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+Project Gutenberg’s You Never Know Your Luck, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: You Never Know Your Luck, Complete
+       Being The Story Of A Matrimonial Deserter
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2006 [EBook #6288]
+Last Updated: August 27, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+  Volume 1.
+  PROEM
+  I.     “PIONEERS, O PIONEERS”
+   II.    CLOSING THE DOORS
+  III.   THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
+  IV.    “STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE”
+   V.     A STORY TO BE TOLD
+
+  Volume 2.
+  VI.    “HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON”
+   VII.   A WOMAN’S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+  VIII.  ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+  IX.    NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+  X.    “S. O. S.”
+   XI.    IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+  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
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+This volume contains two novels dealing with the life of prairie people
+in the town of Askatoon in the far West. ‘The World for Sale’ and the
+latter portion of ‘The Money Master’ deal with the same life, and ‘The
+Money Master’ contained some of the characters to be found in ‘Wild
+Youth’. ‘The World for Sale’ also was a picture of prairie country with
+strife between a modern Anglo-Canadian town and a French-Canadian town
+in the West. These books are of the same people; but ‘You Never
+Know Your Luck’ and ‘Wild Youth’ have several characters which move
+prominently through both.
+
+In the introduction to ‘The World for Sale’ in this series, I drew a
+description of prairie life, and I need not repeat what was said there.
+‘In You Never Know Your Luck’ there is a Proem which describes briefly
+the look of the prairie and suggests characteristics of the life of
+the people. The basis of the book has a letter written by a wife to her
+husband at a critical time in his career when he had broken his promise
+to her. One or two critics said the situation is impossible, because no
+man would carry a letter unopened for a long number of years. My reply
+is: that it is exactly what I myself did. I have still a letter written
+to me which was delivered at my door sixteen years ago. I have never
+read it, and my reason for not reading it was that I realised, as I
+think, what its contents were. I knew that the letter would annoy, and
+there it lies. The writer of the letter who was then my enemy is now my
+friend. The chief character in the book, Crozier, was an Irishman, with
+all the Irishman’s cleverness, sensitiveness, audacity, and timidity;
+for both those latter qualities are characteristic of the Irish race,
+and as I am half Irish I can understand why I suppressed a letter and
+why Crozier did. Crozier is the type of man that comes occasionally to
+the Dominion of Canada; and Kitty Tynan is the sort of girl that the
+great West breeds. She did an immoral thing in opening the letter that
+Crozier had suppressed, but she did it in a good cause--for Crozier’s
+sake; she made his wife write another letter, and she placed it again
+in the envelope for Crozier to open and see. Whatever lack of morality
+there was in her act was balanced by the good end to the story, though
+it meant the sacrifice of Kitty’s love for Crozier, and the making of
+his wife happy once more.
+
+As for ‘Wild Youth’ I make no apology for it. It is still fresh in the
+minds of the American public, and it is true to the life. Some critics
+frankly called it melodramatic. I do not object to the term. I know
+nothing more melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare’s
+plays. Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic;
+Balzac was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and
+Sir Walter Scott. The charge of melodrama is not one that should disturb
+a writer of fiction. The question is, are the characters melodramatic.
+Will anyone suggest to me the marriage of a girl of seventeen with a man
+over sixty is melodramatic. It may be, but I think it tragical, and so
+it was in this case. As for Orlando Guise, I describe the man as I knew
+him, and he is still alive. Some comments upon the story suggested that
+it was impossible for a man to spend the night on the prairie with a
+woman whom he loved without causing her to forget her marriage vows. It
+is not sentimental to say that is nonsense. It is a prurient mind that
+only sees evil in a situation of the sort. Why it should be desirable to
+make a young man and woman commit a misdemeanor to secure the praise of
+a critic is beyond imagination. It would be easy enough to do. I did it
+in The Right of Way. I did it in others of my books. What happens to one
+man and one woman does not necessarily happen to another. There are men
+who, for love of a woman, would not take advantage of her insecurity.
+There are others who would. In my books I have made both classes do
+their will, and both are true to life. It does not matter what one book
+is or is not, but it does matter that an author writes his book with a
+sense of the fitting and the true.
+
+Both these books were written to present that side of life in Canada
+which is not wintry and forbidding. There is warmth of summer in both
+tales, and thrilling air and the beauty of the wild countryside. As for
+the cold, it is severe in most parts of Canada, but the air is dry, and
+the sharpness is not felt as it is in this damper climate of England.
+Canadians feel the cold of a March or November day in London far more
+than the cold of a day in Winnipeg, with the thermometer many degrees
+below zero. Both these books present the summer side of Canada, which is
+as delightful as that of any climate in the world; both show the modern
+western life which is greatly changed since the days when Pierre
+roamed the very fields where these tales take place. It should never
+be forgotten that British Columbia has a climate like that of England,
+where, on the Coast, it is never colder than here, and where there is
+rain instead of snow in winter.
+
+There is much humour and good nature in the West, and this also I tried
+to bring out in these two books; and Askatoon is as cosmopolitan as
+London. Canada in the West has all races, and it was consistent of me to
+give a Chinaman of noble birth a part to play in the tragicomedy. I
+have a great respect for the Chinaman, and he is a good servant and a
+faithful friend. Such a Chinaman as Li Choo I knew in British Columbia,
+and all I did was to throw him on the Eastern side of the Rockies, a few
+miles from the border of the farthest Western province. The Chinaman’s
+death was faithful in its detail, and it was true to his nature. He had
+to die, and with the old pagan philosophy, still practised in China
+and Japan, he chose the better way, to his mind. Princes still destroy
+themselves in old Japan, as recent history proves.
+
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+
+
+
+PROEM
+
+Have you ever seen it in reaping-time? A sea of gold it is, with gentle
+billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
+salute the reaper and say, “All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
+the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall.” The countless million
+heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles
+them to the hour of harvest. The air-like the tingle of water from a
+mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
+the dust of the world flushed away.
+
+Arcady? Look closely. Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are
+houses--sometimes in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
+domesticity or naked industry in the workfield. Also rising here and
+there in the expanse, clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a
+powdery mist. They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
+Sacrifice it is. The vast steam-threshers are mightily devouring what
+their servants, the monster steam-reapers, have gleaned for them. Soon,
+when September comes, all that waving sea will be still. What was gold
+will still be a rusted gold, but near to the earth-the stubble of the
+corn now lying in vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
+east and west and south and across the seas.
+
+Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
+whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
+chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature’s travail which
+is not pain. Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
+white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun
+will be a soft--sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
+wool. Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the
+threshers, will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home.
+There the farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought
+that while he waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding;
+and as in April, the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it
+will push upward and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with
+the “What cheer, partner!” of a mate in the scheme of nature.
+
+Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here--bright, singing
+birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the
+wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth,
+the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
+plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash
+of the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the
+mallard from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by
+its joy in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very
+good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. “PIONEERS, O PIONEERS”
+
+If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
+pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
+have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
+possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the “field of
+the cloth of gold,” which your eye has already been invited to see.
+With the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
+joyously at twenty-two. This morning singer was just that age; and if
+you had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of
+miles, before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in
+tone with the scene. She was a symphony in gold--nothing less. Her hair,
+her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all gold.
+Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might have
+had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal, and
+the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion. The eyelashes were so
+long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
+cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
+painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
+other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
+was so very busy, a keynote.
+
+Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
+not; but it is a libel. She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and
+is never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There was,
+however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl’s
+presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her
+quite apart from her place in this nature-scheme. She was not wholly
+aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which
+would have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so
+black. Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it
+may be a matter of parentage.
+
+Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted. Her father had
+been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West.
