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+The Project Gutenberg EBook You Never Know Your Luck, Parker, V3
+#114 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+Title: You Never Know Your Luck, Volume 3.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6287]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 5, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, V3***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 3.
+
+
+XII.      AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM
+XIII.     KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN
+XIV.      AWAITING THE VERDICT
+XV.       "MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"
+XVI.      "'TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU GO BACK FOR MINE"
+XVII.     WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM
+
+"What are you laughing at, Kitty?  You cackle like a young hen with her
+first egg."  So spoke Mrs. Tynan to her daughter, who alternately swung
+backwards and forwards in a big rocking-chair, silently gazing into the
+distant sky, or sat still and "cackled" as her mother had said.
+
+A person of real observation and astuteness, however, would have noticed
+that Kitty's laughter told a story which was not joy and gladness--
+neither good humour nor the abandonment of a luxurious nature.
+It was tinged with bitterness and had the smart of the nettle.
+
+Her mother's question only made her laugh the more, and at last Mrs.
+Tynan stooped over her and said, "I could shake you, Kitty.  You'd make a
+snail fidget, and I've got enough to do to keep my senses steady with all
+the house-work--and now her in there!"  She tossed a hand behind her
+fretfully.
+
+Quick with love for her mother, as she always was, Kitty caught the
+other's trembling hand.  "You've always had too much to do, mother;
+always been slaving for others.  You've never had time to think whether
+you're happy or not, or whether you've got a problem--that's what people
+call things, when they're got so much time on their hands that they make
+a play of their inside feelings and work it up till it sets them crazy."
+
+Mrs. Tynan's mouth tightened and her brow clouded.  "I've had my problems
+too, but I always made quick work of them.  They never had a chance to
+overlay me like a mother overlays her baby and kills it."
+
+"Not 'like a mother overlays,' but 'as a mother overlays,'" returned
+Kitty with a queer note to her voice.  "That's what they taught me at
+school.  The teacher was always picking us up on that kind of thing.
+I said a thing worse than that when Mrs. Crozier"--her fingers motioned
+towards another room--"came to-day.  I don't know what possessed me.  I
+was off my trolley, I suppose, as John Sibley puts it.  Well, when Mrs.
+James Shiel Gathorne Crozier said--oh, so sweetly and kindly--'You are
+Miss Tynan?' what do you think I replied?  I said to her, 'The same'!"
+
+Rather an acidly satisfied smile came to Mrs. Tynan's lips.  "That was
+like the Slatterly girls," she replied.  "Your father would have said it
+was the vernacular of the rail-head.  He was a great man for odd words,
+but he knew always just what he wanted to say and he said it out.  You've
+got his gift.  You always say the right thing, and I don't know why you
+made that break with her--of all people."
+
+A meditative look came into Kitty's eyes.  "Mr. Crozier says every one
+has an imp that loves to tease us, and trip us up, and make us appear
+ridiculous before those we don't want to have any advantage over us."
+
+"I don't want Mrs. Crozier to have any advantage over you and me, I can
+tell you that.  Things'll never be the same here again, Kitty dear, and
+we've all got on so well; with him so considerate of every one, and a
+good friend always, and just one of us, and his sickness making him seem
+like our own, and--"
+
+"Oh, hush--will you hush, mother!" interposed Kitty sharply.  "He's
+going away with her back to the old country, and we might just as well
+think about getting other borders, for I suppose Mr. Bulrush and his
+bonny bride will set up a little bulrush tabernacle on the banks of the
+Nile"--she nodded in the direction of the river outside--"and they'll
+find a little Moses and will treat it as their very own."
+
+"Kitty, how can you!"
+
+Kitty shrugged a shoulder.  "It would be ridiculous for that pair to have
+one of their own.  It's only the young mother with a new baby that looks
+natural to me."
+
+"Don't talk that way, Kitty," rejoined her mother sharply.  "You aren't
+fit to judge of such things."
+
+"I will be before long," said her daughter.  "Anyway, Mrs. Crozier isn't
+any better able to talk than I am," she added irrelevantly.  "She never
+was a mother."
+
+"Don't blame her," said Mrs. Tynan severely.  "That's God's business.
+I'd be sorry for her, so far as that was concerned, if I were you.  It's
+not her fault."
+
+"It's an easy way of accounting for good undone," returned Kitty.
+"P'r'aps it was God's fault, and p'r'aps if she had loved him more--"
+
+Mrs. Tynan's face flushed with sudden irritation and that fretful look
+came to her eyes which accompanies a lack of comprehension.  "Upon my
+word, well, upon my word, of all the vixens that ever lived, and you
+looking like a yellow pansy and too sweet for daily use!  Such thoughts
+in your head!  Who'd have believed that you--!"
+
+Kitty made a mocking face at her mother.  "I'm more than a girl, I'm a
+woman, mother, who sees life all around me, from the insect to the
+mountain, and I know things without being told.  I always did.  Just life
+and living tell me things, and maybe, too, the Irish in me that father
+was."
+
+"It's so odd.  You're such a mixture of fun and fancy, at least you
+always have been; but there's something new in you these days.  Kitty,
+you make me afraid--yes, you make your mother afraid.  After what you
+said the other day about Mr. Crozier I've had bad nights, and I get
+nervous thinking."
+
+Kitty suddenly got up, put her arm round her mother and kissed her.
+"You needn't be afraid of me, mother.  If there'd been any real danger,
+I wouldn't have told you.  Mr. Crozier's away, and when he comes back
+he'll find his wife here, and there's the end of everything.  If there'd
+been danger, it would have been settled the night before he went away.
+I kissed him that night as he was sleeping out there under the trees."
+
+Mrs. Tynan sat down weakly and fanned herself with her apron.  "Oh, oh,
+oh, dear Lord!" she said.  "I'm not afraid to tell you anything I ever
+did, mother," declared Kitty firmly; "though I'm not prepared to tell you
+everything I've felt.  I kissed him as he slept.  He didn't wake, he just
+lay there sleeping--sleeping."  A strange, distant, dreaming look came
+into her eyes.  She smiled like one who saw a happy vision, and an eerie
+expression stole into her face.  "I didn't want him to wake," she
+continued.  "I asked God not to let him wake.  If he'd waked--oh, I'd
+have been ashamed enough till the day I died in one way!  Still he'd have
+understood, and he'd have thought no harm.  But it wouldn't have been
+fair to him--and there's his wife in there," she added, breaking off into
+a different tone.  "They're a long way above us--up among the peaks, and
+we're at the foot of the foothills, mother; but he never made us feel
+that, did he?  The difference between him and most of the men I've ever
+seen!  The difference!"
+
+"There's the Young Doctor," said her mother reproachfully.
+
+"He-him!  He's by himself, with something of every sort in him from the
+top to the bottom.  There's been a ditcher in his family, and there may
+have been a duke.  But Shiel Crozier--Shiel"--she flushed as she said the
+name like that, but a little touch of defiance came into her face too--
+"he is all of one kind.  He's not a blend.  And he's married to her in
+there!"
+
+"You needn't speak in that tone about her.  She's as fine as can be."
+
+"She's as fine as a bee," retorted Kitty.  Again she laughed that almost
+mirthless laugh for which her mother had called her to account a moment
+before.  "You asked me a while ago what I was laughing at, mother," she
+continued.  "Why, can't you guess?  Mr. Crozier talked of her always as
+though she was--well, like the pictures you've seen of Britannia, all
+swelling and spreading, with her hand on a shield and her face saying,
+'Look at me and be good,' and her eyes saying, 'Son of man, get upon thy
+knees!'  Why, I expected to see a sort of great--goodness--gracious
+goddess, that kept him frightened to death of her.  Bless you, he never
+opened her letter, he was so afraid of her; and he used to breathe once
+or twice hard--like that, when he mentioned her!"  She breathed in such
+mock awe that her mother laughed with a little kindly malice too.
+
+"Even her letter," Kitty continued remorselessly, "it was as though she
+--that little sprite--wrote it with a rod of chastisement, as the Bible
+says.  It--"
+
+"What do you know of the inside of that letter?" asked her mother,
+staring.
+
+"What the steam of the tea-kettle could let me see," responded Kitty
+defiantly; and then, to her shocked mother, she told what she had done,
+and what the nature of the letter was.
+
+"I wanted to help him if I could, and I think I'll be able to do it--I've
+worked it all out," Kitty added eagerly, with a glint of steel in the
+gold of her eyes and a fantastic kind of wisdom in her look.
+
+"Kitty," said her mother severely and anxiously, "it's madness
+interfering with other people's affairs--of that kind.  It never was
+any use."
+
+"This will be the exception to the rule," returned Kitty.  "There she
+is"--again she flicked a hand towards the other room--"after they've been
+parted five years.  Well, she came after she read my letter to her, and
+after I'd read that unopened letter to him, which made me know how to put
+it all to her.  I've got intuition--that's Celtic and mad," she added,
+with her chin thrusting out at her mother, to whom the Irish that her
+husband had been, which was so deep in her daughter, was ever a mystery
+to her, and of which she was more or less afraid.
+
+"I've got a plan, and I believe--I know--it will work," Kitty continued.
+"I've been thinking and thinking, and if there's trouble between them; if
+he says he isn't going on with her till he's made his fortune; if he
+throws that unopened letter in her face, I'll bring in my invention to
+deal with the problem, and then you'll see!  But all this fuss for a
+little tiny button of a thing like that in there--pshaw!  Mr. Crozier is
+worth a real queen with the beauty of one of the Rhine maidens.  How he
+used to tell that story of the Rhinegold--do you remember?  Wasn't it
+grand?  Well, I am glad now that he's going--yes, whatever trouble there
+may be, still he is going.  I feel it in my heart."
+
+She paused, and her eyes took on a sombre tone.  Presently, with a
+slight, husky pain in her voice, like the faint echo of a wail, she went
+on: "Now that he's going, I'm glad we've had the things he gave us,
+things that can't be taken away from us.  What you have enjoyed is yours
+for ever and ever.  It's memory; and for one moment or for one day or one
+year of those things you loved, there's fifty years, perhaps, for memory.
+Don't you remember the verses I cut out of the magazine:
+
+                  "'Time, the ruthless idol-breaker,
+                    Smileless, cold iconoclast,
+                    Though he rob us of our altars,
+                    Cannot rob us of the past.'"
+
+"That's the way your father used to talk," replied her mother.  "There's
+a lot of poetry in you, Kitty."  "More than there is in her?" asked
+Kitty, again indicating the region where Mrs. Crozier was.
+
+"There's as much poetry in her as there is in--in me.  But she can do
+things; that little bit of a babywoman can do things, Kitty.  I know
+women, and I tell you that if that woman hadn't a penny, she'd set to
+and earn it; and if her husband hadn't a penny, she'd make his home
+comfortable just the same somehow, for she's as capable as can be.  She
+had her things unpacked, her room in order herself--she didn't want your
+help or mine--and herself with a fresh dress on before you could turn
+round."
+
+Kitty's eyes softened still more.  "Well, if she'd been poor he would
+never have left her, and then they wouldn't have lost five years--think
+of it, five years of life with the man you love lost to you!--and there
+wouldn't be this tough old knot to untie now."
+
+"She has suffered--that little sparrow has suffered, I tell you, Kitty.
+She has a grip on herself like--like--"
+
+"Like Mr. Crozier with a broncho under his hand," interjected Kitty.
+"She's too neat, too eternally spick and span for me, mother.  It's as
+though the Being that made her said, 'Now I'll try and see if I can
+produce a model of a grown-up, full-sized piece of my work.'  Mrs.
+Crozier is an exhibition model, and Shiel Crozier's over six feet three,
+and loose and free, and like a wapiti in his gait.  If he was a wapiti
+he'd carry the finest pair of antlers ever was."
+
+"Kitty, you make me laugh," responded the puzzled woman.  "I declare,
+you're the most whimsical creature, and--"
+
+At that moment there came a tapping at the door behind them, and a small,
+silvery voice said, "May I come in?" as the door opened and Mrs.
+Crozier, very precisely yet prettily dressed, entered.
+
+"Please make yourself at home--no need to rap," answered Mrs. Tynan.
+"Out in the West here we live in the open like.  There's no room closed
+to you, if you can put up with what there is, though it's not what you're
+used to."
+
+"For five months in the year during the past five years I've lived in a
+house about half as large as this," was Mrs. Crozier's reply.  "With my
+husband away there wasn't the need of much room."
+
+"Well, he only has one room here," responded Mrs. Tynan.  "He never
+seemed too crowded in it."
+
+"Where is it?  Might I see it?" asked the small, dark-eyed, dark-haired
+wife, with the little touch of nectarine bloom and a little powder also;
+and though she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, there was a look of
+wistfulness in her eyes, a gleam of which Kitty caught ere it passed.
+
+"You've been separated, Mrs. Crozier," answered the elder woman, "and
+I've no right to let you into his room without his consent.  You've had
+no correspondence at all for five years--isn't that so?"
+
+"Did he tell you that?" the regal little lady asked composedly, but with
+an underglow of anger in her eyes.
+
+"He told the court that at the Logan Trial," was the reply.
+
+"At the murder trial--he told that?" Mrs. Crozier asked almost
+mechanically, her face gone pale and a little haggard.
+
+"He was obliged to answer when that wolf, Gus Burlingame, was after him,"
+interposed Kitty with kindness in her tone, for, suddenly, she saw
+through the outer walls of the little wife's being into the inner courts.
+She saw that Mrs. Crozier loved her husband now, whatever she had done in
+the past.  The sight of love does not beget compassion in a loveless
+heart, but there was love in Kitty's heart; and it was even greater than
+she would have wished any human being to see; and by it she saw with
+radium clearness through the veil of the other woman's being.
+
+"Surely he could have avoided answering that," urged Mona Crozier
+bitterly.
+
+"Only by telling a lie," Kitty quickly answered, "and I don't believe he
+ever told a lie in his life.  Come," she added, "I will show you his
+room.  My mother needn't do it, and so she won't be responsible.  You
+have your rights as a wife until they're denied you.  You mustn't come,
+mother," she said to Mrs. Tynan, and she put a tender hand on her arm.
+
+"This way," she added to the little person in the pale blue, which suited
+well her very dark hair, blue eyes, and rose-touched cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN
+
+A moment later they stood inside Shiel Crozier's room.  The first glance
+his wife gave took in the walls, the table, the bureau, and the desk
+which contained her own unopened letter.  She was looking for a
+photograph of herself.
+
+There was none in the room, and an arid look came into her face.  The
+glance and its sequel did not escape Kitty's notice.  She knew well--as
+who would not?--what Mona Crozier was hoping to see, and she was human
+enough to feel a kind of satisfaction in the wife's chagrin and
+disappointment; for the unopened letter in the baize-covered desk which
+she had read was sufficient warrant for a punishment and penalty due the
+little lady, and not the less because it was so long delayed.  Had not
+Shiel Crozier had his draught of bitter herbs to drink over the past five
+years?
+
+Moreover, Kitty was sure beyond any doubt at all that Shiel Crozier's
+wife, when she wrote the letter, did not love her husband, or at least
+did not love him in the right or true way.  She loved him only so far as
+her then selfish nature permitted her to do; only in so far as the pride
+of money which she had, and her husband had not, did not prevent; only in
+so far as the nature of a tyrant could love--though the tyranny was pink
+and white and sweetly perfumed and had the lure of youth.  In her
+primitive way Kitty had intuitively apprehended the main truth, and that
+was enough to justify her in contributing to Mona Crozier's punishment.
