+"Was that the kind of question asked at the trial?" the wife quickly
+interjected.
+
+"Yes, lots of that kind," returned Kitty.
+
+"What was the object?"
+
+"To make him look not so distinguished--like nothing.  If a man isn't
+handsome, but only distinguished"--Kitty's mood was dangerous--"and you
+make him look cheap, that's one advantage, and--"
+
+Here the Young Doctor, having observed the rising tide of antagonism in
+the tone of the voices behind him, gently interposed, and made it clear
+that the purpose was to throw a shadow on the past of her husband in
+order to discredit his evidence; to which Mrs. Crozier nodded her
+understanding.  She liked the Young Doctor, as who did not who came in
+contact with him, except those who had fear of him, and who had an idea
+that he could read their minds as he read their bodies.  And even this
+girl at her side--Mona Crozier realised that the part she had played was
+evidently an unselfish one, though she felt with piercing intuition that
+whatever her husband thought of the girl, the girl thought too much of
+her husband.  Somehow, all in a moment, it made her sorry for the girl's
+sake.  The girl had meant well by her husband in sending for his wife,
+that was certain; and she did not look bad.  She was too sedately and
+reservedly dressed, in spite of her auriferous face and head and her
+burnished tone, to be bad; too fearless in eye, too concentrated to be
+the rover in fields where she had no tenure or right.
+
+She turned and looked Kitty squarely in the eyes, and a new, softer look
+came into her own, subduing what to Kitty was the challenging alertness
+and selfish inquisitiveness.
+
+"You have been very good to Shiel--you two kind people," she said, and
+there came a sudden faint mist to her eyes.
+
+That was her lucky moment, and she spoke as she did just in time, for
+Kitty was beginning to resent her deeply; to dislike her far more than
+was reasonable, and certainly without any justice.
+
+Kitty spoke up quickly.  "Well, you see, he was always kind and good to
+other people, and that was why--"
+
+"But that Mr. Burlingame did not like him?"  The wife had a strange
+intuition regarding Mr. Burlingame.  She was sure that there was a woman
+in the case--the girl beside her?
+
+"That was because Mr. Burlingame was not kind or good to other people,"
+was Kitty's sedate response.  There was an undertone of reflection in the
+voice which did not escape Mrs. Crozier's senses, and it also caught the
+ear of the Young Doctor, to whom there came a sudden revelation of the
+reason why Burlingame had left Mrs. Tynan's house.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Crozier enigmatically.  Presently, with suppressed
+excitement as she saw the Young Doctor reining in the horses slowly, she
+added: "My husband--when have you arranged that I should see him?"
+
+"When he gets back--home," Kitty replied, with an accent on the last
+word.
+
+Mrs. Crozier started visibly.  "When he gets back home-back from where?
+He is not here?" she asked in a tone of chagrin.  She had come a long
+way, and she had pictured this meeting at the end of the journey with a
+hundred variations, but never with this one--that she should not see
+Shiel at once when the journey was over, if he was alive.  Was it hurt
+pride or disappointed love which spoke in her face, in her words?  After
+all, it was bad enough that her private life and affairs should be
+dragged out in a court of law; that these two kind strangers, whom she
+had never seen till a few minutes ago, should be in the inner circle of
+knowledge of the life of her husband and herself, without her self-esteem
+being hurt like this.  She was very woman, and the look of the thing was
+not nice to her eyes, while it must belittle her in theirs.  Had this
+girl done it on purpose?  Yet why should she--she who had so appealed to
+her to come to him--have sought to humiliate her?
+
+Kitty was not quite sure what she ought to say.  "You see, we expected
+him back before this.  He is very exact!"
+
+"Very exact?" asked Mrs. Crozier in astonishment.  This was a new phase
+of Shiel Crozier's character.  He must, indeed, have changed since he had
+caused her so much anxiety in days gone by.
+
+"Usen't he to be so?" asked Kitty, a little viciously.  "He is so very
+exact now," she added.  "He expected to be back home before this"--how
+she loved to use that word home--"and so we thought he would be here when
+you arrived.  But he has been detained at Aspen Vale.  He had a big
+business deal on--"
+
+"A big business deal?  Is he--is he in a large way of business?" Mona
+asked almost incredulously.  Shiel Crozier in a large way of business,
+in a big business deal?  It did not seem possible.  His had ever been the
+game of chance.  Business--business?
+
+"He doesn't talk himself, of course; that wouldn't be like him,"--Kitty
+had joy in giving this wife the character of her husband," but they say
+that if he succeeds in what he's trying to do now he will make a great
+deal of money."
+
+"Then he has not made it yet?" asked Mrs. Crozier.
+
+"He has always been able to pay his board regularly, with enough left for
+a pew in church," answered Kitty with dry malice; for she mistook the
+light in the other's eyes, and thought it was avarice; and the love
+of money had no place in Kitty's make-up.  She herself would never have
+been influenced by money where a man was concerned.
+
+"Here's the house," she quickly added; "our home, where Mr. Crozier
+lives.  He has the best room, so yours won't be quite so good.  It's
+mother's--she's giving it up to you.  With your trunks and things, you'll
+want a room to yourself," Kitty added, not at all unconscious that she
+was putting a phase of the problem of Crozier and his wife in a very
+commonplace way; but she did not look into Mrs. Crozier's face as she
+said it.
+
+Mrs. Crozier, however, was fully conscious of the poignancy of the
+remark, and once again her face flushed slightly, though she kept outward
+composure.
+
+"Mother, mother, are you there?" Kitty called, as she escorted the wife
+up the garden walk.
+
+An instant later Mrs. Tynan cheerfully welcomed the disturber of the
+peace of the home where Shiel Crozier had been the central figure for so
+long.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+And I was very lucky--worse luck!
+God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!
+Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, V2 ***
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