+His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to
+maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
+daughter was now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the origin
+of the girl’s slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of
+selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial
+decision. The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his
+daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul
+as ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little
+sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter’s sake at least, keeping
+herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked
+temptations. She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample
+but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers. The girl
+was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who
+can say? Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish
+coast long since? Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her
+father’s. You would have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have
+thought that nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so
+pointedly designed to express the ancient dame’s colour-scheme, even to
+the delicate auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud
+look of her faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a
+purse and scarcely needed one. In any case she had an ample pocket in
+her dress.
+
+This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
+important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
+have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
+herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
+chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story.
+As a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
+deserter. Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
+had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean
+and low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
+matrimony without its status.
+
+As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
+misleading. A man had once said to her that “she looked too gay to be
+good,” but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
+rather better. Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
+getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
+knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
+turned from her wiser if not better men. Because they had pursued the
+old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan
+had exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional
+and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for
+their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
+themselves well. She scored in any contest--in spite of her rather small
+brain, large heart, and ardent appearance. A very clever, shiftless
+Irish husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy
+watching and fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and
+fend herself to the same extent as she would have done had she been free
+and childless and thirty. The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw
+none of those things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time
+and look into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or
+the grey-blue foothills. She never sang--she had never sung a note in
+her life; but this girl of hers, with a man’s coat in her hand, and eyes
+on the joyous scene before her, was for ever humming or singing. She
+had even sung in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer,
+because strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not
+so vain as people of her colouring sometimes are. It was just as bad,
+however, when she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang,
+people stared at her. So it was that she seldom went to church at all;
+but it was not because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were
+quite individual and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial
+deserter will show.
+
+This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom
+to the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when
+he was in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair
+proportion of the time. It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy
+and the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as
+a child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the
+alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular
+man whose coat she now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust
+upon it. This was the song she sang:
+
+     “Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
+     Hereaway I waited him, hereaway and oft;
+     When I sang my song to him, bright his eyes began to shine--
+     Hereaway I loved him well, for my heart was soft.
+
+     “Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies--
+     ‘Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?’”
+
+     “Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
+     Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
+     Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown--
+     Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
+
+     “When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+     Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+     I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
+     ‘Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?’”
+
+There was a plaintive quality in the voice of this russet maiden in
+perfect keeping with the music and the words; and though her lips
+smiled, there was a deep, wistful look in her eyes more in harmony with
+the coming autumn than with this gorgeous harvest-time.
+
+For a moment after she had finished singing she stood motionless,
+absorbed by the far horizon; then suddenly she gave a little shake of
+the body and said in a brisk, playfully chiding way:
+
+“Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” There was no one near,
+so far as eye could see, so it was clear that the words were addressed
+to herself. She was expressing that wonder which so many people feel
+at discovering in themselves long-concealed characteristics, or find
+themselves doing things out of their natural orbit, as they think. If
+any one had told Kitty Tynan that she had rare imagination, she would
+have wondered what was meant. If anyone had said to her, “What are you
+dreaming about, Kitty?” she would have understood, however, for she had
+had fits of dreaming ever since she was a child, and they had increased
+during the past few years--since the man came to live with them whose
+coat she was brushing. Perhaps this was only imitation, because the
+man had a habit of standing or sitting still and looking into space for
+minutes--and on Sundays for hours--at a time; and often she had watched
+him as he lay on his back in the long grass, head on a hillock, hat
+down over his eyes, while the smoke from his pipe came curling up from
+beneath the rim. Also she had seen him more than once sitting with a
+letter before him and gazing at it for many minutes together. She had
+also noted that it was the same letter on each occasion; that it was a
+closed letter, and also that it was unstamped. She knew that, because
+she had seen it in his desk--the desk once belonging to her father, a
+sloping thing with a green-baize top. Sometimes he kept it locked, but
+very often he did not; and more than once, when he had asked her to get
+him something from the desk, not out of meanness, but chiefly because
+her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios, she
+had examined the envelope curiously. The envelope bore a woman’s
+handwriting, and the name on it was not that of the man who owned the
+coat--and the letter. The name on the envelope was Shiel Crozier, but
+the name of the man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry--James Gathorne
+Kerry, so he said.
+
+Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
+mystery. She wondered greatly what it all meant. Never in anything else
+had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but
+she felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up
+fifty stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who
+for over four years had lived in her mother’s house. He had become part
+of her life, perhaps just because he was a man,--and what home is a
+real home without a man?--perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet,
+confidential word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness;
+indeed, he showed in his manner occasionally almost a boisterous
+hilarity. He undoubtedly was what her mother called “a queer dick,” but
+also “a pippin with a perfect core,” which was her way of saying that
+he was a man to be trusted with herself and with her daughter; one who
+would stand loyally by a friend or a woman. He had stood by them both
+when Augustus Burlingame, the lawyer, who had boarded with them when
+J. G. Kerry first came, coarsely exceeded the bounds of liberal
+friendliness which marked the household, and by furtive attempts at
+intimacy began to make life impossible for both mother and daughter.
+Burlingame took it into his head, when he received notice that his rooms
+were needed for another boarder, that J. G. Kerry was the cause of it.
+Perhaps this was not without reason, since Kerry had seen Kitty Tynan
+angrily unclasping Burlingame’s arm from around her waist, and had used
+cutting and decisive words to the sensualist afterwards.
+
+There had taken the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent--Jesse
+Bulrush--who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three
+days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous
+fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and
+adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient
+for harmless deceit. He was fifty, and no gallant save in words; and,
+as a wary bachelor of many years’ standing, it was a long time before
+he showed a tendency to blandish a good-looking middle-aged nurse named
+Egan who also lodged with Mrs. Tynan; though even a plain-faced nurse
+in uniform has an advantage over a handsome unprofessional woman. Jesse
+Bulrush and J. G. Kerry were friends--became indeed such confidential
+friends to all appearance, though their social origin was evidently
+so different, that Kitty Tynan, when she wished to have a pleasant
+conversation which gave her a glow for hours afterwards, talked to the
+fat man of his lean and aristocratic-looking friend.
+
+“Got his head where it ought to be--on his shoulders; and it ain’t
+for playing football with,” was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush
+concerning Mr. Kerry. This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she
+could not have told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a
+long history of the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and
+whom even the inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to “discover” when
+he lived in the same house. But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing
+as a canary, and relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and
+becoming means, with her good contralto voice. She was indeed a creature
+of contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice
+it was she. She looked a soprano.
+
+What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry’s coat in her hand
+it would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the
+detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no
+consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her,
+for there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the
+house, the words of the lyric singing themselves over in her brain:
+
+     “Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the hearth, heaven stood there in the skies’
+     Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?”’
+
+She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of
+laying his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had
+said aloud to herself, “Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!”
+ Perhaps--and perhaps not.
+
+As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the
+house, and she quickened her footsteps. The blood in her face, the look
+in her eye quickened also. And now a figure appeared in the doorway--a
+figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.
+
+“Villain’!” he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient
+moods--after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush. “Hither with my coat; my
+spotless coat in a spotted world,--the unbelievable anomaly--
+
+         “‘For the earth of a dusty to-day
+          Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.’”
+
+When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought
+it was clever beyond thinking--a heavenly jumble. “If it wasn’t for me
+you’d be carted for rubbish,” she replied joyously as she helped him on
+with his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.
+
+“I heard you singing--what was it?” he asked cheerily, while it could
+be seen that his mind was preoccupied. The song she had sung, floating
+through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
+engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long
+time, with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or
+rear-guard or what you will:
+
+    “‘Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
+     Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft--’”
+
+she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
+saddened her, she knew not why. At the words the flaming exhilaration of
+the man’s face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant look.
+
+“That--oh, that!” he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a
+clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.
+
+“Your hat!” she called after him, and ran inside the house. An instant
+later she gave it to him. Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
+kindly at her.