+
+Kitty's perceptions were true.  At the start, Mona was in nature
+proportionate to her size; and when she married she had not loved Crozier
+as he had loved her.  Maybe that was why--though he may not have admitted
+it to himself--he could not bear to be beholden to her when his ruin
+came.  Love makes all things possible, and there is no humiliation in
+taking from one who loves and is loved, that uncapitalised and communal
+partnership which is not of the earth earthy.  Perhaps that was why,
+though Shiel loved her, he had had a bitterness which galled his soul;
+why he had a determination to win sufficient wealth to make himself
+independent of her.  Down at the bottom of his chivalrous Irish heart
+he had learned the truth, that to be dependent on her would beget in her
+contempt for him, and he would be only her paid paramour and not her
+husband in the true sense.  Quixotic he had been, but under his quixotism
+there was at least the shadow of a great tragical fact, and it had made
+him a matrimonial deserter.  Whether tragedy or comedy would emerge was
+all on the knees of the gods.
+
+"It's a nice room, isn't it?" asked Kitty when there had passed from
+Mona Crozier's eyes the glaze or mist--not of tears, but stupefaction--
+which had followed her inspection of the walls, the bureau, the table,
+and the desk.
+
+"Most comfortable, and so very clean--quite spotless," the wife answered
+admiringly, and yet drearily.  It made her feel humiliated that her man
+could live this narrow life of one room without despair, with sufficient
+resistance to the lure of her hundred and fifty thousand pounds and her
+own delicate and charming person.  Here, it would seem, he was content.
+One easy-chair, made out of a barrel, a couch, a bed--a very narrow bed,
+like a soldier's, a bed for himself alone--a small table, a shelf on the
+wall with a dozen books, a little table, a bureau, and an old-fashioned,
+sloping-topped, shallow desk covered with green baize, on high legs, so
+that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made that
+high stand for the desk himself).  That was what the room conveyed to
+her--the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a workshop
+and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on the march.
+After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation she espied a
+little card hung under the small mirror on the wall.  There was writing
+on it, and going nearer, she saw in red pencil the words, "Courage,
+soldier!"
+
+These were the words which Kitty was so fond of using, and the girl had
+a thrill of triumph now as she saw the woman from whom Crozier had fled
+looking at the card.  She herself had come and looked at it many times
+since Crozier had gone, for he had only put it there just before he left
+on his last expedition to Aspen Vale to carry through his deal.  It had
+brought a great joy to Kitty's heart.  It had made her feel that she had
+some share in his life; that, in a way, she had helped him on the march,
+the vivandiere who carried the water-bag which would give him drink when
+parched, battle-worn, or wounded.
+
+Mona Crozier turned away from the card, sadly reflecting that nothing in
+the room recalled herself; that she was not here in the very core of his
+life in even the smallest way.  Yet this girl, this sunny creature with
+the call of youth and passion in her eyes, this Ruth of the wheat-fields,
+came and went here as though she was a part of it.  She did this and that
+for him, and she was no doubt on such terms of intimacy with him that
+they were really part of each other's life in a scheme of domesticity
+unlike any boarding-house organization she had ever known.  Here in
+everything there was the air, the decorum, and the unartificial comfort
+of home.
+
+This was why he could live without his wedded wife and her gold and her
+brocade, and the silk and the Persian rugs, and the grand piano and the
+carriages and the high silk hat from Piccadilly.  Her husband had had the
+luxuries of wealth, and here he was living like a Spartan on his hill--
+and alone; though he had a wife whom men had beseiged both before and
+after marriage.  A feeling of impotent indignation suddenly took
+possession of her.  Here he was with two women, unattached,--one
+interesting and good and agreeable and good-looking, and the other almost
+a beauty,--who were part of the whole rustic scheme in which he lived.
+They made him comfortable, they did the hundred things that a valet or a
+fond wife would do; they no doubt hung on every word he uttered--and he
+could be interesting beyond most men.  She had realised terribly how
+interesting he was after he had fled; when men came about her and talked
+to her in many ways, with many variations, but always with the one tune
+behind all they said; always making for the one goal, whatever the point
+from which they started or however circuitous their route.
+
+As time went on she had hungrily longed to see her husband again, and
+other men had no power to interest her; but still she had not sought to
+find him.  At first it had been offended pride, injured self-esteem, in
+which the value of her own desirable self and of her very desirable
+fortune was not lost; then it became the pride of a wife in whom the
+spirit of the eternal woman was working; and she would have died rather
+than have sought to find him.  Five years--and not a word from him.
+
+Five years--and not a letter from him!  Her eyes involuntarily fell on
+the high desk with the greenbaize top.  Of all the letters he had written
+at that desk not one had been addressed to her.  Slowly, and with an
+unintentional solemnity, she went up to it and laid a hand upon it.  Her
+chin only cleared the edge of it-he was a tall man, her husband.
+
+"This is the place of secrets, I suppose?" she said, with a bright smile
+and an attempt at gaiety to Kitty, who had watched her with burning eyes;
+for she had felt the thrill of the moment.  She was as sensitive to
+atmosphere of this sad play of life as nearly and as vitally as the
+deserted wife.
+
+"I shouldn't think it a place of secrets," Kitty answered after a moment.
+"He seldom locks it, and when he does I know where the key is."
+
+"Indeed?"  Mona Crozier stiffened.  A look of reproach came into her
+eyes.  It was as though she was looking down from a great height upon a
+poor creature who did not know the first rudiments of personal honour,
+the fine elemental customs of life.
+
+Kitty saw and understood, but she did not hasten to reply, or to set
+things right.  She met the lofty look unflinchingly, and she had pride
+and some little malice too--it would do Mrs. Crozier good, she thought--
+in saying, as she looked down on the humming-bird trying to be an eagle:
+
+"I've had to get things for him-papers and so on, and send them on when
+he was away, and even when he was at home I've had to act for him; and so
+even when it was locked I had to know where the key was.  He asked me to
+help him that way."
+
+Mona noted the stress laid upon the word home, and for the first time she
+had a suspicion that this girl knew more than even the Logan Trial had
+disclosed, and that she was being satirical and suggestive.
+
+"Oh, of course," she returned cheerfully in response to Kitty--"you acted
+as a kind of clerk for him!"  There was a note in her voice which she
+might better not have used.  If she but knew it, she needed this girl's
+friendship very badly.  She ought to have remembered that she would not
+have been here in her husband's room had it not been for the letter Kitty
+had written--a letter which had made her heart beat so fast when she
+received it, that she had sunk helpless to the floor on one of those soft
+rugs, representing the soft comfort which wealth can bring.
+
+The reply was like a slap in the face.
+
+"I acted for him in any way at all that he wished me to," Kitty answered,
+with quiet boldness and shining, defiant face.
+
+Mona's hand fell away from the green baize desk, and her eyes again lost
+their sight for a moment.  Kitty was not savage by nature.  She had been
+goaded as much by the thought of the letter Crozier's wife had written to
+him in the hour of his ruin as by the presence of the woman in this
+house, where things would never be as they had been before.  She had
+struck hard, and now she was immediately sorry for it: for this woman was
+here in response to her own appeal; and, after all, she might well be
+jealous of the fact that Crozier had had close to him for so long and in
+such conditions a girl like herself, younger than his own wife, and
+prettier--yes, certainly prettier, she admitted to herself.
+
+"He is that kind of a man.  What he asked for, any good woman could give
+and not be sorry," Kitty convincingly added when the knife had gone deep
+enough.
+
+"Yes, he was that kind of a man," responded the other gently now, and
+with a great sigh of relief.  Suddenly she came nearer and touched
+Kitty's arm.  "And thank you for saying so," she added.  "He and I have
+been so long parted, and you have seen so much more of him than I have of
+late years!  You know him better--as he is.  If I said something sharp
+just now, please forgive me.  I am--indeed, I am grateful to you and your
+mother."
+
+She paused.  It was hard for her to say what she felt she must say, for
+she did not know how her husband would receive her--he had done without
+her for so long; and she might need this girl and her mother sorely.  The
+girl was a friend in the best sense, or she would not have sent for her.
+She must remind herself of this continually lest she should take wrong
+views.
+
+Kitty nodded, but for a moment she did not reply.  Her hand was on the
+baize-covered desk.  All at once, with determination in her eyes, she
+said: "You didn't use him right or you'd not have been parted for five
+years.  You were rich and he was poor, he is poor now, though he may be
+rich any day, and he wouldn't stay with you because he wouldn't take your
+money to live on.  If you had been a real wife to him he wouldn't have
+seen that he'd be using your money; he'd have taken it as though it was
+his own, out of the purse always open and belonging to both, just as
+though you were partners.  You must feel--"
+
+"Hush, for pity's sake, hush!" interrupted the other.
+
+"You are going to see him again," Kitty persisted.  "Now, don't you think
+it just as well to know what the real truth is?"
+
+"How do you know what is the truth?" asked the trembling little stranger
+with a last attempt to hold her position, to conceal from herself the
+actual facts.
+
+"The Young Doctor and my mother and I were with him all the time he was
+ill after he was shot, and the Trial had only told half the truth.  He
+wanted us, his best friends here, to know the whole truth, so he told us
+that he left you because he couldn't bear to live on your money.  It was
+you made him feel that, though he didn't say so.  All the time he told
+his story he spoke of you as though you were some goddess, some great
+queen--"
+
+A look of hope, of wonder, of relief came into the tiny creature's eyes.
+"He spoke like that of me; he said--?"
+
+"He said what no one else would have said, probably; but that's the way
+with people in love--they see what no one else sees, they think what no
+one else thinks.  He talked with a sort of hush in his voice about you
+till we thought you must be some stately, tall, splendid Helen of Troy
+with a soul like an ocean, instead of"--she was going to say something
+that would have seemed unkind, and she stopped herself in time--"instead
+of a sort of fairy, one of the little folk that never grow up; the same
+as my father used to tell me about."
+
+"You think very badly of me, then?" returned the other with a sigh.
+Her courage, her pride, her attempt to control the situation had vanished
+suddenly, and she became for the moment almost the child she looked.
+
+"We've only just begun.  We're all his friends here, and we'll judge you
+and think of you according to what happens between you and him.  You
+wrote him that letter!"
+
+She suddenly placed her hand on the desk as the inspiration came to her
+to have this matter of the letter out now, and to have Mrs. Crozier know
+exactly what the position was, no matter what might be thought of
+herself.  She was only thinking of Shiel Crozier and his future now.
+
+"What letter did I write?"  There was real surprise and wonder in her
+tone.
+
+"That last letter you wrote to him--the letter in which you gave him fits
+for breaking his promise, and talked like a proud, angry angel from the
+top of the stairs."
+
+"How do you know of that letter?  He, my husband, told you what was in
+that letter; he showed it to you?"  The voice was indignant, low, and
+almost rough with anger.
+
+"Yes, your husband showed me the letter--unopened."
+
+"Unopened--I do not understand."  Mona steadied herself against the foot
+of the bed and looked in a helpless way at Kitty.  Her composure was
+gone, though she was very quiet, and she had that look of a vital
+absorption which possesses human beings in crises of their lives.
+
+Suddenly Kitty took from behind a book on the shelf a key, opened the
+desk, and drew out the letter which Crozier had kept sealed and unopened
+all the years, which he had never read.
+
+"Do you know that?" Kitty asked, and held it out for Mrs. Crozier to
+see.
+
+Two dark blue eyes stared confusedly at the letter--at her own
+handwriting.  Kitty turned it over.  "You see it is closed as it was when
+you sent it to him.  He has never opened it.  He does not know what is in
+it."
+
+"He has-kept it--five years--unopened," Mona said in broken phrases
+scarce above a whisper.
+
+"He has never opened it, as you see."
+
+"Give--give it to me," the wife said, stepping forward to stay Kitty's
+hand as she opened the lid of the desk to replace the letter.
+
+"It's not your letter--no, you shall not," said Kitty firmly as she
+jerked aside the hand laid upon her wrist, and threw one arm on the lid,
+holding it down as Mrs. Crozier tried to keep it open.  Then with a swift
+action of the free hand she locked the desk and put the key in her
+pocket.
+
+"If you destroyed this letter he would never believe but that it was
+worse than it is; and it is bad enough, Heaven knows, for any woman to
+have written to her husband--or to any one else's husband.  You thought
+you were the centre of the world when you wrote that letter.  Without a
+penny, he would be a great man, with a great future; but you are only a
+pretty little woman with a fortune, who has thought a great lot of
+herself, and far too much of herself only, when she wrote that letter."
+
+"How do you know what is in it?"  There was agony and challenge at once
+in the other's voice.  "Because I read it--oh, don't look so shocked!
+I'd do it again.  I knew just how to act when I'd read it.  I steamed it
+open and closed it up again.  Then I wrote to you.  I'm not sorry I did
+it.  My motive was a good one.  I wanted to help him.  I wanted to
+understand everything, so that I'd know best what to do.  Though he's so
+far above us in birth and position, he seemed in one way like our own.
+That's the way it is in new countries like this.  We don't think of lots
+of things that you finer people in the old countries do, and we don't
+think evil till it trips us up.  In a new country all are strangers among
+the pioneers, and they have to come together.  This town is only twenty
+years old, and scarcely anybody knew each other at the start.  We had to
+take each other on trust, and we think the best as long as we can.  Mr.
+Crozier came to live with us, and soon he was just part of our life--not
+a boarder; not some one staying the night who paid you what he owed you
+in the morning.  He was a friend you could say your prayers with, or eat
+your meals with, or ride a hundred miles with, and just take it as a
+matter of course; for he was part of what you were part of, all this out
+here--don't you understand?"
+
+"I am trying hard to do so," was the reply in a hushed voice.  Here was a
+world, here were people of whom Mona Crozier had never dreamed.  They
+were so much of an antique time--far behind the time that her old land
+represented; not a new world, but the oldest world of all.  She began to
+understand the girl also, and her face took on a comprehending look, as
+with eyes like bronze suns Kitty continued:
+
+"So, though it was wrong--wicked--in one way, I read the letter, to do
+some good by it, if it could be done.  If I hadn't read it you wouldn't
+be here.  Was it worth while?"
+
+At that moment there was a knock at the outer door of the other room, or,
+rather, on the lintel of it.  Mona started.  Suppose it was her husband
+--that was her thought.
+
+Kitty read the look.  "No, it isn't Mr. Crozier.  It's the Young Doctor.
+I know his knock.  Will you come and see him?"
+
+The wife was trembling, she was very pale, her eyes were rather staring,
+but she fought to control herself.  It was evident that Kitty expected
+her to do so.  It was also quite certain that Kitty meant to settle
+things now, in so far as it could be done.
+
+"He knows as much as you do?" asked Mrs. Crozier.
+
+"No, the Young Doctor hasn't read the letter and I haven't told him
+what's in it; but he knows that I read it, and what he doesn't know he
+guesses.  He is Mr. Crozier's honest, clever friend.  I've got an idea--
+an invention to put this thing right.  It's a good one.  You'll see.  But
+I want the Young Doctor to know about it.  He never has to think twice.
+He knows what to do the very first time."
+
+A moment later they were in the other room, with the Young Doctor smiling
+down at "the little spot of a woman," as he called Crozier's wife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+AWAITING THE VERDICT
+
+"You look quite settled and at home," the Young Doctor remarked, as he
+offered Mrs. Crozier a chair.  She took it, for never in her life had she
+felt so small physically since coming to the great, new land.  The
+islands where she was born were in themselves so miniature that the minds
+of their people, however small, were not made to feel insignificant.  But
+her mind, which was, after all, vastly larger in proportion than the body
+enshrining it, felt suddenly that both were lost in a universe.  Her
+impulse was to let go and sink into the helplessness of tears, to be
+overwhelmed by an unconquerable loneliness; but the Celtic courage in
+her, added to that ancient native pride which prevents one woman from
+giving way before another woman towards whom she bears jealousy,
+prevented her from showing the weakness she felt.  Instead, it roused
+her vanity and made her choose to sit down, so disguising perceptibly the
+disparity of height which gave Kitty an advantage over her and made the
+Young Doctor like some menacing Polynesian god.