+
+“‘Whereaway, hereaway’ is a wonderful song,” he said. “We used to sing
+it when I was a boy--and after, and after. It’s an old song--old as the
+hills. Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan. What a girl you are--to be so kind to
+a fellow like--me!”
+
+“Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!”--these were the very words she had
+used about herself a little while before. The song--why did it make
+Mr. Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it? Kitty
+watched him striding down the street into the town.
+
+Now a voice--a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:
+
+“Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat,” it said.
+
+Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
+struggle, into his coat.
+
+“Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly,” she answered cheerily as she entered.
+
+“Of course I’m not the star boarder--nothing for me!” he said in
+affected protest.
+
+“A little more to starboard and you’ll get it on,” she retorted with
+a glint of her late father’s raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch
+which put it right on the ample shoulders.
+
+“Bully! bully!” he cried. “I’ll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup.”
+
+“I’m a Christian. I hate horse-racers and gamblers,” she returned
+mockingly.
+
+“I’ll turn Christian--I want to be loved,” he bleated from the doorway.
+
+“Roll on, proud porpoise!” she rejoined, which shows that her
+conversation was not quite aristocratic at all times.
+
+“Golly, but she’s a gold dollar in a gold bank,” remarked Jesse Bulrush
+warmly as he lurched into the street.
+
+The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down the
+way the two men had gone.
+
+The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her. She heard the dizzy din
+of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of
+the solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing,
+machine-like sound. This particular sound went on and on.
+
+She opened the door of the next room. Her mother sat at a sewing-machine
+intent upon some work, the needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.
+
+“What are you making, mother?” Kitty asked. “New blinds for Mr. Kerry’s
+bedroom-he likes this green colour,” the widow added with a slight
+flush, due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.
+
+“Everybody does everything for him,” remarked the girl almost pettishly.
+
+“That’s a nice spirit, I must say!” replied her mother reprovingly, the
+machine almost stopping.
+
+“If I said it in a different way it would be all right,” the other
+returned with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft
+inflection, like a born actress.
+
+“Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” declared her mother, and she
+bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring
+way. Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes. A look
+of pleasure stole over the girl’s face, and her bosom rose and fell with
+a happy sigh. Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. CLOSING THE DOORS
+
+There are many people who, in some subtle psychological way, are very
+like their names; as though some one had whispered to “the parents of
+this child” the name designed for it from the beginning of time. So it
+was with Shiel Crozier. Does not the name suggest a man lean and flat,
+sinewy, angular and isolated like a figure in one of El Greco’s pictures
+in the Prado at Madrid? Does not the name suggest a figure of elongated
+humanity with a touch of ancient mysticism and yet also of the
+fantastical humour of Don Quixote?
+
+In outward appearance Shiel Crozier, otherwise J. G. Kerry, of Askatoon,
+was like his name for the greater part of the time. Take him in
+repose, and he looked a lank ascetic who dreamed of a happy land where
+flagellation was a joy and pain a panacea. In action, however, as when
+Kitty Tynan helped him on with his coat, he was a pure improvisation
+of nature. He had a face with a Cromwellian mole, which broke out in
+emotion like an April day, with eyes changing from a blue-grey to the
+deepest ultramarine that ever delighted the soul and made the reputation
+of an Old Master. Even in the prairie town of Askatoon, where every man
+is so busy that he scarcely knows his own children when he meets them,
+and almost requires an introduction to his wife when the door closes on
+them at bedtime, people took a second look at him when he passed. Many
+who came in much direct contact with him, as Augustus Burlingame the
+lawyer had done, tried to draw from him all there was to tell about
+himself; which is a friendly custom of the far West. The native-born
+greatly desire to tell about themselves. They wear their hearts on their
+sleeves, and are childlike in the frank recitals of all they were and
+are and hope to be. This covers up also a good deal of business acumen,
+shrewdness, and secretiveness which is not so childlike and bland.
+
+In this they are in sharp contrast to those not native-born. These
+come from many places on the earth, and they are seldom garrulously
+historical. Some of them go to the prairie country to forget they ever
+lived before, and to begin the world again, having been hurt in life
+undeservingly; some go to bury their mistakes or worse in pioneer work
+and adventure; some flee from a wrath that would devour them--the law,
+society, or a woman.
+
+This much must be said at once for Crozier, that he had no crime to
+hide. It was not because of crime that “He buckles up his talk like the
+bellyband on a broncho,” as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said
+of him; and Deely was a man of “horse-sense,” no doubt because he was a
+horse-doctor--“a veterenny surgeon,” as his friends called him when they
+wished to flatter him. Deely supplemented this chaste remark about the
+broncho with the observation that, “Same as the broncho, you buckle him
+tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush.” And he
+added further, “‘Tis a woman that’s put the mumplaster on his tongue,
+Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it’s another man’s wife.”
+
+Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of
+his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law,
+or with another man’s wife, nor yet with any single maid--not yet;
+though there was now Kitty Tynan in his path. Yet he had had trouble.
+There was hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more
+than all else in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived
+his life for over four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer,
+and stud-manager for Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire. In the
+opinion of the West, “big-bugs” did not come down to this kind of
+occupation unless they had been roughly handled by fate or fortune.
+
+“Talk? Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame,” said
+Malachi Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling
+young farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and
+farming.
+
+“Words to him are like nuts to a monkey. He’s an artist, that man is.
+Been in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the music
+smells--fairly smells like parfumery,” responded Sibley. “I’d like to
+get at the bottom of him. There’s a real good story under his asbestos
+vest--something that’d make a man call for the oh-be-joyful, same as I
+do now.”
+
+After they had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler Deely
+continued the gossip. “Watch me now, been a friend of dukes in
+England--and Ireland, that Mr. James Gathorne Kerry, as any one can see;
+and there he is feelin’ the hocks of a filly or openin’ the jaws of a
+stud horse, age-hunting! Why, you needn’t tell me--I’ve had my mind made
+up ever since the day he broke the temper of Terry Brennan’s Inniskillen
+chestnut, and won the gold cup with her afterwards. He just sort of
+appeared out of the mist of the marnin’, there bein’ a divil’s lot of
+excursions and conferences and holy gatherin’s in Askatoon that time
+back, ostensible for the business which their names denote, like the
+Dioceesan Conference and the Pure White Water Society. That was their
+bluff; but they’d come herealong for one good pure white dioceesan thing
+before all, and that was to see the dandiest horse-racing which ever
+infested the West. Come--he come like that!”--Deely made a motion like
+a swoop of an aeroplane to earth--“and here he is buckin’ about like a
+rough-neck same as you and me; but yet a gent, a swell, a cream della
+cream, that’s turned his back on a lady--a lady not his own wife, that’s
+my sure and sacred belief.”
+
+“You certainly have got women on the brain,” retorted Sibley. “I ain’t
+ever seen such a man as you. There never was a woman crossing the street
+on a muddy day that you didn’t sprint to get a look at her ankles.
+Behind everything you see a woman. Horses is your profession, but woman
+is your practice.”
+
+“There ain’t but one thing worth livin’ for, and that’s a woman,”
+ remarked Deely.
+
+“Do you tell Mrs. Deely that?” asked Sibley.
+
+“Watch me now, she knows. What woman is there don’t know when her
+husband is what he is! And it’s how I know that the trouble with James
+Gathorne Kerry is a woman. I know the signs. Divils me own, he’s got ‘em
+in his face.”
+
+“He’s got in his face what don’t belong here and what you don’t know
+much about--never having kept company with that sort,” rejoined Sibley.