+
+Both these people had an influence and authority in Mona Crozier's life
+which now outweighed the advantage wealth gave her.  Her wealth had not
+kept her husband beside her when delicate and perfumed tyranny began to
+flutter its banners of control over him.  Her fortune had driven him
+forth when her beauty and her love ought to have kept him close to her,
+whatever fate might bring to their door, or whatever his misfortune or
+the catastrophe falling on him.  It was all deeply humiliating, and the
+inward dejection made her now feel that her body was the last effort of a
+failing creative power.  So she sat down instead of standing up in a vain
+effort at retrieval.
+
+The Young Doctor sat down also, but Kitty did not, and in her buoyant
+youth and command of the situation she seemed Amazonian to Mona's eyes.
+It must be said for Kitty that she remained standing only because a
+restlessness had seized her which was not present when she was with Mona
+in Crozier's room.  It was now as though something was going to happen
+which she must face standing; as though something was coming out of the
+unknown and forbidding future and was making itself felt before its time.
+Her eyes were almost painfully bright as she moved about the room doing
+little things.  Presently she began to lay a cloth and place dishes
+silently on the table--long before the proper time, as her mother
+reminded her when she entered for a moment and then quickly passed on
+into the kitchen, at a warning glance from Kitty, which said that the
+Young Doctor and Mona were not to be disturbed.
+
+"Well, Askatoon is a place where one feels at home quickly," added the
+Young Doctor, as Mona did not at once respond to his first remark.
+"Every one who comes here always feels as though he--or she--owns the
+place.  It's the way the place is made.  The trouble with most of us is
+that we want to put the feeling into practice and take possession of
+'all and sundry.' Isn't that true, Miss Tynan?"
+
+"As true as most things you say," retorted Kitty, as she flicked the
+white tablecloth.  "If mother and I hadn't such wonderful good health I
+suppose you'd come often enough here to give you real possession.  Do you
+know, Mrs. Crozier," she added, with her wistful eyes vainly trying to be
+merely mischievous, "he once charged me five dollars for torturing me
+like a Red Indian.  I had put my elbow out of joint, and he put it in
+again with his knee and both hands, as though it was the wheel of a wagon
+and he was trying to put on the tire."
+
+"Well, you were running round soon after," answered the Young Doctor.
+"But as for the five dollars, I only took it to keep you quiet.  So long
+as you had a grievance you would talk and talk and talk, and you never
+were so astonished in your life as when I took that five dollars."
+
+"I've taken care never to dislocate my elbow since."
+
+"No, not your elbow," remarked the Young Doctor meaningly, and turned to
+Mona, who had now regained her composure.
+
+"Well,  I shan't call you in to reduce the dislocation--that's the
+medical term, isn't it?" persisted Kitty, with fire in her eyes.
+
+"What is the dislocation?" asked Mona, with a subtle, inquiring look but
+a manner which conveyed interest.
+
+The Young Doctor smiled.  "It's only her way of saying that my mind is
+unhinged and that I ought to be sent to a private hospital for two."
+
+"No--only one," returned Kitty.
+
+"Marriage means common catastrophe, doesn't it?" he asked quizzically.
+
+"Generally it means that one only is permanently injured," replied Kitty,
+lifting a tumbler and looking through it at him as though to see if the
+glass was properly polished.
+
+Mona was mystified.  At first she thought there had been oblique
+references to her husband, but these remarks about marriage would
+certainly exclude him.  Yet, would they exclude him?  During the time in
+which Shiel's history was not known might there not have been--but no,
+it could not have been so, for it was Kitty who had sent the letter which
+had brought her to Askatoon.
+
+"Are you to be married--soon?" she asked of Kitty, with a friendly yet
+trembling smile, for her agitation was, despite appearances, troubling
+every nerve.
+
+"I've thought of it quite lately," responded Kitty calmly, seating
+herself now and looking straight into the eyes of the woman, who was
+suggesting more truth than she knew.
+
+"May I congratulate you?  Am I justified on such slight acquaintance?
+I am sure you have chosen wisely," was the smooth rejoinder.
+
+Kitty did not shrink from looking Mona in the eyes.  "It isn't quite time
+for congratulations yet, and I'm not sure I've chosen wisely.  My family
+very strongly disapproves.  I can't help that, of course, and I may have
+to elope and take the consequences."
+
+"It takes two to elope," interposed the Young Doctor, who thought that
+Kitty, in her humorous extravagance, was treading very dangerous ground
+indeed.  He was thinking of Crozier and Kitty; but Kitty was thinking of
+Crozier, and meaning John Sibley.  Somehow she could not help playing
+with this torturing thing in the presence of the wife of the man who was
+the real "man in possession" so far as her life was concerned.
+
+"Why, he is waiting on the doorstep," replied Kitty boldly and referring
+only to John Sibley.
+
+At that minute there was the crunch of gravel on the pathway and the
+sound of a quick footstep.  Kitty and Mona were on their feet at once.
+Both recognised the step of Shiel Crozier.  Presently the Young Doctor
+recognised it also, but he rose with more deliberation.
+
+At that instant a voice calling from the road arrested Crozier's advance
+to the open door of the room where they were.  It was Jesse Bulrush
+asking a question.  Crozier paused in his progress, and in the moment's
+time it gave, Kitty, with a swift look of inquiry and with a burst of the
+real soul in her, caught the hand of Crozier's wife and pressed it
+warmly.  Then, with a face flushed and eyes that looked straight ahead of
+her, she left the room as the Young Doctor went to the doorway and
+stepped outside.  Within ten feet of the door he met Crozier.
+
+"How goes it, patient?" he said, standing in Crozier's way.  Being a man
+who thought much and wisely for other people, he wanted to give the wife
+time to get herself in control.
+
+"Right enough in your sphere of operations," answered Crozier.
+
+"And not so right in other fields, eh?"
+
+"I've come back after a fruitless hunt.  They've got me, the thieves!"
+said Crozier, with a look which gave his long face an almost tragic
+austerity.  Then suddenly the look changed, the mediaeval remoteness
+passed, and a thought flashed up into his eves which made his expression
+alive with humour.
+
+"Isn't it wonderful, that just when a man feels he wants a rope to hang
+himself with, the rope isn't to be had?" he exclaimed.  "Before he can
+lay his hands on it he wants to hang somebody else, and then he has to
+pause whether he will or no.  Did I ever tell you the story of the old
+Irishwoman who lived down at Kenmare, in Kerry?  Well, she used to sit at
+her doorway and lament the sorrows of the world with a depth of passion
+that you'd think never could be assuaged.  'Oh, I fale so bad, I am so
+wake--oh, I do fale so bad,' she used to say.  'I wish some wan would
+take me by the ear and lade me round to the ould shebeen, and set me
+down, and fill a noggen of whusky and make me dhrink it--whether I would
+or no!'  Whether I would or no I have to drink the cup of self-denial,"
+Crozier continued, "though Bradley and his gang have closed every door
+against me here, and I've come back without what I went for at Aspen
+Vale, for my men were away.  I've come back without what I went for, but
+I must just grin and bear it."  He shrugged his shoulders and gave a
+great sigh.
+
+"Perhaps you'll find what you went for here," returned the Young Doctor
+meaningly.
+
+"There's a lot here--enough to make a man think life worth while"--inside
+the room the wife shrank at the words, for she could hear all--"but just
+the same I'm not thinking the thing I went to look for is hereabouts."
+
+"You never know your luck," was the reply.  "'Ask and you shall find,
+knock and it shall be opened unto you.'"
+
+The long face blazed up with humour again.  "Do you mean that I haven't
+asked you yet?" Crozier remarked, with a quizzical look, which had still
+that faint hope against hope which is a painful thing for a good man's
+eyes to see.
+
+The Young Doctor laid a hand on Crozier's arm.  "No, I didn't mean that,
+patient.  I'm in that state when every penny I have is out to keep me
+from getting a fall.  I'm in that Starwhon coal-mine down at Bethbridge,
+and it's like a suction-pump.  I couldn't borrow a thousand dollars
+myself now.  I can't do it, or I'd stand in with you, Crozier.  No, I
+can't help you a bit; but step inside.  There's a room in this house
+where you got back your life by the help of a knife.  There's another
+room in there where you may get back your fortune by the help of a wife."
+
+Stepping aside he gave the wondering Crozier a slight push forward into
+the doorway, then left him and hurried round to the back of the house,
+where he hoped he might see Kitty.
+
+The Young Doctor found Kitty pumping water on a pail of potatoes and
+stirring them with a broom-handle.
+
+"A most unscientific way of cleaning potatoes," he said, as Kitty did not
+look at him.  "If you put them in a trough where the water could run off,
+the dirt would go with the water, and you would'nt waste time and
+intelligence, and your fingers would be cleaner in the end."
+
+The only reply Kitty made was to flick the broomhead at him.  It had been
+dipped in water, and the spray from it slightly spattered his face.
+
+"Will you never grow up?" he exclaimed as he applied a handkerchief to
+his ruddy face.
+
+"I'd like you so much better if you were younger--will you never be
+young?" she asked.
+
+"It makes a man old before his time to have to meet you day by day and
+live near you."
+
+"Why don't you try living with me?" she retorted.  "Ah, then, you meant
+me when you said to Mrs. Crozier that you were going to be married?
+Wasn't that a bit 'momentary'?  as my mother's cook used to remark.  I
+think we haven't 'kept company'--you and I"
+
+"It's true you haven't been a beau of mine, but I'd rather marry you than
+be obliged to live with you," was the paradoxical retort.
+
+"You have me this time," he said, trying in vain to solve her reply.
+
+Kitty tossed her head.  "No, I haven't got you this time, thank Heaven,
+and I don't want you; but I'd rather marry you than live with you, as I
+said.  Isn't it the custom for really nice-minded people to marry to get
+rid of each other--for five years, or for ever and ever and ever?"
+
+"What a girl you are, Kitty Tynan!" he said reprovingly.  He saw that
+she meant Crozier and his wife.
+
+Kitty ceased her work for an instant and, looking away from him into the
+distance, said: "Three people said those same words to me all in one day
+a thousand years ago.  It was Mr. Crozier, Jesse Bulrush, and my mother;
+and now you've said it a thousand years after; as with your inexpensive
+education and slow mind you'd be sure to do."
+
+"I have an idea that Mrs. Crozier said the same to you also this very
+day.  Did she--come, did she?"
+
+"She didn't say, 'What a girl you are!' but in her mind she probably did
+say, 'What a vixen!"'
+
+The Young Doctor nodded satirically.  "If you continued as you began when
+coming from the station, I'm sure she did; and also I'm sure it wasn't
+wrong of her to say it."
+
+"I wanted her to say it.  That's why I uttered the too, too utter-things,
+as the comic opera says.  What else was there to do?  I had to help cure
+her."
+
+"To cure her of what, miss?"
+
+"Of herself, doctor-man."
+
+The Young Doctor's look became graver.  He wondered greatly at this young
+girl's sage instinct and penetration.  "Of herself?  Ah, yes, to think
+more of some one else than herself!  That is--"
+
+"Yes, that is love," Kitty answered, her head bent over the pail and
+stirring the potatoes hard.
+
+"I suppose it is," he answered.
+
+"I know it is," she returned.
+
+"Is that why you are going to be married?" he asked quizzically.
+
+"It will probably cure the man I marry of himself," she retorted.  "Oh,
+neither of us know what we are talking about--let's change the subject!"
+she added impatiently now, with a change of mood, as she poured the water
+off the potatoes.
+
+There was a moment's silence in which they were both thinking of the same
+thing.  "I wonder how it's all going inside there?" he remarked.
+"I hope all right, but I have my doubts."
+
+"I haven't any doubt at all.  It isn't going right," she answered
+ruefully; "but it has to be made go right."
+
+"Whom do you think can do that?"
+
+Kitty looked him frankly and decisively in the face.  Her eyes had the
+look of a dreaming pietist for the moment.  The deep-sea soul of her was
+awake.  "I can do it if they don't break away altogether at once.  I
+helped her more than you think.  I told her I had opened that letter."
+
+He gasped.  "My dear girl--that letter--you told her you had done such a
+thing, such--!"
+
+"Don't dear girl me, if you please.  I know what I am doing.  I told her
+that and a great deal more.  She won't leave this house the woman she was
+yesterday.  She is having a quick cure--a cure while you wait."
+
+"Perhaps he is cured of her," remarked the Young Doctor very gravely.
+
+"No, no, the disease might have got headway, but it didn't," Kitty
+returned, her face turned away.  "He became a little better; but he was
+never cured.  That's the way with a man.  He can never forget a woman he
+has once cared for, and he can go back to her half loving her; but it
+isn't the case with a woman.  There's nothing so dead to a woman as a man
+when she's cured of him.  The woman is never dead to the man, no matter
+what happens."
+
+The Young Doctor regarded her with a strange, new interest and a puzzled
+surprise.  "Sappho--Sappho, how did you come to know these things!" he
+exclaimed.  "You are only a girl at best, or something of a boy-girl at
+worst, and yet you have, or think you have, got into those places which
+are reserved for the old-timers in life's scramble.  You talk like an
+ancient dame."
+
+Kitty smiled, but her eyes had a slumbering look as if she was half
+dreaming.  "That's the mistake most of you make--men and women.  There's
+such a thing as instinct, and there's such a thing as keeping your eyes
+open."
+
+"What did Mrs. Crozier say when you told her about opening that five-
+year-old letter?  Did she hate you?"
+
+Kitty nodded with wistful whimsicality.  "For a minute she was like an
+industrious hornet.  Then I made her see she wouldn't have been here at
+all if I hadn't opened it.  That made, her come down from the top of her
+nest on the church-spire, and she said that, considering my
+opportunities, I was not such an aboriginal after all."
+
+"Now, look you, Saphira, prospective wife of Ananias, she didn't say
+that, of course.  Still, it doesn't matter, does it?  The point is,
+suppose he opens that letter now."
+
+"If he does, he'll probably not go with her.  It was a letter that would
+send a man out with a scalping-knife.  Still, if Mr. Crozier had his
+land-deal through he might not read the letter as it really is.  His
+brain wouldn't then be grasping what his eyes saw."
+
+"He hasn't got his land-deal through.  He told me so just now before he
+saw her."
+
+"Then it's ora pro nobis--it's pray for us hard," rejoined Kitty
+sorrowfully.  "Poor man from Kerry!"  At that moment Mrs. Tynan came from
+the house, her face flushed, her manner slightly agitated.  "John Sibley
+is here, Kitty--with two saddle-horses....  He says you promised to ride
+with him to-day."
+
+"I probably did," responded Kitty calmly.  "It's a good day for riding
+too.  But John will have to wait.  Please tell him to come back at six
+o'clock.  There'll be plenty of time for an hour's ride before sundown."
+
+"Are you lame, dear child?" asked her mother ironically.  "Because if
+you're not, perhaps you'll be your own messenger.  It's no way to treat a
+friend--or whatever you like to call him."
+
+Kitty smiled tenderly at her mother.  "Then would you mind telling him
+to come here, mother darling?  I'm giving this doctor-man a prescription.
+Ah, please do what I ask you, mother!  It is true about the prescription.
+It's not for himself; it's for the foreign people quarantined inside."
+She nodded towards the room where Shiel Crozier and his wife were shaping
+their fate.
+
+As her mother disappeared with a gesture of impatience and the remark
+that she washed her hands of the whole Sibley business, the Young Doctor
+said to Kitty, "What is your prescription, Ma'm'selle Saphira?  Suppose
+they come out of quarantine with a clean bill of health?"
+
+"If they do that you needn't make up the prescription.  But if Aspen Vale
+hasn't given him what he wanted, then Mr. Shiel Crozier will still be an
+exile from home and the angel in the house."
+
+"What is the prescription?  Out with your Sibylline leaves!"
+
+"It's in that unopened letter.  When the letter is opened you'll see it
+effervesce like a seidlitz powder."
+
+"But suppose I am not here when the letter is opened?"
+
+"You must be here-you must.  You'll stay now, if you please."