+
+“The way he lives and talks--‘No, thank you, I don’t care for any
+thing,’ says he, when you’re standin’ at the door of a friendly saloon,
+which is established by law to bespeak peace and goodwill towards men,
+and you ask him pleasant to step inside. He don’t seem to have a single
+vice. Haven’t we tried him? There was Belle Bingley, all frizzy hair and
+a kicker; we put her on to him. But he give her ten dollars to buy a hat
+on condition she behaved like a lady in the future--smilin’ at her, the
+divil! And Belle, with temper like dinnemite, took it kneelin’ as it
+were, and smiled back at him--her! Drink, women--nothin’ seems to have a
+hold on him. What’s his vice? Sure, then, that’s what I say, what’s his
+vice? He’s got to have one; any man as is a man has to have one vice.”
+
+“Bosh! Look at me,” rejoined Sibley. “Drink women--nit! Not for me! I’ve
+got no vice. I don’t even smoke.”
+
+“No vice? Begobs, yours has got you like a tire on a wheel! Vice--what
+do you call gamblin’? It’s the biggest vice ever tuk grip of a man. It’s
+like a fever, and it’s got you, John, like the nail on your finger.”
+
+“Well, p’r’aps, he’s got that vice too. P’r’aps J. G. Kerry’s got that
+vice same as me.”
+
+“Anyhow, we’ll get to know all we want when he goes into the witness
+box at the Logan murder trial next week. That’s what I’m waitin’ for,”
+ Deely returned, with a grin of anticipation. “That drug-eating Gus
+Burlingame’s got a grudge against him somehow, and when a lawyer’s got
+a grudge against you it’s just as well to look where y’ are goin’.
+Burlingame don’t care what he does to get his way in court. What set him
+against Kerry I ain’t sure, but, bedad, I think it’s looks. Burlingame
+goes in for lookin’ like a picture in a frame--gold seals hangin’ beyant
+his vestpocket, broad silk cord to his eye-glass, loose flowin’ tie,
+and long hair-makes him look pretentuous and showy. But your ‘Mr. Kerry,
+sir,’ he don’t have any tricks to make him look like a doge from Veenis
+and all the eyes of the females battin’ where’er he goes. Jealousy, John
+Sibley, me boy, is a cruil thing.”
+
+“Why is it you ain’t jealous of him? There’s plenty of women that
+watch you go down-town--you got a name for it, anyway,” remarked Sibley
+maliciously.
+
+Deely nodded sagely. “Watch me now, that’s right, me boy. I got a name
+for it, but I want the game without the name, and that’s why I ain’t
+puttin’ on any airs--none at all. I depend on me tongue, not on me
+looks, which goes against me. I like Mr. J. G. Kerry. I’ve plenty
+dealin’s with him, naturally, both of us being in the horse business,
+and I say he’s right as a minted dollar as he goes now. Also, and
+behold, I’d take my oath he never done anything to blush for. His
+touble’s been a woman--wayward woman what stoops to folly! I give up
+tryin’ to pump him just as soon as I made up my mind it was a woman.
+That shuts a man’s mouth like a poor-box.
+
+“Next week’s fixed for the Logan killin’ case, is it?”
+
+“Monday comin’, for sure. I wouldn’t like to be in Mr. Kerry’s shoes.
+Watch me now, if he gives the evidence they say he can give--the
+prasecution say it--that M’Mahon Gang behind Logan ‘ll get him sure as
+guns, one way or another.”
+
+“Some one ought to give Mr. Kerry the tip to get out and not give
+evidence,” remarked Sibley sagely. Deely shook his head vigorously.
+“Begobs, he’s had the tip all right, but he’s not goin’. He’s got as
+much fear as a canary has whiskers. He doesn’t want to give evidence,
+he says, but he wants to see the law do its work. Burlingame ‘ll try to
+make it out manslaughter; but there’s a widow with children to suffer
+for the manslaughter, just as much as though it was murder, and there
+isn’t a man that doesn’t think murder was the game, and the grand joory
+had that idea too.
+
+“Between Gus Burlingame and that M’Mahon bunch of horse-thieves,
+the stranger in a strange land ‘ll have to keep his eyes open, I’m
+thinkin’.”
+
+“Divils me darlin’, his eyes are open all right,” returned Deely.
+
+“Still, I’d like to jog his elbow,” Sibley answered reflectively. “It
+couldn’t do any harm, and it might do good.”
+
+Deely nodded good-naturedly. “If you want to so bad as that, John,
+you’ve got the chance, for he’s up at the Sovereign Bank now. I seen
+him leave the Great Overland Railway Bureau ten minutes ago and get away
+quick to the bank.”
+
+“What’s he got on at the bank and the railway?”
+
+“Some big deal, I guess. I’ve seen him with Studd Bradley.”
+
+“The Great North Trust Company boss?”
+
+“On it, my boy, on it--the other day as thick as thieves. Studd Bradley
+doesn’t knit up with an outsider from the old country unless there’s
+reason for it--good gold-currency reasons.”
+
+“A land deal, eh?” ventured Sibley. “What did I say--speculation,
+that’s his vice, same as mine! P’r’aps that’s what ruined him. Cards,
+speculation, what’s the difference? And he’s got a quiet look, same as
+me.”
+
+Deely laughed loudly. “And bursts out same as you! Quiet one hour like
+a mill-pond or a well, and then--swhish, he’s blazin’! He’s a volcano in
+harness, that spalpeen.”
+
+“He’s a volcano that doesn’t erupt when there’s danger,” responded
+Sibley. “It’s when there’s just fun on that his volcano gets loose. I’ll
+go wait for him at the bank. I got a fellow-feeling for Mr. Kerry. I’d
+like to whisper in his ear that he’d better be lookin’ sharp for the
+M’Mahon Gang, and that if he’s a man of peace he’d best take a holiday
+till after next week, or get smallpox or something.”
+
+The two friends lounged slowly up the street, and presently parted near
+the door of the bank. As Sibley waited, his attention was drawn to a
+window on the opposite side of the street at an angle from themselves.
+The light was such that the room was revealed to its farthest corners,
+and Sibley noted that three men were evidently carefully watching the
+bank, and that one of the men was Studd Bradley, the so-called boss. The
+others were local men of some position commercially and financially in
+the town. Sibley did not give any sign that he noticed the three men,
+but he watched carefully from under the rim of his hat. His imagination,
+however, read a story of consequence in the secretive vigilance of the
+three, who evidently thought that, standing far back in the room, they
+could not be seen.
+
+Presently the door of the bank opened, and Sibley saw Studd Bradley lean
+forward eagerly, then draw back and speak hurriedly to his companions,
+using a gesture of satisfaction.
+
+“Something damn funny there!” Sibley said to himself, and stepped
+forward to Crozier with a friendly exclamation. Crozier turned rather
+impatiently, for his face was aflame with some exciting reflection. At
+this moment his eyes were the deepest blue that could be imagined--an
+almost impossible colour, like that of the Mediterranean when it
+reflects the perfect sapphire of the sky. There was something almost
+wonderful in their expression. A woman once said as she looked at a
+picture of Herschel, whose eyes had the unworldly gaze of the great
+dreamer looking beyond this sphere, “The stars startled him.” Such a
+look was in Crozier’s eyes now, as though he was seeing the bright end
+of a long road, the desire of his soul.
+
+That, indeed, was what he saw. After two years of secret negotiation
+he had (inspired by information dropped by Jesse Bulrush, his
+fellow-boarder) made definite arrangements for a big land-deal in
+connection with the route of a new railway and a town-site, which would
+mean more to him than any one could know. If it went through, he would,
+for an investment of ten thousand dollars, have a hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars; and that would solve an everlasting problem for him.
+
+He had reached a critical point in his enterprise. All that was wanted
+now was ten thousand dollars in cash to enable him to close the great
+bargain and make his hundred and fifty thousand. But to want ten
+thousand dollars and to get it in a given space of time, when you have
+neither securities, cash, nor real estate, is enough to keep you awake
+at night. Crozier had been so busy with the delicate and difficult
+negotiations that he had not deeply concerned himself with the absence
+of the necessary ten thousand dollars. He thought he could get the
+money at any time, so good was the proposition; and it was best to defer
+raising it to the last moment lest some one learning the secret should
+forestall him. He must first have the stake to be played for before
+he moved to get the cash with which to make the throw. This is not
+generally thought a good way, but it was his way, and it had yet to be
+tested.
+
+There was no cloud of apprehension, however, in Crozier’s eyes as they
+met those of Sibley. He liked Sibley. At this point it is not necessary
+to say why. The reason will appear in due time. Sibley’s face had always
+something of that immobility and gravity which Crozier’s face had part
+of the time-paler, less intelligent, with dark lines and secret
+shadows absent from Crozier’s face; but still with some of the El Greco
+characteristics which marked so powerfully that of the man who passed as
+J. G. Kerry.
+
+“Ah, Sibley,” he said, “glad to see you! Anything I can do for you?”
+
+“It’s the other way if there’s any doing at all,” was the quick
+response.
+
+“Well, let’s walk along together,” remarked Crozier a little
+abstractedly, for he was thinking hard about his great enterprise.
+
+“We might be seen,” said Sibley, with an obvious undermeaning meant to
+provoke a question.
+
+Crozier caught the undertone of suggestion. “Being about to burgle the
+bank, it’s well not to be seen together--eh?”
+
+“No, I’m not in on that business, Mr. Kerry. I’m for breaking banks, not
+burgling ‘em,” was the cheerful reply.
+
+They laughed, but Crozier knew that the observant gambling farmer was
+not talking at haphazard. They had met on the highway, as it were, many
+times since Crozier had come to Askatoon, and Crozier knew his man.
+
+“Well, what are we going to do, and who will see us if we do it?”
+ Crozier asked briskly.
+
+“Studd Bradley and his secret-service corps have got their eyes on this
+street--and on you,” returned Sibley dryly.
+
+Crozier’s face sobered and his eyes became less emotional. “I don’t see
+them anywhere,” he answered, but looking nowhere.
+
+“They’re in Gus Burlingame’s office. They had you under observation
+while you were in the bank.”
+
+“I couldn’t run off with the land, could I?” Crozier remarked dryly, yet
+suggestively, in his desire to see how much Sibley knew.
+
+“Well, you said it was a bank. I’ve no more idea what it is you’re
+tryin’ to run off with than I know what an ace is goin’ to do when
+there’s a joker in the pack,” remarked Sibley; “but I thought I’d tell
+you that Bradley and his lot are watchin’ you gettin’ ready to run.”
+ Then he hastily told what he had seen.
+
+Crozier was reassured. It was natural that Bradley & Co. should take an
+interest in his movements. They would make a pile of money if he pulled
+off the deal-far more than he would. It was not strange that they should
+watch his invasion of the bank. They knew he wanted money, and a bank
+was the place to get it. That was the way he viewed the matter on the
+instant. He replied to Sibley cheerfully. “A hundred to one is a lot
+when you win it,” he said enigmatically.
+
+“It depends on how much you have on,” was Sibley’s quiet reply--“a
+dollar or a thousand dollars.
+
+“If you’ve got a big thing on, and you’ve got an outsider that you think
+is goin’ to win and beat the favourite, it’s just as well to run no
+risks. Believe me, Mr. Kerry, if you’ve got anything on that asks for
+your attention, it’d be sense and saving if you didn’t give evidence at
+the Logan Trial next week. It’s pretty well-guessed what you’re goin’ to
+say and what you know, and you take it from me, the M’Mahon mob that’s
+behind Logan ‘ll have it in for you. They’re terrors when they get
+goin’, and if your evidence puts one of that lot away, ther’ll be
+trouble for you. I wouldn’t do it--honest, I wouldn’t. I’ve been out
+West here a good many years, and I know the place and the people. It’s
+a good place, and there’s lots of first-class people here, but there’s
+a few offscourings that hang like wolves on the edge of the sheepfold,
+ready to murder and git.”
+
+“That was what you wanted to see me about, wasn’t it?” Crozier asked
+quietly.
+
+“Yes; the other was just a shot on the chance. I don’t like to see men
+sneakin’ about and watching. If they do, you can bet there’s something
+wrong. But the other thing, the Logan Trial business, is a dead
+certainty. You’re only a new-comer, in a kind of way, and you don’t
+need to have the same responsibility as the rest. The Law’ll get what it
+wants whether you chip in or not. Let it alone. What’s the Law ever done
+for you that you should run risks for it? It’s straight talk, Mr. Kerry.
+Have a cancer in the bowels next week or go off to see a dyin’ brother,
+but don’t give evidence at the Logan Trial--don’t do it. I got a
+feeling--I’m superstitious--all sportsmen are. By following my instincts
+I’ve saved myself a whole lot in my time.”
+
+“Yes; all men that run chances have their superstitions, and they’re
+not to be sneered at,” replied Crozier thoughtfully. “If you see black,
+don’t play white; if you see a chestnut crumpled up, put your money
+on the bay even when the chestnut is a favourite. Of course you’re
+superstitious, Sibley. The tan and the green baize are covered with
+ghosts that want to help you, if you’ll let them.”
+
+Sibley’s mouth opened in amazement. Crozier was speaking with the look
+of the man who hypnotises himself, who “sees things,” who dreams as only
+the gambler and the plunger on the turf do dream, not even excepting the
+latter-day Irish poets.
+
+“Say, I was right what I said to Deely--I was right,” remarked Sibley
+almost huskily, for it seemed to him as though he had found a long-lost
+brother. No man except one who had staked all he had again and again
+could have looked or spoken like that.
+
+Crozier looked at the other thoughtfully for a moment, then he said:
+
+“I don’t know what you said to Deely, but I do know that I’m going to
+the Logan Trial in spite of the M’Mahon mob. I don’t feel about it as
+you do. I’ve got a different feeling, Sibley. I’ll play the game out.
+I shall not hedge. I shall not play for safety. It’s everything on the
+favourite this time.”
+
+“You’ll excuse me, but Gus Burlingame is for the defence, and he’s got
+his knife into you,” returned Sibley.
+
+“Not yet.” Crozier smiled sardonically.
+
+“Well, I apologise, but what I’ve said, Mr. Kerry, is said as man to
+man. You’re ridin’ game in a tough place, as any man has to do who
+starts with only his pants and his head on. That’s the way you begun
+here, I guess; and I don’t want to see your horse tumble because some
+one throws a fence-rail at its legs. Your class has enemies always in a
+new country--jealousy, envy.”
+
+The lean, aristocratic, angular Crozier, with a musing look on his long
+face, grown ascetic again, as he held out his hand and gripped that of
+the other, said warmly: “I’m just as much obliged to you as though I
+took your advice, Sibley. I am not taking it, but I am taking a pledge
+to return the compliment to you if ever I get the chance.”
+
+“Well, most men get chances of that kind,” was the gratified reply of
+the gambling farmer, and then Crozier turned quickly and entered the
+doorway of the British Bank, the rival of that from which he had turned
+in brave disappointment a little while before.
+
+Left alone in the street, Sibley looked back with the instinct of the
+hunter. As he expected, he saw a head thrust out from the window where
+Studd Bradley and his friends had been. There was an hotel opposite the
+British Bank. He entered and waited. Bradley and one of his companions
+presently came in and seated themselves far back in the shadow, where
+they could watch the doorway of the bank.
+
+It was quite a half-hour before Shiel Crozier emerged from the bank. His
+face was set and pale. For an instant he stood as though wondering which
+way to go, then he moved up the street the way he had come.
+
+Sibley heard a low, poisonous laugh of triumph rankle through the
+hotel office. He turned round. Bradley, the over-fed, over-confident,
+over-estimated financier, laid a hand on the shoulder of his companion
+as they moved towards the door.