+
+"I'm afraid I can't.  I have patients waiting."  Kitty made an impetuous
+gesture of command.  "There are two patients here who are at the crisis
+of their disease.  You may be wanted to save a life any minute now."
+
+"I thought that with your prescription you were to be the AEsculapius."
+
+"No, I'm only going to save the reputation of AEsculapius by giving him a
+prescription got from a quack to give to a goose."
+
+"Come, come, no names.  You are incorrigible.  I believe you'd have your
+joke on your death-bed."
+
+"I should if you were there.  I should die laughing," Kitty retorted.
+
+"There will be no death-bed for you, miss.  You'll be translated--no,
+that's not right; no one could translate you."
+
+"God might--or a man I loved well enough not to marry him."
+
+There was a note of emotion in her laugh as she uttered the words.  It
+did not escape the ear of the Young Doctor, who regarded her fixedly for
+a moment before he said: "I'm not sure that even He would be able to
+translate you.  You speak your own language, and it's surely original.
+I am only just learning its alphabet.  No one else speaks it.  I have a
+fear that you'll be terribly lonely as you travel along the trail, Kitty
+Tynan."
+
+A light of pleasure came into Kitty's eyes, though her face was a little
+drawn.  "You really do think I'm original--that I'm myself and not like
+anybody else?" she asked him with a childlike eagerness.
+
+"Almost more than any one I ever met," answered the Young Doctor gently;
+for he saw that she had her own great troubles, and he also felt now
+fully what this comedy or tragedy inside the house meant to her.  "But
+you're terribly lonely--and that's why: because you are the only one of
+your kind."
+
+"No, that's why I'm not going to be lonely," she said, nodding towards
+the corner of the house where John Sibley appeared.
+
+Suddenly, with a gesture of confidence and almost of affection, she laid
+a hand on the Young Doctor's breast.  "I've left the trail, doctor-man.
+I'm cutting across the prairie.  Perhaps I shall reach camp and perhaps I
+shan't; but anyhow I'll know that I met one good man on the way.  And I
+also saw a resthouse that I'd like to have stayed at, but the blinds were
+drawn and the door was locked."
+
+There was a strange, eerie look in her face again as her eyes of soft
+umber dwelt on his for a moment; then she turned with a gay smile to John
+Sibley, who had seen her hand on the Young Doctor's chest without dismay;
+for the joy of Kitty was that she hid nothing; and, anyhow, the Young
+Doctor had a place of his own; and also, anyhow, Kitty did what she
+pleased.  Once when she had visited the Coast the Governor had talked to
+her with great gusto and friendliness; and she had even gone so far as to
+touch his arm while, chuckling at her whimsically, he listened to a story
+she told him of life at the rail-head.  And the Governor had patted her
+fingers in quite a fatherly way--or not, as the mind of the observer saw
+it; while subsequently his secretary had written verses to her.
+
+"So you've been gambling again--you've broken your promise to me," she
+said reprovingly to Sibley, but with that wonderful, wistful laughter in
+her eyes.
+
+Sibley looked at her in astonishment.  "Who told you?" he asked.  It had
+only happened the night before, and it didn't seem possible she could
+know.
+
+He was quite right.  It wasn't possible she could know, and she didn't
+know.  She only divined.
+
+"I knew when you made the promise you couldn't keep it; that's why I
+forgive you now," she added.  "Knowing what I did about you, I oughtn't
+to have let you make it."
+
+The Young Doctor saw in her words a meaning that John Sibley could never
+have understood, for it was a part of the story of Crozier's life
+reproduced--and with what a different ending!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+"MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"
+
+When Crozier stepped out of the bright sunlight into the shady living-
+room of the Tynan home, his eyes were clouded by the memory of his
+conference with Studd Bradley and his financial associates, and by the
+desolate feeling that the five years since he had left England had
+brought him nothing--nothing at all except a new manhood.  But that he
+did not count an asset, because he had not himself taken account of this
+new capital.  He had never been an introspective man in the philosophic
+sense, and he never had thought that he was of much account.  He had
+lived long on his luck, and nothing had come of it--"nothing at all, at
+all," as he said to himself when he stepped inside the room where,
+unknown to him, his wife awaited him.  So abstracted was he, so disturbed
+was his gaze (fixed on the inner thing), that he did not see the figure
+in blue and white over against the wall, her hand on the big arm-chair
+once belonging to Tyndall Tynan, and now used always by Shiel Crozier,
+"the white-haired boy of the Tynan sanatorium," as Jesse Bulrush had
+called him.
+
+There was a strange timidity, and a fear not so strange, in Mona's eyes
+as she saw her husband enter with that quick step which she had so
+longingly remembered after he had fled from her; but of which she had
+taken less account when he was with her at Lammis long ago-When Crozier
+of Lammis was with her long ago.  How tall and shapely he was!  How large
+he loomed with the light behind him!  How shadowed his face and how
+distant the look in his eyes.
+
+Somehow the room seemed too small for him, and yet he had lived in this
+very house for four years and more; he had slept in the next room all
+that time; had eaten at this table and sat in this very chair--Mrs. Tynan
+had told her that--for this long time, like the master of a household.
+With that far-away, brooding look in his face, he seemed in one sense as
+distant from her as when she was in London in those dreary, desolate
+years with no knowledge of his whereabouts, a widow in every sense save
+one; but in her acts--that had to be said for her--a wife always and not
+a widow.  She had not turned elsewhere, though there had been temptation
+enough to do so.
+
+Crozier advanced to the centre of the room, even to the table laid for
+dinner, before he was conscious of some one in the room, of a figure by
+the chair.  For a moment he stood still, startled as if he had seen a
+vision, and his sight became blurred.  When it cleared, Mona had come a
+step nearer to him, and then he saw her clearly.  He caught his breath as
+though Life had burst upon him with some staggering revelation.  If she
+had been a woman of genius, as in her way Kitty Tynan was, she would have
+spoken before he had a chance to do so.  Instead, she wished to see how
+he would greet her, to hear what he would say.  She was afraid of him
+now.  It was not her gift to do the right thing by perfect instinct;
+she had to think things out; and so she did now.  Still it has to be said
+for her that she also had a strange, deep sense of apprehension in the
+presence of the man whose arms had held her fast, and then let her go
+for so bitter a length of time, in which her pride was lacerated and her
+heart brought low.  She did not know how she was going to be met now, and
+a womanly shyness held her back.  If she had said one word--his name
+only--it might have made a world of difference to them both at that
+moment; for he was tortured by failure, and now when hope was gone, here
+was the woman whom he had left in order to force gifts from fate to bring
+himself back to her.
+
+"You--you here!" he exclaimed hoarsely.  He did not open his arms to her
+or go a step nearer to her.  His look was that of blank amazement, of
+mingled remembrance and stark realisation.  This was a turn of affairs
+for which he had made no calculation.  There had ever been the question
+of his return to her, but never of her coming to him.  Yet here she was,
+debonnaire and fresh and perfectly appointed--and ah, so terribly neat
+and spectacularly finessed!  Here she was with all that expert formality
+which, in the old days, had been a reproach to his loosely-swung life and
+person, to his careless, almost slovenly but well-brushed, cleanly, and
+polished ease--not like his wife, as though he had been poured out of a
+mould and set up to dry.  He was not tailor-made, and she had ever been
+so exact that it was as though she had been crystallised, clothes and
+all--a perfect crystal, yet a crystal.  It was this very perfection, so
+charming to see, but in a sense so inhuman, which had ever dismayed him.
+"What should I be doing in the home of an angel!" he had exclaimed to
+himself in the old home at Lammis.
+
+Truth is, he ought never to have had such a feeling, and he would not
+have had it, if she had diffused the radiance of love, which would have
+made her outer perfectness mere slovenliness beside her inner charm and
+magnetism.  Very little of all this passed through Crozier's mind, as
+with confused vision he looked at her.  He had borne the ordeal of the
+witness-box in the Logan Trial with superb coolness; he had been in
+physical danger over and over again, and had kept his head; he had never
+been faced by a human being who embarrassed him--except his own wife.
+"There is no fear like that of one's own wife," was the saying of an
+ancient philosopher, and Crozier had proved it true; not because of
+errors committed, but because he was as sensitive as a girl of
+sensibility; because he felt that his wife did not understand him, and he
+was ever in fear of doing the wrong thing, while eager beyond telling to
+please her.  After all, during the past five years, parted from her while
+loving her, there had still been a feeling of relief unexplainable to
+himself in not having to think whether he was pleasing her or not, or to
+reproach himself constantly that he was failing to conform to her
+standard.
+
+"How did you come--why?  How did you know?" he asked helplessly, as she
+made no motion to come nearer; as she kept looking at him with an
+expression in her eyes wholly unfamiliar to him.  Yet it was not wholly
+unfamiliar, for it belonged to the days when he courted her, when she
+seemed to have got nearer to him than in the more intimate relations of
+married life.
+
+"Is--is that all you have to say to me, Shiel?" she asked, with a
+swelling note of feeling in her voice; while there was also emerging in
+her look an elusive pride which might quickly become sharp indignation.
+That her deserter should greet her so after five years of such offence to
+a woman's self-respect, as might entitle her to become a rebel against
+matrimony, was too cruel to be borne.  This feeling suddenly became alive
+in her, in spite of a joy in her heart different from that which she had
+ever known; in defiance of the fact that now that they were together once
+more, what would she not do to prevent their being driven apart again!
+
+"After abandoning me for five years, is that all you have to say to me,
+Shiel?  After I have suffered before the world--"
+
+He threw up his arms with a passionate gesture.  "The world!" he
+exclaimed--"the devil take the world!  I've been out of it for five
+years, and well out of it.  What do I care for the world!"
+
+She drew herself up in a spirit of defence.  "It isn't what you care for
+the world, but I had to live in it--alone, and because I was alone,
+eyebrows were lifted.  It has been easy enough for you.  You were where
+no one knew you.  You had your freedom"--she advanced to the table, and,
+as though unconsciously, he did the same, and they gazed at each other
+over the white linen and its furnishings--"and no one was saying that
+your wife had left you for this or that, because of her bad conduct or of
+yours.  Either way it was not what was fair and just; yet I had to bear
+and suffer, not you.  There is no pain like it.  There I was in misery
+and--"
+
+A bitter smile came to his lips.  "A woman can endure a good deal when
+she has all life's luxuries in her grasp.  Did you ever think, Mona, that
+a man must suffer when he goes out into a world where he knows no one,
+penniless, with no trade, no profession, nothing except his own helpless
+self?  He might have stayed behind among the luxuries that belonged to
+another, and eaten from the hand of his wife's charity, but"--(all the
+pride and pain of the old situation rose up in him, impelled by the
+brooding of the years of separation, heightened by the fact that he was
+no nearer to his goal of financial independence of her than he was when
+he left London five years before)--"but do you think, no matter what I've
+done, broken a pledge or not, been in the wrong a thousand times as much
+as I was, that I'd be fed by the hand of one to whom I had given a pledge
+and broken it?  Do you think that I'd give her the chance to say, or not
+to say, but only think, 'I forgive you; I will give you your food and
+clothes and board and bed, but if you are not good in the future, I will
+be very, very angry with you'?  Do you think--?"
+
+His face was flaming now.  The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment
+and pride and love--the love that tore itself in pieces because it had
+not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money gives--
+broke forth in him, fresh as he was from a brutal interview with the
+financial clique whom he had given the chance to make much money, and who
+were now, for a few thousand dollars, trying to cudgel him out of his one
+opportunity to regain his place in his lost world.
+
+"I live--I live like this," he continued, with a gesture that embraced
+the room where they were, "and I have one room to myself where I have
+lived over four years"--he pointed towards it.  "Do you think I would
+choose this and all it means--its poverty and its crudeness, its distance
+from all I ever had and all my people had, if I could have stood the
+other thing--a pauper taking pennies from his own wife?  I had had taste
+enough of it while I had a little something left; but when I lost
+everything on Flamingo, and I was a beggar, I knew I could not stand the
+whole thing.  I could not, would not, go under the poor-law and accept
+you, with the lash of a broken pledge in your hand, as my guardian.  So
+that's why I left, and that's why I stay here, and that's why I'm going
+to stay here, Mona."
+
+He looked at her firmly, though his face had that illumination which the
+spirit in his eyes--the Celtic fire drawn through the veins of his
+ancestors--gave to all he did and felt; and now as in a dream he saw
+little things in her he had never seen before.  He saw that a little
+strand of her beautiful dark hair had broken away from its ordered place
+and hung prettily against the rosy, fevered skin of her cheek just beside
+her ear.  He saw that there were no rings on her fingers save one, and
+that was her wedding-ring--and she had always been fond of wearing rings.
+He noted, involuntarily, that in her agitation the white tulle at her
+bosom had been disturbed into pretty disarray, and that there was neither
+brooch nor necklace at her breast or throat.
+
+"If you stay, I am going to stay too," she declared in an almost
+passionate voice, and she spoke with deliberation and a look which left
+no way open to doubt.  She was now a valiant little figure making a fight
+for happiness.
+
+"I can't prevent that," he responded stubbornly.
+
+She made a quick, appealing motion of her hands.  "Would you prevent it?
+Aren't you glad to see me?  Don't you love me any more?  You used to love
+me.  In spite of all, you used to love me.  Even though you hated my
+money, and I hated your gambling--your betting on horses.  You used to
+love me--I was sure you did then.  Don't you love me now, Shiel?"
+
+A gloomy look passed over his face.  Memory of other days was admonishing
+him.  "What is the good of one loving when the other doesn't?  And,
+anyhow, I made up my mind five years ago that I would not live on my
+wife.  I haven't done so, and I don't mean to 'do so.  I don't mean to
+take a penny of your money.  I should curse it to damnation if I was
+living on it.  I'm not, and I don't mean to do so."
+
+"Then I'll stay here and work too, without it," she urged, with a light
+in her eyes which they had never known.
+
+He laughed mirthlessly.  "What could you do--you never did a day's work
+in your life!"
+
+"You could teach me how, Shiel."
+
+His jaw jerked in a way it had when he was incredulous.  "You used to say
+I was only--mark you, only a dreamer and a sportsman.  Well, I'm no
+longer a dreamer and a sportsman; I'm a practical man.  I've done with
+dreaming and sportsmanship.  I can look at a situation as it is, and--"
+
+"You are dreaming--but yes, you are dreaming still," she interjected.
+"And you are a sportsman still, but it is the sport of a dreamer, and a
+mad dreamer too.  Shiel, in spite of all my faults in the past, I come to
+you, to stay with you, to live on what you earn if you like, if it's only
+a loaf of bread a day.  I--I don't care about my money.  I don't care
+about the luxuries which money can buy; I can do without them if I have
+you.  Am I not to stay, and won't you--won't you kiss me, Shiel?"
+
+She came close to him-came round the table till she stood within a few
+feet of him.
+
+There was one trembling instant when he would have taken her hungrily
+into his arms, but as if some evil spirit interposed with malign purpose,
+there came the sound of feet on the gravel outside, and the figure of a
+man darkened the doorway.  It was Augustus Burlingame, whose face as he
+saw Mona Crozier took on an ironical smile.
+
+"Yes--what do you want?" inquired Crozier quietly.  "A few words with
+Mr. Crozier on business, if he is not too much occupied?"
+
+"What business?"
+
+"I am acting for Messrs.  Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons."
+
+The cloud darkened on Crozier's face.  His lips tightened, his face
+hardened.  "I will see you in a moment--wait outside, please," he added,
+as Burlingame made as though to step inside.  "Wait at the gate," he
+added quietly, but with undisguised contempt.
+
+The moment of moments for Mona and himself had passed.  All the
+bitterness of defeat was on him again.  All the humiliation of undeserved
+failure to accomplish what had been the dear desire of five years bore
+down his spirit now.  Suddenly he had a suspicion that his wife had
+received information of his whereabouts from this very man, Burlingame.
+Had not the Young Doctor said that Burlingame had written to lawyers in
+the old land to get information concerning him?  Was it not more than
+likely that he had given his wife the knowledge which had brought her
+here?
+
+When Burlingame had disappeared he turned to Mona.  "Who told you I was
+here?  Who wrote to you?" he asked darkly.  The light had died away from
+his face.  It was ascetic in its lonely gravity now.
+
+"Your doctor cabled to Castlegarry and Miss Tynan wrote to me."
+
+A faint flush spread over Crozier's face.  "How did Miss Tynan know where
+to write?"
+
+Mona had told the truth at once because she felt it was the only way.
+Now, however, she was in a position where she must either tell him that
+Kitty had opened that still sealed letter from herself to him which he
+had carried all these years, or else tell him an untruth.  She had no
+right to tell him what Kitty had confided to her.  There was no other way
+save to lie.
+
+"How should I know?  It was enough for me to get her letter," she
+replied.
+
+"At Castlegarry?"
+
+What was there to do?  She must keep faith with Kitty, who had given her
+this sight of her husband again.
+
+"Forwarded from Lammis," she said.  "It reached me before the doctor's
+cable."
+
+So it was Kitty--Kitty Tynan-who had brought his wife to this new home
+from which he had been trying so hard to get back to the old home.
+Kitty, the angel of the house.
+
+"You wrote me a letter which drove me from home," he said heavily.
+
+"No--no--no," she protested.  "It was not that.  I know it was not that.
+It was my money--it was that which drove you away.  You have just said
+so."
+
+"You wrote me a hateful letter," he persisted.  "You didn't want to see
+me.  You sent it to me by your sweet, young brother."
+
+Her eyes flashed.  "My letter did not drive you away.  It couldn't have.
+You went because you did not love me.  It was that and my money, not the
+letter, not the letter."
+
+Somehow she had a curious feeling that the very letter which contained
+her bitter and hateful reproaches might save her yet.  The fact that he
+had not opened it--well, she must see Kitty again.  Her husband was in a
+dark mood.  She must wait.  She knew that her fortunate moment had passed
+when the rogue Burlingame appeared.  She must wait for another.
+
+"Shall I go now?  You want to see that man outside.  Shall I go, Shiel?"
+She was very pale, very quiet, steady and gentle.
+
+"I must hear what that fellow has to say.  It is business--important,"
+he replied.  "It may mean anything--everything, or nothing."
+
+As she left the room he had an impulse to call her back, but he conquered
+it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+"'TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU SHALL GO BACK FOR MINE"
+
+For a moment Crozier stood looking at the closed doorway through which
+Mona had gone, with a look of repentant affection in his eyes; but as the
+thought of his own helpless insolvency and broken hopes flashed across
+his mind, a look of dark and harassed reflection shadowed his face.  He
+turned to the front doorway with a savage gesture.  The mutilated dignity
+of his manhood, the broken pride of a lifetime, the bitterness in his
+heart need not be held in check in dealing with the man who waited to
+give him a last thrust of enmity.
+
+He left the house.  Burlingame was seated on the stump of a tree which
+had been made into a seat.  "Come to my room if you have business with
+me," Crozier said sharply.
+
+As they went, Crozier swung aside from the front door towards the corner
+of the house.
+
+"The back way?" asked Burlingame with a sneer.
+
+"The old familiar way to you," was the smarting reply.  "In any case, you
+are not welcome in Mrs. Tynan's part of the house.  My room is my own,
+however, and I should prefer you within four walls while doing business
+with you."
+
+Burlingame's face changed colour slightly, for the tone of Crozier's
+voice, the grimness of his manner, suggested an abnormal condition.
+Burlingame was not a brave man physically.  He had never lived the
+outdoor life, though he had lived so much among outdoor people.
+He was that rare thing in a new land, a decadent, a connoisseur in vice,
+a lover of opiates and of liquor.  He was young enough yet not to be
+incapacitated by it.  His face and hands were white and a little flabby,
+and he wore his hair rather long, which, it is said, accounts for the
+weakness of some men, on the assumption that long hair wastes the
+strength.  But Burlingame quickly remembered the attitude of the lady--
+Crozier's wife, he was certain--and of Crozier in the dining-room a few
+moments before, and to his suspicious eyes it was not characteristic of
+a happy family party.  No doubt this grimness of Crozier was due to
+domestic trouble and not wholly to his own presence.  Still, he felt
+softly for the tiny pistol he always carried in his big waistcoat pocket,
+and it comforted him.
+
+Beyond the corner of the house Crozier paused and took a key from his
+pocket.  It opened a side door to his own room, seldom used, since it was
+always so pleasant in this happy home to go through the main living-room,
+which every one liked so much that, though it was not the dining-room, it
+was generally used as such, and though it was not the parlour, it was its
+frequent substitute.  Opening the door, Crozier stepped aside to let
+Burlingame pass.  It was two years since Burlingame had been in this
+room, and then he had entered it without invitation.  His inquisitiveness
+had led him to explore it with no good intent when he lived in the house.
+
+Entering now, he gave it quick scrutiny.  It was clear he was looking for
+something in particular.  He was, in fact, searching for signs of its
+occupancy by another than Shiel Crozier--tokens of a woman's presence.
+There was, however, no sign at all of that, though there were signs of
+a woman's care and attention in a number of little things--homelike,
+solicitous, perhaps affectionate care and attention.  Certainly the
+spotless pillows, the pretty curtains, the pincushion, and charmingly
+valanced bed and shelves, cheap though the material was, showed a woman's
+very friendly care.  When he lived in that house there were no such
+little attentions paid to him!  It was his experience that where such
+attentions went something else went with them.  A sensualist himself, it
+was not conceivable to him that men and women could be under the same
+roof without "passages of sympathetic friendship and tokens of affinity."
+That was a phrase he had frequently used when pursuing his own sort of
+happiness.
+
+His swift scrutiny showed that Crozier's wife had no habitation here, and
+that gave him his cue for what the French call "the reconstruction of the
+crime."  It certainly was clear that, as he had suggested at the Logan
+Trial, there was serious trouble in the Crozier family of two, and the
+offender must naturally be the man who had flown, not the woman who had
+stayed.  Here was circumstantial evidence.
+
+His suggestive glance, the look in his eyes, did not escape Crozier, who
+read it all aright; and a primitive expression of natural antipathy
+passed across his mediaeval face, making it almost inquisitorial.
+
+"Will you care to sit?" he said, however, with the courtesy he could
+never avoid; and he pointed to a chair beside the little table in the
+centre of the room.  As Burlingame sat down he noticed on the table a
+crumpled handkerchief.  It had lettering in the corner.  He spread it out
+slightly with his fingers, as though abstractedly thinking of what he was
+about to say.  The initial in the corner was K.  Kitty had left it on the
+table while she was talking to Mrs. Crozier a halfhour before.  Whatever
+Burlingame actually thought or believed, he could not now resist picking
+up the handkerchief and looking at it with a mocking smile.  It was too
+good a chance to waste.  He still hugged to his evil heart the
+humiliating remembrance of his expulsion from this house, the share
+Crozier had had in it, and the things which Crozier had said to him then.
+He had his enemy now between the upper and the nether mill-stones, and he
+meant to grind him to the flour of utter abasement.  It was clear that
+the arrival of Mrs. Crozier had brought him no relief, for Crozier's face
+was not that of a man who had found and opened a casket of good fortune.
+
+"Rather dangerous that, in the bedroom of a family man," he said,
+picking up the handkerchief and looking suggestively from the lettering
+in the corner to Crozier.  He laid it down again, smiling detestably.
+
+Crozier calmly picked up the handkerchief, saw the lettering, then went
+quietly to the door of the room and called Mrs. Tynan's name.  Presently
+she appeared.  Crozier beckoned her into the room.  When she entered, he
+closed the door behind her.
+
+"Mrs. Tynan," he said, "this fellow found your daughter's handkerchief on
+my table, and he has said regarding it, 'Rather dangerous that, in the
+bedroom of a family man.'  What would you like me to do with him?"
+
+Mrs. Tynan walked up to Burlingame with the look of a woman of the
+Commune and said: "If I had a son I would disown him if he didn't mangle
+you till your wife would never know you again, you loathesome thing.
+There isn't a man or woman in Askatoon who'd believe your sickening
+slanders, for every one knows what you are.  How dare you enter this
+house?  If the men of Askatoon had any manhood in them they would tar-
+and-feather you.  My girl is as good as any girl that ever lived, and
+you know it.  Now go out of here--now!"
+
+Crozier intervened quietly.  "Mrs. Tynan, I asked him in here because it
+is my room.  I have some business with him.  When it is over, then he
+shall go, and we will fumigate the place.  As for the tar-and-feathers,
+you might leave that to me.  I think I can arrange it.
+
+"I'll turn the hose on him as he goes out, if you don't mind," the irate
+mother exclaimed as she left the room.
+
+Crozier nodded.  "Well, that would be appropriate, Mrs. Tynan, but it
+wouldn't cleanse him.  He is the original leopard whose spots are there
+for ever."
+
+By this time Burlingame was on his feet, and a look of craft and fear and
+ugly meaning was in his face.  Morally he was a coward, physically he was
+a coward, but he had in his pocket a weapon which gave him a feeling
+of superiority in the situation; and after a night of extreme self-
+indulgence he was in a state of irritation of the nerves which gave
+him what the searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
+call "brain-storms."  He had had sense enough to know that his amorous
+escapades would get him into trouble one day, and he had always carried
+the little pistol which was now so convenient to his hand.  It gave him a
+fictitious courage which he would not have had unarmed against almost any
+man--or woman--in Askatoon.
+
+"You get a woman to do your fighting for you," he said hatefully.  "You
+have to drag her in.  It was you I meant to challenge, not the poor girl
+young enough to be your daughter."  His hand went to his waistcoat
+pocket.  Crozier saw and understood.
+
+Suddenly Crozier's eyes blazed.  The abnormal in him--the Celtic strain
+always at variance with the normal, an almost ultra-natural attendant of
+it awoke like a tempest in the tropics.  His face became transformed,
+alive with a passion uncanny in its recklessness and purpose.  It was a
+brain-storm indeed, but it had behind it a normal power, a moral force
+which was not to be resisted.
+
+"None of your sickly melodrama here.  Take out of your pocket the pistol
+you carry and give it to me," Crozier growled.  "You are not to be
+trusted.  The habit of thinking you would shoot somebody some time--
+somebody you had injured--might become too much for you to-day, and then
+I should have to kill you, and for your wife's sake I don't want to do
+that.  I always feel sorry for a woman with a husband like you.  You
+could never shoot me.  You couldn't be quick enough, but you might try.
+Then I should end you, and there'd be another trial; but the lawyer who
+defended me would not have to cross-examine any witness about your
+character.  It is too well-known, Burlingame.  Out with it--the pistol!"
+he added, standing menacingly over the other.
+
+In a kind of stupor, under the storm that was breaking above him,
+Burlingame slowly drew out of a capacious waistcoat pocket a tiny but
+powerful pistol of the most modern make.
+
+"Put it in my hand," insisted Crozier, his eyes on the other's.
+
+The flabby hand laid the weapon in Crozier's lean and strenuous fingers.
+Crozier calmly withdrew the cartridges and then tossed the weapon back on
+the table.
+
+"Now we have equality of opportunity," he remarked quietly.  "If you
+think you would like to repeat any slander that's slid off your foul
+tongue, do it now; and in a moment or two Mrs. Tynan can turn the hose on
+the floor of this room."
+
+"I want to get to business," said Burlingame sullenly, as he took from
+his pocket a paper.
+
+Crozier nodded.  "I can imagine your haste," he remarked.  "You need all
+the fees you can get to pay Belle Bingley's bills."
+
+Burlingame did not wince.  He made no reply to the challenge that he was
+the chief supporter of a certain wanton thereabouts.
+
+"The time for your option to take ten thousand dollars' worth of shares
+in the syndicate is up," he said; "and I am instructed to inform you that
+Messrs.  Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons propose to take over your
+unpaid shares and to complete the transaction without you."
+
+"Who informed Messrs.  Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons that I am
+not prepared to pay for my shares?" asked Crozier sharply.
+
+"The time is up," surlily replied Burlingame.  "It is assumed you can't
+take up your shares, and that you don't want to do so.  The time us up,"
+he added emphatically, and he tapped the paper spread before him on the
+table.
+
+Crozier's eyes half closed in an access of stubbornness and hatred.
+"You are not to assume anything whatever," he declared.  "You are to
+accommodate yourself to actual facts.  The time is not up.  It is not up
+till midnight, and any action taken before then on any other assumption
+will give grounds for damages."
+
+Crozier spoke without passion and with a coldblooded insistence not lost
+on Burlingame.  Taking down a calendar from the wall, he laid it beside
+the paper on the table before the too eager lawyer.  "Examine the dates,"
+he said.  "At twelve o'clock tonight Messrs.  Bradley, Willingden,
+Baxter, & Simmons are free to act, if the money is not at the disposal of
+the syndicate by then; but till then my option is indefeasible.  Does
+that meet the case or not?"
+
+"It meets the case," said Burlingame in a morose voice, rising.
+"If you can produce the money before the stroke of midnight, why can't
+you produce it now?  What's the use of bluffing!  It can't do any good in
+the end.  Your credit--"
+
+"My credit has been stopped by your friends," interrupted Crozier, "but
+my resources are current."  "Midnight is not far off," viciously remarked
+Burlingame as he made for the door.
+
+Crozier intercepted him.  "One word with you on another business before
+you go," he said.  "The tar-and-feathers for which Mrs. Tynan asks will
+be yours at any moment I raise my hand in Askatoon.  There are enough
+women alone who would do it."
+
+"Talk of that after midnight," sneered Burlingame desperately as the door
+was opened for him by Crozier.  "Better not go out by the front gate,"
+remarked Crozier scornfully.  "Mrs. Tynan is a woman of her word, and the
+hose is handy."
+
+A moment later, with contemptuous satisfaction, he saw Burlingame climb
+the picket-fence at the side of the house.
+
+Turning back into the room, he threw up his arms.  "Midnight--midnight--
+my God, where am I to get the money!  I must--I must have it .  .  .
+It's the only way back."
+
+Sitting down at the table, he dropped his head into his hands and shut
+his eyes in utter dejection.  "Mona--by Heaven, no, I'll never take it
+from her!" he said once, and clenched his hands at his temples and sat
+on and on unmoving.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?
+
+For a full half-hour Crozier sat buried in dark reflection, then he
+slowly raised his head, and for a minute looked round dazedly.  His
+absorption had been so great that for a moment he was like one who had
+awakened upon unfamiliar things.  As when in a dream of the night the
+history of years will flash past like a ray of light, so for the bad
+half-hour in which Crozier had given himself up to despair, his mind had
+travelled through an incongruous series of incidents of his past life,
+and had also revealed pictures of solution after solution of his present
+troubles.
+
+He had that-gift of visualization which makes life an endless procession
+of pictures which allure, or which wear the nature into premature old
+age.  The last picture flashing before his eyes, as he sat there alone,
+was of himself and his elder brother, Garnett, now master of Castlegarry,
+racing ponies to reach the lodge-gates before they closed for the night,
+after a day of disobedience and truancy.  He remembered how Garnett had
+given him the better pony of the two, so that the younger brother, who
+would be more heavily punished if they were locked out, should have the
+better chance.  Garnett, if odd in manner and character, had always been
+a true sportsman though not a lover of sport.