+
+“That’s another gate shut,” he said. “I guess we can close ‘em all with
+a little care. It’s working all right. He’s got no chance of raising the
+cash,” he added, as the two passed the chair where Sibley sat--with his
+hat over his eyes, chewing an unlighted cigar.
+
+“I don’t know what it is, but it’s dirt--and muck at that,” John Sibley
+remarked as he rose from his chair and followed the two into the street.
+
+Bradley and his friends were trying steadily to close up the avenues of
+credit to the man to whom the success of his enterprise meant so much.
+To crowd him out would mean an extra hundred and fifty thousand dollars
+for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
+
+What the case was in which Shiel Crozier was to give evidence is not
+important; what came from the giving of his testimony is all that
+matters; and this story would never have been written if he had not
+entered the witness-box.
+
+A court-room at any time seems a little warmer than any other spot
+to all except the prisoner; but on a July day it is likely to be a
+punishment for both innocent and guilty. A man had been killed by one
+of the group of toughs called locally the M’Mahon Gang, and against the
+charge of murder that of manslaughter had been set up in defence; and
+manslaughter might mean jail for a year or two or no jail at all. Any
+evidence which justified the charge of murder would mean not jail, but
+the rope in due course; for this was not Montana or Idaho, where the
+law’s delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed.
+
+The court-room of Askatoon was crowded to suffocation, for the M’Mahons
+were detested, and the murdered man had a good reputation in the
+district. Besides, a widow and three children mourned their loss, and
+the widow was in court. Also Crozier’s evidence was expected to be
+sensational, and to prove the swivel on which the fate of the accused
+man would hang. Among those on the inside it was also known that the
+clever but dissipated Augustus Burlingame, the counsel for the prisoner,
+had a grudge against Crozier,--no one quite knew why except Kitty Tynan
+and her mother, and that cross-examination would be pressed mercilessly
+when Crozier entered the witness-box. As Burlingame came into the
+court-room he said to the Young Doctor--he was always spoken of as the
+Young Doctor in Askatoon, though he had been there a good many years
+and he was no longer as young as he looked--who was also called as a
+witness, “We’ll know more about Mr. J. G. Kerry when this trial is over
+than will suit his book.” It did not occur to Augustus Burlingame that
+in Crozier, who knew why he had fled the house of the showy but virtuous
+Mrs. Tynan, he might find a witness of a mental and moral calibre with
+baffling qualities and some gift of riposte.
+
+Crozier entered the witness-box at a stage when excitement was at fever
+height; for the M’Mahon Gang had given evidence which every one believed
+to be perjured; and the widow of the slain man was weeping bitterly in
+her seat because of noxious falsehoods sworn against her honest husband.
+
+There was certainly something credible and prepossessing in the look of
+Crozier. He might be this or that, but he carried no evil or vice of
+character in his face. He was in his grave mood this summer afternoon.
+There he stood with his long face and the very heavy eyebrows,
+clean-shaven, hard-bitten, as though by wind and weather, composed
+and forceful, the mole on his chin a kind of challenge to the
+vertical dimple in his cheek, his high forehead more benevolent than
+intellectual, his brown hair faintly sprinkled with grey and a bit
+unmanageable, his fathomless eyes shining. “No man ought to have such
+eyes,” remarked a woman present to the Young Doctor, who abstractedly
+nodded assent, for, like Malachi Deely and John Sibley, he himself had a
+theory about Crozier; and he had a fear of what the savage enmity of the
+morally diseased Burlingame might do. He had made up his mind that so
+intense a scrupulousness as Crozier had shown since coming to Askatoon
+had behind it not only character, but the rigidity of a set purpose; and
+that view was supported by the stern economy of Crozier’s daily life,
+broken only by sudden bursts of generosity for those in need.
+
+In the box Crozier kept his eye on the crown attorney, who prosecuted,
+and on the judge. He appeared not to see any one in the court-room,
+though Kitty Tynan had so placed herself that he must see her if he
+looked at the audience at all. Kitty thought him magnificent as he told
+his story with a simple parsimony but a careful choice of words which
+made every syllable poignant with effect. She liked him in his grave
+mood even better than when he was aflame with an internal fire of his
+own creation, when he was almost wildly vivid with life.
+
+“He’s two men,” she had often said to herself; and she said it now
+as she looked at him in the witness-box, measuring out his words and
+measuring off at the same time the span of a murderer’s life; for
+when the crown attorney said to the judge that he had concluded his
+examination there was no one in the room--not even the graceless
+Burlingame--who did not think the prisoner guilty.
+
+“That is all,” the crown attorney said to Crozier as he sank into his
+chair, greatly pleased with one of the best witnesses who had ever been
+through his hands--lucid, concentrated, exact, knowing just where he
+was going and reaching his goal without meandering. Crozier was about to
+step down when Burlingame rose.
+
+“I wish to ask a few questions,” he said.
+
+Crozier bowed and turned, again grasping the rail of the witness-box
+with one hand, while with an air of cogitation and suspense he stroked
+his chin with the long fingers of the other hand.
+
+“What is your name?” asked Burlingame in a tone a little louder than
+he had used hitherto in the trial, indeed even louder than lawyers
+generally use when they want to bully a witness. In this case it was as
+though he wished to summon the attention of the court.
+
+For a second Crozier’s fingers caught his chin almost spasmodically. The
+real meaning of the question, what lay behind it, flashed to his mind.
+He saw in lightning illumination the course Burlingame meant to pursue.
+For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, and he turned slightly
+pale, but the blue of his eyes took on a new steely look--a look also
+of striking watchfulness, as of an animal conscious of its danger, yet
+conscious too of its power when at bay.
+
+“What is your name?” Burlingame asked again in a somewhat louder tone,
+and turned to look at the jury, as if bidding them note the hesitation
+of the witness; though, indeed, the waiting was so slight that none but
+a trickster like Burlingame would have taken advantage of it, and only
+then when there was much behind.
+
+For a moment longer Crozier remained silent, getting strength, as it
+were, and saying to himself, “What does he know?” and then, with a
+composed look of inquiry at the judge, who appeared to take no notice,
+he said: “I have already, in evidence, given my name to the court.”
+
+“Witness, what is your name?” again almost shouted the lawyer, with a
+note of indignation in his voice, as though here was a dangerous fellow
+committing a misdemeanour in their very presence. He spread out his
+hands to the jury, as though bidding them observe, if they would, this
+witness hesitating in answer to a simple, primary question--a witness
+who had just sworn a man’s life away!
+
+“What is your name?”
+
+“James Gathorne Kerry, as I have already given it to the court,” was the
+calm reply.
+
+“Where do you live?”
+
+“In Askatoon, as I have already said in evidence; and if it is necessary
+to give my domicile, I live at the house of Mrs. Tyndall Tynan, Pearl
+Street--as you know so well.”
+
+The tone in which he uttered the last few words was such that even the
+judge pricked up his ears.
+
+A look of hatred came into the decadent but able lawyer’s face.
+
+“Where do you live when you are at home?”
+
+“Mrs. Tynan’s house is the only home I have at present.”
+
+He was outwitting the pursuer so far, but it only gained him time, as he
+knew; and he knew also that no suggestive hint concerning the episode at
+Mrs. Tynan’s, when Burlingame was asked to leave her house, would be of
+any avail now.
+
+“Where were you born?”
+
+“In Ireland.”
+
+“What part of Ireland?”
+
+“County Kerry.”
+
+“What place--what town or city or village in County Kerry?”
+
+“In neither.”
+
+“What house, then--what estate?” Burlingame was more than nettled; and
+he sharpened his sword.
+
+“The estate of Castlegarry.”
+
+“What was your name in Ireland?”
+
+In the short silence that followed, the quick-drawn breath of many
+excited and some agitated people could be heard. Among the latter were
+Mrs. Tynan and her daughter and Malachi Deely; among those who held
+their breath in suspense were John Sibley, Studd Bradley the financier,
+and the Young Doctor. The swish of a skirt seemed ridiculously loud
+in the hush, and the scratching of the judge’s quill pen was noisily
+irritating.