+
+If--if--why had he never thought of Garnett?  Garnett could help him, and
+he would do so.  He would let Garnett stand in with him--take one-third
+of his profits from the syndicate.  Yes, he must ask Garnett to see him
+through.  Then it was that he lifted his head from his hands, and his
+mind awakened out of a dream as real as though he had actually been
+asleep.  Garnett--alas!  Garnett was thousands of miles away, and he had
+not heard from him for five years.  Still, he knew the master of
+Castlegarry was alive, for he had seen him mentioned in a chance number
+of The Morning Post lately come to his hands.  What avail!  Garnett was
+at Castlegarry, and at midnight his chance of fortune and a new life
+would be gone.  Then, penniless, he would have to face Mona again; and
+what would come of that he could not see, would not try to see.  There
+was an alternative he would not attempt to face until after midnight,
+when this crisis in his life would be over.  Beyond midnight was a
+darkness which he would not now try to pierce.  As his eyes again became
+used to his surroundings, a look of determination, the determination of
+the true gambler, came into his face.  The real gambler never throws up
+the sponge till all is gone; never gives up till after the last toss of
+the last penny of cash or credit; for he has seen such innumerable times
+the thing come right and good fortune extend a friendly hand with the
+last hazard of all.
+
+Suddenly he remembered--saw--a scene in the gambling rooms at Monte Carlo
+on the only visit he had ever paid to the place.  He had played
+constantly, and had won more or less each day.  Then his fortune turned
+and he lost and lost each day.  At last, one evening, he walked up to a
+table and said to the croupier, "When was zero up last?"  The croupier
+answered, "Not for an hour."  Forthwith he began to stake on zero and on
+nothing else.  For two hours he put his louis at each turn of the wheel
+on the Lonely Nought.  For two hours he lost.  Increasing his stake,
+which had begun at five francs and had risen at length to five louis, he
+still coaxed the sardonic deity.  Finally midnight came, and he was the
+only person playing at the table.  All others had gone or had ceased to
+play.  These stayed to watch the "mad Inglesi," as a foreigner called
+him, knocking his head against the foot stool of an unresponsive god of
+chance.  The croupiers watched also with somewhat disdainful, somewhat
+pitying interest, this last representative of a class who have an insane
+notion that the law of chances is in their favour if they can but stay
+the course.  And how often had they seen the stubborn challenger of a
+black demon, who would not appear according to the law of chances, leave
+the table ruined for ever!
+
+Smiling, Crozier had played on till he had but ten louis left.  Counting
+them over with cheerful exactness, he rose up, lit a cigarette, placed
+the ten louis on the fatal spot with cynical precision, and with a gay
+smile kissed his hand to the refractory Nothing and said, "You've got it
+all, Zero-good-night!  Goodnight, Zero!"  Then he had buttoned his coat
+and turned away to seek the cool air of the Mediterranean.  He had gone
+but a step or two, his head half gaily turned to the table where the
+dwindling onlookers stood watching the wheel spin round, when suddenly
+the croupier's cry of "Zero!" fell upon his ears.
+
+With cheerful nonchalance he had come back to the table and picked up the
+many louis he had won--won by his last throw and with his last available
+coin.
+
+As the scene passed before him now he got to his feet and, with that look
+of the visionary in his eyes, which those only know who have watched the
+born gamester, said, "I'll back my hand till the last throw."  Then it
+was, as his eyes gazed in front of him dreamily, he saw the card on his
+mirror bearing the words, "Courage, soldier!"
+
+With a deepening flame in his eyes he went over and gazed at it.  At
+length he reached out and touched the writing with a caressing finger.
+
+"Kitty--Kitty, how great you are!" he said.  Then as he turned to the
+outer door a softness came into his face, stole up into his brilliant
+eyes and dimmed them with a tear.  "What a hand to hold in the dark--the
+dark of life !" he said aloud.  "Courage, soldier!" he added, as he
+opened the door by which he had entered, through which Burlingame had
+gone, and strode away towards the town of Askatoon, feeling somehow in
+his heart that before midnight his luck would turn.
+
+From the dining-room Kitty had watched him go.  "Courage, soldier!" she
+whispered after him, and she laughed; but almost immediately she threw
+her head up with a gasping sigh, and when it was lowered again two tears
+were stealing down her cheeks.
+
+With an effort she conquered herself, wiped away the tears, and said
+aloud, with a whimsical but none the less pitiful self-reproach, "Kitty-
+Kitty Tynan, what a fool you are!"
+
+Entering the room Crozier had left, she went to the desk with the green-
+baize top, opened it, and took out the fateful letter which Mona Crozier
+had written to her husband five years ago.  Putting it into her pocket
+she returned to the dining-room.  She stood there for a moment with her
+chin in her hands and deep reflection in her eyes, and then, going to the
+door of her mother's sitting-room, she opened it and beckoned.  A moment
+later Mrs. Crozier and the Young Doctor entered the dining-room and sat
+down at a motion from her.  Presently she said:
+
+"Mrs. Crozier, I have here the letter your husband received from you five
+years ago in London."
+
+Mrs. Crozier flushed.  She had been masterful by nature and she had had
+her way very much in life.  To be dominated in the most intimate things
+of her life by this girl was not easy to be borne; but she realised that
+Kitty had been a friend indeed, even if not conventional.  In response to
+Kitty's remark now she inclined her head.
+
+"Well, you have told us that you and your husband haven't made it up.
+That is so, isn't it?" Kitty continued.
+
+"If you wish to put it that way," answered Mona, stiffening a little in
+spite of herself.
+
+"P'r'aps I don't put it very well, but it is the stony fact, isn't it,
+Mrs. Crozier?"
+
+Mona hesitated a moment, then answered: "He is very upset concerning the
+land syndicate, and he has a quixotic idea that he cannot take money from
+me to help him carry it through."
+
+"I don't quite know what quixotic means," rejoined Kitty dryly.  "If it
+wasn't understood while you lived together that what was one's was the
+other's, that it was all in one purse, and that you shut your eyes to
+the name on the purse and took as you wanted, I don't see how you could
+expect him, after your five years' desertion, to take money from you
+now."
+
+"My five years' desertion!" exclaimed Mona.  Surely this girl was more
+than reckless in her talk.  Kitty was not to be put down.  "If you don't
+mind plain speaking, he was always with you, but you weren't always with
+him in those days.  This letter showed that."  She tapped it on her
+thumb-nail.  "It was only when he had gone and you saw what you had lost,
+that you came back to him--in heart, I mean.  Well, if you didn't go away
+with him when he went, and you wouldn't have gone unless he had ordered
+you to go--and he wouldn't do that--it's clear you deserted him, since
+you did that which drove him from home, and you stayed there instead of
+going with him.  I've worked it out, and it is certain you deserted him
+five years ago.  Desertion does't mean a sea of water between, it means
+an ocean of self-will and love-me-first between.  If you hadn't deserted
+him, as this letter shows, he wouldn't have been here.  I expect he told
+you so; and if he did, what did you say to him?"
+
+The Young Doctor's eyes were full of decorous mirth and apprehension, for
+such logic and such impudence as Kitty's was like none he had ever heard.
+Yet it was commanding too.
+
+Kitty caught the look in his eyes and blazed up.  "Isn't what I said
+correct?  Isn't it all true and logical?  And if it is, why do you sit
+there looking so superior?"
+
+The Young Doctor made a gesture of deprecating apology.  "It's all true,
+and it's logical, too, if you stand on your head when you think it.  But
+whether it is logical or not, it is your conclusion, and as you've taken
+the thing in hand to set it right, it is up to you now.  We can only hold
+hard and wait."
+
+With a shrug of her graceful shoulders Kitty turned again to Mrs.
+Crozier, who intervened hastily, saying, "I did not have a chance of
+saying to him all I wished.  Of course he could not take my money, but
+there was his own money!  I was going to tell him about that, but just
+then the lawyer, Mr. Burlingame--"
+
+"They all call him 'Gus' Burlingame.  He doesn't get the civility of Mr.
+here in Askatoon," interposed Kitty.
+
+Mona made an impatient gesture.  "If you will listen, I want to tell you
+about Mr. Crozier's money.  He thinks he has no money, but he has.  He
+has a good deal."
+
+She paused, and the Young Doctor and Kitty leaned forward eagerly.
+"Well, but go on," said Kitty.  "If he has money he must have it to-day,
+and now.  Certainly he doesn't know of it.  He thinks he is broke,--dead
+broke,--and there'd be a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for him if he
+could put up ten thousand dollars to-night.  If I were you I wouldn't
+hide it from him any longer."
+
+Mona got to her feet in anger.  "If you would give me a chance to
+explain, I would do so," she said, her lips trembling.  "Unfortunately,
+I am in your hands, but please give me credit for some intelligence--and
+some heart.  In any case I shall not be bullied."
+
+The Young Doctor almost laughed outright, despite the danger of the
+situation.  He was not prepared for Kitty's reply and the impulsive act
+that marched with it.  In an instant Kitty had caught Mona Crozier's hand
+and pressed it warmly.  "I was only doing what I've seen lawyers do," she
+said eagerly.  "I've got something that I want you to do, and I've been
+trying to work up to it.  That's all.  I'm not as mean and bad mannered
+as you think me.  I really do care what happens to him--to you both," she
+hastened to add.
+
+Struggling to keep back her tears, and in a low voice, Mona rejoined: "I
+meant to have told him what I'm going to tell you now.  I couldn't say
+anything about the money belonging to him till I had told him how it came
+to be his."
+
+After a moment' pause she continued: "He told you all about the race
+which Flamingo lost, and about that letter."  She pointed to the letter
+which Kitty still carried in her hand.  "Well, that letter was written
+under the sting of bitter disappointment.  I was vain.  I was young.
+I did not understand as I do now.  If you were not such good friends--
+of his--I could not tell you this.  It seemed to me that by breaking his
+pledge he showed he did not care for me; that he thought he could break a
+sacred pledge to me, and it didn't matter.  I thought it was treating me
+lightly--to do it so soon after the pledge was given.  I was indignant.
+I felt we weren't as we might be, and I felt, too, that I must be at
+fault; but I was so proud that I didn't want to admit it, I suppose, when
+he did give me a grievance.  It was all so mixed.  I was shocked at his
+breaking his pledge, I was so vexed that our marriage hadn't been the
+success it might have been, and I think I was a little mad."
+
+"That is not the monopoly of only one of your sex," interposed the Young
+Doctor dryly.  "If I were you I wouldn't apologise for it.  You speak to
+a sister in like distress."
+
+Kitty's eyes flamed up, but she turned her head, as though some licensed
+libertine of speech had had his say, and looked with friendly eyes at
+Mona.  "Yes, yes--please go on," she urged.
+
+"When I wrote that letter I had forgotten what I had done the day before
+the race.  I had gone into my husband's room to find some things I needed
+from the drawer of his dressing-table; and far at the back of a drawer I
+found a crumpled-up roll of ten-pound notes.  It was fifty pounds
+altogether.  I took the notes--"
+
+She paused a moment, and the room became very still.  Both her listeners
+were sure that they were nearing a thing of deep importance.
+
+In a lower voice Mona continued: "I don't know what possessed me, but
+perhaps it was that the things he did of which I disapproved most had got
+a hold on me in spite of myself.  I said to myself: 'I am going to the
+Derby.  I will take the fifty pounds, and I'll put it on a horse for
+Shiel.'  He had talked so much to my brother about Flamingo, and I had
+seen him go wrong so often, that I had a feeling if I put it on a horse
+that Shiel particularly banned, it would probably win.  He had been wrong
+nearly every time for two years.  It was his money, and if it won, it
+would make him happy; and if it didn't win, well, he didn't know the
+money existed--I was sure of that; and, anyhow, I could replace it.  I
+put it on a horse he condemned utterly, but of which one or two people
+spoke well.  You know what happened to Flamingo.  While at Epsom I heard
+from friends that Shiel was present at the race, though he had said he
+would not go.  Later I learned that he had lost heavily.  Then I saw him
+in the distance paying out money and giving bills to the bookmakers.  It
+made me very angry.  I don't think I was quite sane.  Most women are like
+that at times."
+
+"As I said," remarked the Young Doctor, his face mirthfully alive.  Here
+was a situation indeed.
+
+"So I wrote him that letter," Mona went on.  "I had forgotten all about
+the money I put on the outsider which won the race.  As you know, I was
+called away to my sick sister that evening, and the money I won with
+Shiel's fifty pounds was not paid to me till after Shiel had gone."
+
+"How much was it?" asked Kitty breathlessly.
+
+"Four thousand pounds."
+
+Kitty exclaimed so loudly that she smothered her mouth with a hand.
+"Why, he only needs for the syndicate two thousand pounds--ten thousand
+dollars," she said excitedly.  "But what's the good of it, if he can't
+lay his hand on it by midnight to-night!"
+
+"He can do so," was Mona's quick reply.  "I was going to tell him that,
+but the lawyer came, and--"
+
+Kitty sprang up and down in excitement.  "I had a plan.  It might have
+worked without this.  It was the only way then.  But this makes it sure
+--yes, most beautifully sure.  It shows that the thing to do is to follow
+your convictions.  You say you actually have the money, Mrs. Crozier?"
+
+Mona took from her pocket an envelope, and out of it she drew four Bank
+of England notes.  "Here it is--here are four one-thousand-pound notes.
+I had it paid to me that way five years ago, and here--here it is," she
+added, with almost a touch of hysteria in her voice, for the excitement
+of it all acted on her like an electric storm.
+
+"Well, we'll get to work at once," declared Kitty, looking at the notes
+admiringly, then taking them from Mona and smoothing them out with tender
+firmness.  "It's just the luck of the wide world, as my father used to
+say.  It actually is.  Now you see," she continued, "it's like this.
+That letter you wrote him"--she addressed herself to Mona--"it has to be
+changed.  You have got to rewrite it, and you must put into it these four
+bank-notes.  Then when you see him again you must have that letter opened
+at exactly the right moment, and--oh, I wonder if you will do it exactly
+right!" she added dubiously to Mona.  "You don't play your game very
+well, and it's just possible that, even now, with all the cards in your
+hands, you will throw them away as you did in the past.  I wish that--"
+
+Seeing Mona's agitation changing to choler, the Young Doctor intervened.
+He did not know Kitty was purposely stinging Crozier's unhappy little
+consort, so that she should be put upon her mettle to do the thing
+without bungling.
+
+"You can trust Mrs. Crozier to act carefully; but what exactly do you
+mean?  I judge that Mrs. Crozier does not see more distinctly than I do,"
+he remarked inquiringly to Kitty, and with admonishment in tone and
+emphasis.
+
+"No, I do not understand quite--will you explain?" interposed Mona with
+inner resentment at being managed, but feeling that she could not do
+without Kitty even if she would.
+
+"As I said," continued Kitty, "I will open that letter, and you will put
+in another letter and these bank-notes; and when he repeats what he said
+about the way you felt and wrote when he broke his pledge, you can blaze
+up and tell him to open the letter.  Then he will be so sorry that he'll
+get down on his knees, and you will be happy ever after."
+
+"But it will be a fraud, and dishonest and dishonourable," protested
+Mona.
+
+Kitty almost sniffed, but she was too agitated to be scornful.  "Just
+leave that to me, please.  It won't make me a bit more dishonourable to
+open the letter again--I've opened it once, and I don't feel any the
+worse for it.  I have no conscience, and things don't weigh on my mind at
+all.  I'm a light-minded person."
+
+Looking closely at her, the Young Doctor got a still further insight into
+the mind and soul of this prairie girl, who used a lid of irony to cover
+a well of deep feeling.  Things did not weigh on her mind!  He was sure
+that pain to the wife of Shiel Crozier would be mortal torture to Kitty
+Tynan.
+
+"But I felt exactly what I wrote that Derby Day when he broke his pledge,
+and he ought to know me exactly as I was," urged Mona.  "I don't want to
+deceive him, to appear a bit better than I am."
+
+"Oh, you'd rather lose him!" said Kitty almost savagely.  "Knowing how
+hard it is to keep a man under the best circumstances, you'd willingly
+make the circumstances as bad as they can be--is that it?  Besides,
+weren't you sorry afterwards that you wrote that letter?"
+
+"Yes, yes, desperately sorry."
+
+"And you wished often that your real self had written on Derby Day and
+not the scratch-cat you were then?"
+
+Mona flushed, but answered bravely, "Yes, a thousand times."
+
+"What business had you to show him your cat-self, your unreal, not your
+real self on Derby Day five years ago?  Wasn't it your duty to show him
+your real self?"
+
+Mona nodded helplessly.  "Yes, I know it was."
+
+"Then isn't it your duty to see that your real self speaks in that letter
+now?"
+
+"I want him to know me exactly as I am, and then--"
+
+Kitty made a passionate gesture.  Was ever such an uncomprehending woman
+as this diamond-button of a wife?
+
+"And then you would be unhappy ever after instead of being happy ever
+after.  What is the good of prejudicing your husband against you by
+telling the unnecessary truth.  He is desperate, and besides, he has been
+away from you for five years, and we all change somehow--particularly
+men, when there are so many women in the world, and very pretty women of
+all ages and kinds and colours and tastes, and dazzling, deceitful
+hussies too.  It isn't wise for any woman to let her husband or any one
+at all see her exactly as she is; and only the silly ones do it.  They
+tell what they think is the truth about their own wickedness, and it
+isn't the truth at all, because I suppose women don't know how to tell
+the exact truth; and they can be just as unfair to themselves as they are
+to others.  Besides, haven't you any sense of humour, Mrs. Crozier?  It's
+as good as a play, this.  Just think: after five years of desertion, and
+trouble without end, and it all put right by a little sleight-of-hand.
+Shall I open it?"
+
+She held the letter up.  Mona nodded almost eagerly now, for come of a
+subtle, social world far away, she still was no match for the subtlety of
+the wilds--or was it the cunning the wild things know?
+
+Kitty left the room, but in a moment afterwards returned with the letter
+open.  "The kettle on the hob is the friend of the family," she said
+gaily.  "Here it is all ready for what there is to do.  You go and keep
+watch for Mr. Crozier," she added to the Young Doctor.  "He won't be gone
+long, I should think, and we don't want him bursting in on us before I've
+got that letter safe back into his desk.  If he comes, you keep him busy
+for a moment.  When we're quite ready I'll come to the front door, and
+then you will know it is all right."
+
+"I'm to go while you make up your prescription--all right!" said the
+Young Doctor, and with a wave of the hand he left the room.
+
+Instantly Kitty brought a lead pencil and paper.  "Now sit down and write
+to him, Mrs. Crozier," she said briskly.  "Use discretion; don't gush;
+slap his face a little for breaking his pledge, and afterwards tell him
+that you did at the Derby what you had abused him for doing.  Then
+explain to him about this four thousand pounds--twenty thousand dollars
+--my, what a lot of money, and all got in one day!  Tell him that it was
+all won by his own cash.  It's as easy as can be, and it will be a
+certainty now."
+
+So saying, she lit a match.  "You--hold this wicked old catfish letter
+into the flame, please, Mrs. Crozier, and keep praying all the time, and
+please remember that 'our little hands were never made to tear each
+other's eyes.'"
+
+Mona's small fingers were trembling as she held the fateful letter into
+the flame, and then in silence both watched it burn to a cinder.  A
+faint, hopeful smile was on Mona's face now.
+
+"What isn't never was to those that never knew," said Kitty briskly, and
+pushed a chair up to the table.  "Now sit down and write, please."
+
+Mona sat down.  Taking up a sheet of notepaper she looked at it
+dubiously.
+
+"Oh, what a fool I am!" said Kitty, understanding the look.  "And that's
+what every criminal does--he forgets something.  I forgot the notepaper.
+Of course you can't use that notepaper.  Of course not.  He'd know it in
+a minute.  Besides, the sheet we burned had an engraved address on it.
+I never thought of that--good gracious!"
+
+"Wait--wait," said Mona, her face lighting.  "I may have some sheets in
+my writing-case.  It's only a chance, but there were some loose sheets in
+it when I left home.  I'll go and see."
+
+While she was gone to her bedroom Kitty stood still in the middle of the
+room lost in reflection, as completely absorbed as though she was seeing
+things thousands of miles away.  In truth, she was seeing things millions
+of miles away; she was seeing a Promised Land.  It was a gift of hers, or
+a penalty of her life, perhaps, that she could lose herself in reverie at
+a moment's notice--a reverie as complete as though she was subtracted
+from life's realities.  Now, as she looked out of the door, far over the
+prairie to a tiny group of pine-trees in the vanishing distance, lines
+she once read floated through her mind:
+
+              "Away and beyond the point of pines,
+               In a pleasant land where the glad grapes be,
+               Purple and pendent on verdant vines,
+               I know that my fate is awaiting me."
+
+What fate was to be hers?  There was no joy in her eyes as she gazed.
+Mrs. Crozier was beside the table again before she roused herself from
+her trance.
+
+"I've got it--just two sheets, two solitary sheets," said Mona in
+triumph.  "How long they have been in my case I don't know.  It is almost
+uncanny they should be there just when they're most needed."
+
+"Providential, we should say out here," was Kitty's response.  "Begin,
+please.  Be sure you have the right date.  It was--"
+
+Mona had already written the date, and she interrupted Kitty with the
+words, "As though I could forget it!"  All at once Kitty put a
+restraining hand on her arm.
+
+"Wait--wait, you mustn't write on that paper yet.  Suppose you didn't
+write the real wise thing--and only two sheets of paper and so much to
+say?"
+
+"How right you always are!" said Mona, and took up one of the blank
+sheets which Kitty had just brought her.
+
+Then she began to write.  For a minute she wrote swiftly, nervously, and
+had nearly finished a page when Kitty said to her, "I think I had better
+see what you have written.  I don't think you are the best judge.  You
+see, I have known him better than you for the last five years, and I am
+the best judge please, I mean it in the rightest, kindest way," she
+added, as she saw Mona shrink.  It was like hurting a child, and she
+loved children--so much.  She had always a vision of children at her
+knee.
+
+Silently Mrs. Crozier pushed the sheets towards her.  Kitty read the page
+with a strange, eager look in her eyes.  "Yes, that's right as far as it
+goes," she said.  "It doesn't gush.  It's natural.  It's you as you are
+now, not as you were then, of course."
+
+Again Mona bent over the paper and wrote till she had completed a page.
+Then Kitty looked over her shoulder and read what had been written.  "No,
+no, no, that won't do," she exclaimed.  "That won't do at all.  It isn't
+in the way that will accomplish what we want.  You've gone quite, quite
+wrong.  I'll do it.  I'll dictate it to you.  I know exactly what to say,
+and we mustn't make any mistake.  Write, please--you must."
+
+Mona scratched out what had been written without a word.  "I am waiting,"
+she said submissively.
+
+"All right.  Now we go on.  Write.  I'll dictate."  "'And look here,
+dearest,'" she began, but Mona stopped her.
+
+"We do not say 'look here' in England.  I would have said 'and see.'"
+
+"'And see-dearest,'" corrected Kitty, with an accent on the last word,
+"'while I was mad at you for the moment for breaking your promise--'"
+
+"In England we don't say 'mad' in that connection," Mona again
+interrupted.  "We say 'angry' or 'annoyed' or 'vexed.'" There was real
+distress in her tone.
+
+"Now I'll tell you what to do," said Kitty cheerfully.  "I'll speak it,
+and you write it my way of thinking, and then when we've finished you
+will take out of the letter any words that are not pure, noble, classic
+English.  I know what you mean, and you are quite right.  Mr. Crozier
+never says 'look here' or 'mad,' and he speaks better than any one I ever
+heard.  Now, we certainly must get on."
+
+After an instant she began again.
+
+"--While I was angry at you a moment for breaking your promise, I cannot
+reproach you for it, because I, too, bet on the Derby, but I bet on a
+horse that you had said as much against as you could.  I did it because
+you had very bad luck all this year and lost, and also last year, and I
+thought--"
+
+For several minutes, with greater deliberation than was usual with her,
+Kitty dictated, and at the end of the letter she said, "I am, dearest,
+your--"
+
+Here Mona sharply interrupted her.  "If you don't mind I will say that
+myself in my own way," she said, flushing.
+
+"Oh, I forgot for the moment that I was speaking for you!" responded
+Kitty, with a lurking, undermeaning in her voice.  "I threw myself into
+it so.  Do you think I've done the thing right?" she added.
+
+With a direct, honest friendliness Mona looked into Kitty eyes.  "You
+have said the exact right thing as to meaning, I am sure, and I can
+change an occasional word here and there to make it all conventional
+English."
+
+Kitty nodded.  "Don't lose a minute in copying it.  We must get the
+letter back in his desk as soon as possible."
+
+As Mona wrote, Kitty sat with the envelope in her hand, alternately
+looking at it and into the distance beyond the point of pines.  She was
+certain that she had found the solution of the troubles of Shiel and Mona
+Crozier, for Crozier would now have his fortune, and the return to his
+wife was a matter of course.  Was she altogether sure?  But yes, she was
+altogether sure.  She remembered, with a sudden, swift plunge of blood in
+her veins, that early dawn when she bent over him as he lay beneath the
+tree, and as she kissed him in his sleep he had murmured, "My darling!"
+That had not been for her, though it had been her kiss which had stirred
+his dreaming soul to say the words.  If they had only been meant for her,
+then--oh, then life would be so much easier in the future!  If--if she
+could only kiss him again and he would wake and say--
+
+She got to her feet with an involuntary exclamation.  For an instant she
+had been lost in a world of her own, a world of the impossible.
+
+"I almost thought I heard a step in the other room," she said in
+explanation to Mona.  Going to the door of Crozier's room, she appeared
+to listen for a moment, and then she opened it.
+
+"No, it is all right," she said.
+
+In another few minutes Mona had finished the letter.  "Do you wish to
+read it again?" she asked Kitty, but not handing it to her.
+
+"No, I leave the words to you.  It was the right meaning I wanted in it,"
+she replied.
+
+Suddenly Mona came to her and laid a hand on her arm.  "You are
+wonderful--a wonderful, wise, beloved girl," she said, and there were
+tears in her eyes.
+
+Kitty gave the tiny fingers a spasmodic clasp, and said: "Quick, we must
+get them in!"  She put the banknotes inside the sheets of paper, then
+hastily placed both in the envelope and sealed the envelope again.
+
+"It's just a tiny bit damp with the steam yet, but it will be all right
+in five minutes.  How soiled the envelope is!"  Kitty added.  "Five years
+in and out of the desk, in and out of his pocket--but all so nice and
+unsoiled and sweet and bonny inside," she added.  "To say nothing of the
+bawbees, as Mr. Crozier calls money.  Well, we are ready.  It all depends
+on you now, Mrs. Crozier."
+
+"No, not all."
+
+"He used to be afraid of you; now you are afraid of him," said Kitty, as
+though stating a commonplace.
+
+There was no more shrewishness left in the little woman to meet this
+chastisement.  The forces against her were too many.  Loneliness and the
+long struggle to face the world without her man; the determination of
+this masterful young woman who had been so long a part of her husband's
+life; and, more than all, a new feeling altogether--love, and the
+dependence a woman feels, the longing to find rest in strong arms, which
+comes with the first revelation of love, had conquered what Kitty had
+called her "bossiness."  She was now tremulous before the crisis which
+she must presently face.  Pride in her fortune, in her independence, had
+died down in her.  She no longer thought of herself as a woman especially
+endowed and privileged.  She took her fortune now like a man; for she had
+been taught that a man could set her aside just because she had money,
+could desert her to be independent of it.  It had been a revelation to
+her, and she was chastened of all the termagancy visible and invisible in
+her.  She stood now before Kitty of "a humble and a contrite heart," and
+made no reply at all to the implied challenge.  Kitty, instantly sorry
+for what she had said, let it go at that.  She was only now aware of how
+deeply her arrows had gone home.
+
+As they stood silent there was a click at the gate.  Kitty ran into
+Crozier's room, thrust the letter into its pigeonhole in the desk, and in
+a moment was back again.  In the garden the Young Doctor was holding
+Crozier in conversation, but watching the front door.  So soon, however,
+as Kitty had shown herself, as she had promised, at the front door and
+then vanished, he turned Crozier towards the house again by an adroit
+word, and left him at the door-step.
+
+Seeing who was inside the room Crozier hesitated, and his long face, with
+paleness added to its asceticism, took on a look which could have given
+no hope of happiness to Mona.  It went to her heart as no look of his had
+ever gone.  Suddenly she had a revelation of how little she had known of
+what he was, or what any man was or could be, or of those springs of
+nature lying far below the outer lives which move in orbits of sheltering
+convention.  It is because some men and women are so sheltered from the
+storms of life by wealth and comfort that these piercing agonies which
+strike down to the uttermost depths so seldom reach them.
+
+Shiel half turned away, not sullen, not morose, but with a strange apathy
+settled on him.  He had once heard a man say, "I feel as though I wanted
+to crawl into a hole and die."  That was the way he felt now, for to be
+beaten in the game which you have played like a man yourself and have
+been fouled into an unchallenged defeat, without the voice of the umpire,
+is a fate which has smothered the soul of better men than Crozier.
+
+Mona's voice stopped him.  "Do not go, Shiel," she urged gently.  "No,
+you must not go--I want fair-play from you, if nothing else.  You must
+play the game with me.  I want justice.  I have to say some things I had
+no chance to say before, and I want to hear some things I have a right to
+hear.  Indeed, you must play the game."
+
+He drew himself up.  Not to be a sportsman, not to play the game--to
+accuse him of this would have brought him back from the edge of the
+grave.
+
+"I'm not fit to-day.  Let it be to-morrow, Mona," was his hesitating
+reply; but he did not leave the doorway.
+
+She shook her head and made a swift little childlike gesture towards him.
+"We are sure of to-day; we are not sure of to-morrow.  One or the other
+of us might not be here to-morrow.  Let us do to-day the thing that
+belongs to to-day."
+
+That note struck home, for indeed the black spirit which whispers to men
+in their most despairing hours to end it all had whispered to him.
+
+"Let us do to-day the thing that belongs to to-day," she had just said,
+and, strange to say, there shot into his mind words that belonged to the
+days when he went to church at Castlegarry and thought of a thousand
+things other than prayer or praise, but yet heard with the acute ears of
+the young, and remembered with the persistent memory of youth.  "For the
+night cometh when no man can work," were the words which came to him.  He
+shuddered slightly.  Suppose that this indeed was the beginning of the
+night!  As she said, he must play the game--play it as Crozier of Lammis
+would have played it.
+
+He stepped inside the room.  "Let it be to-day," he said.
+
+"We may be interrupted here," she replied.  Courage came to her.  "Let us
+talk in your own room," she added, and going over she opened the door of
+it and walked in.  The matured modesty of a lost five years did not cloak
+her actions now.  She was a woman fighting for happiness, and she had
+been so beaten by the rods of scorn, so smothered by the dust of
+humiliation, that there had come to her the courage of those who would
+rather die fighting than in the lethargy of despair.
+
+It was like her old self to take the initiative, but she did it now in so
+different a way--without masterfulness or assumption.  It was rather like
+saying, "I will do what I know you wish me to do; I will lay all reserve
+aside for your sake; I will be bold because I love you."
+
+He shut the door behind them and motioned her to a chair.
+
+"No, I will not sit," she said.  "That is too formal.  You ask any
+stranger to sit.  I am at home here, Shiel, and I will stand."
+
+"What was it you wanted to say, Mona?" he asked, scarcely looking at
+her.
+
+"I should like to think that there was something you wished to hear," she
+replied.  "Don't you want to know all that has happened since you left
+us--about me, about your brother, about your friends, about Lammis?  I
+bought Lammis at the sale you ordered; it is still ours."  She gave
+emphasis to "ours."  "You may not want to hear all that has happened to
+me since you left, still I must tell you some things that you ought to
+know, if we are going to part again.  You treated me badly.  There was no
+reason why you should have left and placed me in the position you did."