+
+“My name in Ireland was James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, commonly called
+Shiel Crozier,” came the even reply from the witness-box.
+
+“James Shiel Gathorne Crozier in Ireland, but James Gathorne Kerry
+here!” Burlingame turned to the jury significantly. “What other name
+have you been known by in or out of Ireland?” he added sharply to
+Crozier. “No other name so far as I know.”
+
+“No other name so far as you know,” repeated the lawyer in a sarcastic
+tone intended to impress the court.
+
+“Who was your father?”
+
+“John Gathorne Crozier.”
+
+“Any title?”
+
+“He was a baronet.”
+
+“What was his business?”
+
+“He had no profession, though he had business, of course.”
+
+“Ah, he lived by his wits?”
+
+“No, he was not a lawyer! I have said he had no profession. He lived on
+his money on his estate.”
+
+The judge waved down the laughter at Burlingame’s expense.
+
+“In official documents what was his description?” snarled Burlingame.
+
+“‘Gentleman’ was his designation in official documents.”
+
+“You, then, were the son of a gentleman?” There was a hateful suggestion
+in the tone.
+
+“I was.”
+
+“A legitimate son?”
+
+Nothing in Crozier’s face showed what he felt, except his eyes, and they
+had a look in them which might well have made his questioner shrink. He
+turned calmly to the judge.
+
+“Your honour, does this bear upon the case? Must I answer this legal
+libertine?”
+
+At the word libertine, the judge, the whole court, and the audience
+started; but it was presently clear the witness meant that the
+questioner was abusing his legal privileges, though the people present
+interpreted it another way, and quite rightly.
+
+The reply of the judge was in favour of the lawyer. “I do not quite see
+the full significance of the line of defence, but I think I must allow
+the question,” was the judge’s gentle and reluctant reply, for he
+was greatly impressed by this witness, by his transparent honesty and
+straightforwardness.
+
+“Were you a legitimate son of John Gathorne Crozier and his wife?” asked
+Burlingame.
+
+“Yes, a legitimate son,” answered Crozier in an even voice.
+
+“Is John Gathorne Crozier still living?”
+
+“I said that gentleman was his designation in official documents. I
+supposed that would convey the fact that he was not living, but I see
+you do not quickly grasp a point.”
+
+Burlingame was stung by the laughter in the court and ventured a
+riposte.
+
+“But is once a gentleman always a gentleman an infallible rule?”
+
+“I suppose not; I did not mean to convey that; but once a rogue always a
+bad lawyer holds good in every country,” was Crozier’s comment in a low,
+quiet voice which stirred and amused the audience again.
+
+“I must ask counsel to put questions which have some relevance even to
+his own line of defence,” remarked the judge sternly. “This is not a
+corner grocery.”
+
+Burlingame bowed. He had had a facer, but he had also shown the witness
+to have been living under an assumed name. That was a good start.
+He hoped to add to the discredit. He had absolutely no knowledge of
+Crozier’s origin and past; but he was in a position to find it out if
+Crozier told the truth on oath, and he was sure he would.
+
+“Where was your domicile in the old country?” Burlingame asked.
+
+“In County Kerry--with a flat in London.”
+
+“An estate in County Kerry?”
+
+“A house and two thousand acres.”
+
+“Is it your property still?”
+
+“It is not.”
+
+“You sold it?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“If you did not sell, how is it that you do not own it?”
+
+“It was sold for me--in spite of me.”
+
+The judge smiled, the people smiled, the jury smiled. Truly, though a
+life-history was being exposed with incredible slowness--“like pulling
+teeth,” as the Young Doctor said--it was being touched off with
+laughter.
+
+“You were in debt?”
+
+“Quite.”
+
+“How did you get into debt?”
+
+“By spending more than my income.”
+
+If Askatoon had been proud of its legal talent in the past it had now
+reason for revising its opinion. Burlingame was frittering away the
+effect of his inquiry by elaboration of details. What he gained by the
+main startling fact he lost in the details by which the witness scored.
+He asked another main question.
+
+“Why did you leave Ireland?”
+
+“To make money.”
+
+“You couldn’t do it there?”
+
+“They were too many for me over there, so I thought I’d come here,”
+ slyly answered Crozier, and with a grave face; at which the solemn scene
+of a prisoner being tried for his life was shaken by a broad smiling,
+which in some cases became laughter haughtily suppressed by the court
+attendant.
+
+“Have you made money here?”
+
+“A little--with expectations.”
+
+“What was your income in Ireland?”
+
+“It began with three thousand pounds--”
+
+“Fifteen thousand dollars about?”
+
+“About that--about a lawyer’s fee for one whisper to a client less than
+that. It began with that and ended with nothing.”
+
+“Then you escaped?”
+
+“From creditors, lawyers, and other such? No, I found you here.”
+
+The judge intervened again almost harshly on the laughter of the court,
+with the remark that a man was being tried for his life; that ribaldry
+was out of place; and that, unless the course pursued by the counsel
+was to discredit the reliability of the character of the witness, the
+examination was in excess of the privilege of counsel.
+
+“Your honour has rightly apprehended what my purpose is,” Burlingame
+said deprecatingly. He then turned to Crozier again, and his voice
+rose as it did when he began the examination. It was as though he was
+starting all over again.
+
+“What was it compelled” (he was boldly venturing) “you to leave Ireland
+at last? What was the incident which drove you out from the land where
+you were born--from being the owner of two thousand acres”--
+
+“Partly bog,” interposed Crozier.
+
+“--From being the owner of two thousand acres to becoming a kind of
+head-groom on a ranch? What was the cause of your flight?”
+
+“Flight! I came in one of the steamers of the Company for which your
+firm are the agents. Eleven days it took to come from Glasgow to
+Quebec.”
+
+Again the court rippled, again the attendant intervened.
+
+Burlingame was nonplussed this time, but he gathered himself together.
+
+“What was the process of law which forced you to leave your own land?”
+
+“None at all.”
+
+“What were your debts when you left?”
+
+“None at all.”
+
+“How much was the last debt you paid?”
+
+“Two thousand five hundred pounds.”
+
+“What was its nature?”
+
+“It was a debt of honour--do you understand?” The subtle challenge of
+the voice, the sarcasm, was not lost. Again there was a struggle on the
+part of the audience not to laugh outright, and so be driven from the
+court as had been threatened.
+
+The judge interposed again with the remark, not very severe in tone,
+that the witness was not in the box to ask questions, but to answer
+them. At the same time he must remind counsel that the examination must
+discontinue unless something more relevant immediately appeared in the
+evidence.
+
+There was silence again for a moment, and even Crozier himself seemed to
+steel himself for a question he felt was coming.
+
+“Are you married or single?” asked Burlingame, and he did not need to
+raise his voice to summon the interest of the court.
+
+“I was married.”
+
+One person in the audience nearly cried out. It was Kitty Tynan. She
+had never allowed herself to think of that, but even if she had, what
+difference could it make whether he was married or single, since he was
+out of her star?
+
+“Are you not married now?”
+
+“I do not know.”
+
+“You mean you do not know if you have been divorced?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“You mean your wife is dead?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“What do you mean? That you do not know whether your wife is living or
+dead?”
+
+“Quite so.”
+
+“Have you heard from her since you saw her last?”
+
+“I had one letter.”
+
+Kitty Tynan thought of the unopened letter in a woman’s handwriting in
+the green baize desk in her mother’s house.
+
+“No more?”
+
+“No more.”
+
+“Are we to understand that you do not know whether your wife is living
+or dead?”
+
+“I have no information that she is dead.”
+
+“Why did you leave her?”
+
+“I have not said that I left her. Primarily I left Ireland.”