+
+His head came up sharply and his voice became a little hard.  "I told you
+I was penniless, and I would not live on you, and I could do nothing in
+England; I had no trade or profession.  If I had said good-bye to you,
+you would probably have offered me a ticket to Canada.  As I was a pauper
+I preferred to go with what I had out of the wreck--just enough to bring
+me here.  But I've earned my own living since."
+
+"Penniless--just enough to bring you out here!"  Her voice had a sound of
+honest amazement.  "How can you say such a thing!  You had my letter--you
+said you had my letter?"
+
+"Yes, I had your letter," he answered.  "Your thoughtful brother brought
+it to me.  You had told him all the dear womanly things you had said or
+were going to say to your husband, and he passed them on to me with the
+letter."
+
+"Never mind what he said to you, Shiel.  It was what I said that
+mattered."  She was getting bolder every minute.  The comedy was playing
+into her hands.
+
+"You wrote in your letter the things he said to me," he replied.
+
+Her protest sounded indignantly real.  "I said nothing in the letter I
+wrote you that any man would not wish to hear.  Is it so unpleasant for a
+man who thinks he is penniless to be told that he has made the year's
+income of a cabinet minister?"
+
+"I don't understand," he returned helplessly.
+
+"You talk as though you had never read my letter.
+
+"I never have read your letter," he replied in bewilderment.
+
+Her face had the flush of honest anger.  "You do not dare to tell me you
+destroyed my letter without reading it--that you destroyed all that
+letter contained simply because you no longer cared for your wife;
+because you wanted to be rid of her, wanted to vanish and never see her
+any more, and so go and leave no trace of yourself!  You have the
+courage here to my face"--the comedy of the situation gained much from
+the mock indignation--she no longer had any compunctions--"to say that
+you destroyed my letter and what it contained--a small fortune it would
+be out here."
+
+"I did not destroy your letter, Mona," was the embarrassed response.
+
+"Then what did you do with it?  Gave it to some one else to read--to some
+other woman, perhaps."
+
+He was really shocked and greatly pained.  "Hush!  You shall not say that
+kind of thing, Mona.  I've never had anything to do with any woman but my
+wife since I married her."
+
+"Then what did you do with the letter?"
+
+"It's there," he said, pointing to the high desk with the green baize
+top.
+
+"And you say you have never read it?"
+
+"Never."
+
+She raised her head with dainty haughtiness.  "Then if you have still the
+same sense of honour that made you keep faith with the bookmakers--you
+didn't run away from them!--read it now, here in my presence.  Read it,
+Shiel.  I demand that you read it now.  It is my right.  You are in
+honour bound--"
+
+It was the only way.  She dare not give him time to question, to suspect;
+she must sweep him along to conviction.  She was by no means sure that
+there wasn't a flaw in the scheme somewhere, something that would betray
+her; and she could hardly wait till it was over, till he had read the
+letter.
+
+In a moment he was again near her with the letter in his hand.
+
+"Yes, that's it--that's the letter," she said, with wondering and
+reproachful eyes.  "I remember the little scratchy blot from the pen on
+the envelope.  There it is, just as I made it five years ago.  But how
+disgracefully soiled the envelope is!  I suppose it has been tossed about
+in your saddle-bag, or with your old clothes, and only kept to remind you
+day by day that you had a wife you couldn't live with--kept as a warning
+never to think of her except to say, 'I hate you, Mona, because you are
+rich and heartless, and not bigger than a pinch of snuff.'  That was the
+kind way you used to speak of her even when you were first married to
+her--contemptuously always in your heart, no matter what you said out
+loud.  And the end showed it--the end showed it; you deserted her."
+
+He was so fascinated by the picture she made of passion and incensed
+declamation that he did not attempt to open the letter, and he wondered
+why there was such a difference between the effect of her temper on him
+now and the effect of it those long years ago.  He had no feeling of
+uneasiness in her presence now, no sense of irritation.  In spite of her
+tirade, he had a feeling that it didn't matter, that she must bluster in
+her tiny teacup if she wanted to do so.
+
+"Open the letter at once," she insisted.  "If you don't, I will."  She
+made as though to take the letter from him, but with a sudden twist he
+tore open the envelope.  The bank-notes fell to the floor as he took out
+the sheet inside.  Wondering, he stooped to pick them up.
+
+"Four thousand pounds!" he exclaimed, examining them.  "What does it
+mean?"
+
+"Read," she commanded.
+
+He devoured the letter.  His eyes swam; then there rushed into them the
+flame which always made them illumine his mediaeval face like the light
+from "the burning bush."  He did not question or doubt, because he saw
+what he wished to see, which is the way of man.  It all looked perfectly
+natural and convincing to him.
+
+"Mona--Mona--heaven above and all the gods of hell and Hellas, what
+a fool, what a fool I've been!" he exclaimed.  "Mona--Mona, can you
+forgive your idiot husband?  I didn't read this letter because I thought
+it was going to slash me on the raw--on the raw flesh of my own
+lacerating.  I simply couldn't bear to read what your brother said was
+in the letter.  Yet I couldn't destroy it, either.  It was you.  I had
+to keep it.  Mona, am I too big a fool to be your husband?"
+
+He held out his arms with a passionate exclamation.  "I asked you to kiss
+me yesterday, and you wouldn't," she protested.  "I tried to make you
+love me yesterday, and you wouldn't.  When a woman gets a rebuff like
+that, when--"
+
+She could not bear it any longer.  With a cry of joy she was in his arms.
+
+After a moment he said, "The best of all was, that you--you vixen, you
+bet on that Derby and won, and--"
+
+"With your money, remember, Shiel."
+
+"With my money!" he cried exultingly.  "Yes, that's the best of it--the
+next best of it.  It was your betting that was the best of all--the best
+thing you ever did since we married, except your coming here."
+
+"It's in time to help you, too--with your own money, isn't it?"
+
+He glanced at his watch.  "Hours--I'm hours to the good.  That crowd--
+that gang of thieves--that bunch of highwaymen!  I've got them--got them,
+and got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, too, to start again at
+home, at Lammis, Mona, back on the--but no, I'm not sure that I can live
+there now after this big life out here."
+
+"I'm not so sure, either," Mona replied, with a light of larger
+understanding in her eyes.  "But we'll have to go back and stop the
+world talking, and put things in shape before we come here to stay."
+
+"To stay here--do you mean that?" he asked eagerly.
+
+"Somewhere in this big land," she replied softly; "anyhow, to stay here
+till I've grown up a little.  I wasn't only small in body in the old
+days, I was small in mind, Shiel."
+
+"Anyhow, I've done with betting and racing, Mona.  I've just got time
+left--I'm only thirty-nine--to start and really do something with
+myself."
+
+"Well, start now, dear man of Lammis.  What is it you have to do before
+twelve o'clock to-night?"  "What is it?  Why, I have to pay over two
+thousand of this,"--he flourished the banknotes--"and even then I'll
+still have two thousand left.  But wait--wait.  There was the original
+fifty pounds.  Where is that fifty pounds, little girl alive?  Out with
+it.  This is the profit.  Where is the fifty you staked?"  His voice was
+gay with raillery.
+
+She could look him in the face now and prevaricate without any shame or
+compunction at all.  "That fifty pounds--that!  Why, I used it to buy my
+ticket for Canada.  My husband ought to pay my expenses out to him."
+
+He laughed greatly.  All Ireland was rioting in his veins now.  He had no
+logic or reasoning left.  "Well, that's the way to get into your old
+man's heart, Mona.  To think of that!  I call it tact divine.  Everything
+has spun my way at last.  I was right about that Derby, after all.  It
+was in my bones that I'd make a pot out of it, but I thought I had lost
+it all when Flamingo went down."
+
+"You never know your luck--you used to say that, Shiel."
+
+"I say it again.  Come, we must tell our friends--Kitty, her mother, and
+the Young Doctor.  You don't know what good friends they have been to me,
+mavourneen."
+
+"Yes, I think I do," said Mona, opening the door to the outer room.
+
+Then Crozier called with a great, cheery voice--what Mona used to call
+his tally-ho voice.  Mrs. Tynan appeared, smiling.  She knew at a glance
+what had happened.  It was so interesting that she could even forgive
+Mona.
+
+"Where's Kitty?" asked Crozier, almost boisterously.
+
+"She has gone for a ride with John Sibley," answered Mrs. Tynan.
+
+"Look, there she is!" said Mona, laying a hand on Crozier's arm, and
+pointing with the other out over the prairie.
+
+Crozier looked out towards the northwestern horizon, and in the distance
+was a woman riding as hard as her horse could go, with a man galloping
+hard after her.  It seemed as though they were riding into the sunset.
+
+"She's riding the horse you won that race with years ago when you first
+came here, Mr. Crozier," said Mrs. Tynan.  "John Sibley bought it from
+Mr. Brennan."
+
+Mona did not see the look which came into Crozier's face as, with one
+hand shading his eyes and the other grasping the banknotes which were to
+start him in life again, independent and self-respecting, he watched the
+girl riding on and on, ever ahead of the man.
+
+It was at that moment the Young Doctor entered the room, and he
+distracted Mona's attention for a moment.  Going forward to him Mona
+shook him warmly by the hand.  Then she went up to Mrs. Tynan and kissed
+her.
+
+"I would like to kiss your daughter too, Mrs. Tynan," Mona said.  .  .  .
+"What are you looking at so hard, Shiel?" she presently added to her
+husband.
+
+He did not turn to her.  His eyes were still shaded by his hand.
+
+"That horse goes well yet," he said in a low voice.  "As good as ever--
+as good as ever."
+
+"He loves horses so," remarked Mona, as though she could tell Mrs. Tynan
+and the Young Doctor anything about Shiel Crozier which they did not
+know.
+
+"Kitty rides well, doesn't she?" asked Mrs. Tynan of Crozier.
+
+"What a pair--girl and horse!" Crozier exclaimed.  "Thoroughbred--
+absolutely thoroughbred!"
+
+Kitty had ridden away with her heart's secret, her very own, as she
+thought: but Shiel Crozier knew--the man that mattered knew.
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+Golden, all golden, save where there was a fringe of trees at a
+watercourse; save where a garden, like a spot of emerald, made a button
+on the royal garment wrapped across the breast of the prairie.  Above,
+making for the trees of the foothills far away, a golden eagle floated,
+a prairie-hen sped affrighted from some invisible thing; and in the far
+distance a railway train slipped down the plain like a serpent making for
+a covert in the first hills of the first world that ever was.
+
+At a casual glance the vast plain seemed uninhabited, yet here and there
+were men and horses, tiny in the vastness, but conquering.  Here and
+there also--for it was July--a haymaker sharpened his scythe, and the
+sound came singing through the air radiant and stirring with life.
+
+Seated in the shade of a clump of trees a girl sat with her chin in her
+hands looking out over the prairie, an intense dreaming in her eyes.  Her
+horse was tethered near by, but it scarcely made a sound.  It was a horse
+which had once won a great race, with an Irish gentleman on his back.
+Long time the girl sat absorbed, her golden colour, her brown-gold hair
+in harmony with the universal stencil of gold.  With her eyes drowned in
+the distance, she presently murmured something to herself, and as she did
+so the eyes deepened to a nameless umber tone, deeper than gold, warmer
+than brown; such a colour as only can be found in a jewel or in a leaf
+the frost has touched.
+
+The frost had touched the soul which gave the colour to the eyes of the
+girl.  Yet she seemed all summer, all glow and youth and gladness.  Her
+voice was golden, too, and the words which fell from her lips were as
+though tuned to the sound of falling water.  The tone of the voice would
+last when the gold of all else became faded or tarnished.  It had its
+origin in the soul:
+
+         "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."
+
+The voice lingered on the words till it trailed away into nothing, like
+the vanishing note of a violin which seems still to pulse faintly after
+the sound has ceased.
+
+"But he did not go alone, and I have not made my grave," the girl said,
+and raised her head at the sound of footsteps.  With an effort she
+emerged from the half-trance in which she had been, and smiled at a man
+hastening towards her.
+
+"Dear bully, bulbous being--how that word 'bully' would have, made her
+cringe!" she said as the man ambled nearer.  He could not go as fast as
+his mind urged him.
+
+"I've got news--news, news!" he exclaimed, wading through his own
+perspiration to where she sat.  "I can guess what it is," the girl
+remarked smilingly, as she reached out a hand to him, but remained
+seated.  "It's a real, live baby born to Lydia, wife of Methuselah, the
+woman also being of goodly years.  It is, isn't it."
+
+"The fattest, finest, most 'scrumpshus' son of all the ages that ever--"
+
+Kitty laughed happily and very whimsically.  "Like none since Moses was
+found among the bulrushes!  Where was this one found, and what do you
+intend to call him--Jesse, after his 'pa'?"
+
+"No--nothing so common.  He's to be called Shiel--Shiel Crozier Bulrush,
+that's to be his name."
+
+The face of the girl became a shade pensive now.  "Oh!  And do you think
+you can guarantee that he will be worth the name?  Do you never think
+what his father is?"
+
+"I'm starting him right with that name.  I can do so much, anyway,"
+laughed the imperturbable one.  "And Mrs. Bulrush, after her great
+effort--how is she?
+
+"Flying--simply flying.  Earth not good enough for her.  Simply flying.
+But here--here is more news.  Guess what--it's for you.  I've just come
+from the post office, and they said there was an English letter for you,
+so I brought it."
+
+He handed it over.  She laid it in her lap and waited as though for him
+to go.
+
+"Can't I hear how he is?  He's the best man that ever crossed my path,"
+he said.
+
+"It happens to be in his wife's, not his, handwriting--did ever such a
+scrap of a woman write so sprawling a hand!" she replied, holding the
+letter up.
+
+"But she'll let us know in the letter how Crozier is, won't she?"
+
+Kitty had now recovered herself, and slowly she opened the envelope and
+took out the letter.  As she did so something fluttered to the ground.
+
+Jesse Bulrush picked it up.  "That looks nice," he said, and he whistled
+in surprise.  "It's a money-draft on a bank."
+
+Kitty, whose eyes were fixed on the big, important handwriting, answered
+calmly and without apparently looking, as she took the paper from his
+hand: "Yes, it's a wedding present--five hundred dollars to buy what I
+like best for my home.  So she says."
+
+"Mrs. Crozier, of course."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Well, that's magnificent.  What will you do with it?"
+
+Kitty rose and held out her hand.  "Go back to your flying partner, happy
+man, and ask her what she would do with five hundred dollars if she had
+it."
+
+"She'd buy her lord and master a present with it, of course," he
+answered.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Rolypoly," she responded, laughing.  "You always could
+think of things for other people to do; and have never done anything
+yourself until now.  Good-bye, father."
+
+When he was gone and out of sight her face changed.  With sudden anger
+she crushed and crumpled up the draft for five hundred in her hand.  "'A
+token of affection from both!'" she exclaimed, quoting from the letter.
+"One lone leaf of Irish shamrock from him would--"
+
+She stopped.  "But he will send a message of his own," she continued.
+"He will--he will.  Even if he doesn't, I'll know that he remembers just
+the same.  He does--he does remember."
+
+She drew herself up with an effort, and, as it were, shook herself free
+from the memories which dimmed her eyes.
+
+Not far away a man was riding towards the clump of trees where she was.
+She saw, and hastened to her horse.
+
+"If I told John all I feel he'd understand.  I believe he always has
+understood," she added with a far-off look.
+
+The draft was still crushed in her hand when she mounted the beloved
+horse, whose name now was Shiel.
+
+Presently she smoothed out the crumpled paper.  "Yes, I'll take it; I'll
+put it by," she murmured.  "John will keep on betting.  He'll be broke
+some day and he'll need it, maybe."
+
+A moment later she was riding hard to meet the man who, before the wheat-
+harvest came, would call her wife.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+He saw what he wished to see, which is the way of man
+Searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
+Telling the unnecessary truth
+What isn't never was to those that never knew
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, V3 ***
+
+******** This file should be named 6287.txt or 6287.zip *********
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