+
+“Assuming that she is alive, your wife will not live with you?”
+
+“Ah, what information have you to that effect?” The judge informed
+Crozier that he must not ask questions of counsel.
+
+“Why is she not with you here?”
+
+“As you said, I am only picking up a living here, and even the passage
+by your own second-class steamship line is expensive.”
+
+The judge suppressed a smile. He greatly liked the witness.
+
+“Do you deny that you parted from your wife in anger?”
+
+“When I am asked that question I will try to answer it. Meanwhile, I do
+not deny what has not been put before me in the usual way.”
+
+Here the judge sternly rebuked the counsel, who ventured upon one last
+question.
+
+“Have you any children?”
+
+“None.”
+
+“Has your brother, who inherited, any children?”
+
+“None that I know of.”
+
+“Are you the heir-presumptive to the baronetcy?”
+
+“I am.”
+
+“Yet your wife will not live with you?”
+
+“Call Mrs. Crozier as a witness and see. Meanwhile, I am not upon my
+trial.”
+
+He turned to the judge, who promptly called upon Burlingame to conclude
+his examination.
+
+Burlingame asked two questions more.
+
+“Why did you change your name when you came here?”
+
+“I wanted to obliterate myself.”
+
+“I put it to you, that what you want is to avoid the outraged law of
+your own country.”
+
+“No--I want to avoid the outrageous lawyers of yours.”
+
+Again there was a pause in the proceedings, and on a protest from the
+crown attorney the judge put an end to the cross-examination with the
+solemn reminder that a man was being tried for his life, and that the
+present proceedings were a lamentable reflection on the levity of human
+nature--in Askatoon. Turning with friendly scrutiny to Crozier, he said:
+
+“In the early stage of his examination the witness informed the court
+that he had made a heavy loss through a debt of honour immediately
+before leaving England. Will he say in what way he incurred the
+obligation? Are we to assume that it was through gambling-card-playing,
+or other games of chance?”
+
+“Through backing the wrong horse,” was Crozier’s instant reply.
+
+“That phrase is often applied to mining or other unreal flights for
+fortune,” said the judge, with a dry smile.
+
+“This was a real horse on a real flight to the winning-post,” added
+Crozier, with a quirk at the corner of his mouth.
+
+“Honest contest with man or horse is no crime, but it is tragedy to
+stake all on the contest and lose,” was the judge’s grave and pedagogic
+comment. “We shall now hear from the counsel for defence his reason for
+conducting his cross-examination on such unusual lines. Latitude of this
+kind is only permissible if it opens up any weakness in the case against
+the prisoner.”
+
+The judge thus did Burlingame a good turn as well as Crozier, by
+creating an atmosphere of gravity, even of tragedy, in which Burlingame
+could make his speech in defence of the prisoner.
+
+Burlingame started hesitatingly, got into his stride, assembled the
+points of his defence with the skill of which he really was capable. He
+made a strong appeal for acquittal, but if not acquittal, then a verdict
+of manslaughter. He showed that the only real evidence which could
+convict his man of murder was that of the witness Crozier. If he had
+been content to discredit evidence of the witness by an adroit but
+guarded misuse of the facts he had brought out regarding Crozier’s past,
+to emphasise the fact that he was living under an assumed name and that
+his bona fides was doubtful, he might have impressed the jury to some
+slight degree. He could not, however, control the malice he felt, and he
+was smarting from Crozier’s retorts. He had a vanity easily lacerated,
+and he was now too savage to abate the ferocity of his forensic attack.
+He sat down, however, with a sure sense of failure. Every orator
+knows when he is beating the air, even when his audience is quiet and
+apparently attentive.
+
+The crown attorney was a man of the serenest method and of cold,
+unforensic logic. He had a deadly precision of speech, a very remarkable
+memory, and a great power of organising and assembling his facts. There
+was little left of Burlingame’s appeal when he sat down. He declared
+that to discredit Crozier’s evidence because he chose to use another
+name than his own, because he was parted from his wife, because he left
+England practically penniless to earn an honest living--no one had
+shown it was not--was the last resort of legal desperation. It was
+an indefensible thing to endeavour to create prejudice against a man
+because of his own evidence given with great frankness. Not one single
+word of evidence had the defence brought to discredit Crozier, save by
+Crozier’s own word of mouth; and if Crozier had cared to commit perjury,
+the defence could not have proved him guilty of it. Even if Crozier had
+not told the truth as it was, counsel for the defence would have found
+it impossible to convict him of falsehood. But even if Crozier was a
+perjurer, justice demanded that his evidence should be weighed as truth
+from its own inherent probability and supported by surrounding facts.
+In a long experience he had never seen animus against a witness so
+recklessly exhibited as by counsel in this case.
+
+The judge was not quite so severe in his summing up, but he did say of
+Crozier that his direct replies to Burlingame’s questions, intended
+to prejudice him in the eyes of the community into which he had come a
+stranger, bore undoubted evidence of truth; for if he had chosen to say
+what might have saved him from the suspicions, ill or well founded, of
+his present fellow-citizens, he might have done so with impunity, save
+for the reproach of his own conscience. On the whole, the judge summed
+up powerfully against the prisoner Logan, with the result that the jury
+were not out for more than a half-hour. Their verdict was, guilty of
+murder.
+
+In the scene which followed, Crozier dropped his head into his hand and
+sat immovable as the judge put on the black cap and delivered sentence.
+When the prisoner left the dock, and the crowd began to disperse,
+satisfied that justice had been done--save in that small circle where
+the M’Mahons were supreme--Crozier rose with other witnesses to leave.
+As he looked ahead of him the first face he saw was that of Kitty Tynan,
+and something in it startled him. Where had he seen that look before?
+Yes, he remembered. It was when he was twenty-one and had been sent away
+to Algiers because he was falling in love with a farmer’s daughter. As
+he drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those
+long years ago, he had seen the girl’s face looking at him from the
+window of a labourer’s cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied
+desolation haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married
+and gone to live in Scotland--that place of torment for an Irish soul.
+
+The look in Kitty Tynan’s face reminded him of that farmer’s lass in his
+boyhood’s history. He was to blame then--was he to blame now? Certainly
+not consciously, not by any intended word or act. Now he met her eyes
+and smiled at her, not gaily, not gravely, but with a kind of whimsical
+helplessness; for she was the first to remind him that he was leaving
+the court-room in a different position (if not a different man) from
+that in which he entered it. He had entered the court-room as James
+Gathorne Kerry, and he was leaving it as Shiel Crozier; and somehow
+James Gathorne Kerry had always been to himself a different man
+from Shiel Crozier, with different views, different feelings, if not
+different characteristics.
+
+He saw faces turned to him, a few with intense curiosity, fewer
+still with a little furtiveness, some with amusement, and many with
+unmistakable approval; for one thing was clear, if his own evidence
+was correct: he was the son of a baronet, he was heir-presumptive to
+a baronetcy, and he had scored off Augustus Burlingame in a way which
+delighted a naturally humorous people. He noted, however, that the nod
+which Studd Bradley, the financier, gave him had in it an enigmatic
+something which puzzled him. Surely Bradley could not be prejudiced
+against him because of the evidence he had given. There was nothing
+criminal in living under an assumed name, which, anyhow, was his own
+name in three-fourths of it, and in the other part was the name of the
+county where he was born.
+
+“Divils me own, I told you he was up among the dukes,” said Malachi
+Deely to John Sibley as they came out. “And he’s from me own county, and
+I know the name well enough; an’ a damn good name it is. The bulls of
+Castlegarry was famous in the south of Ireland.”
+
+“I’ve a warm spot for him. I was right, you see. Backing horses ruined
+him,” said Sibley in reply; and he looked at Crozier admiringly.
+
+There is the communion of saints, but nearer and dearer is the communion
+of sinners; for a common danger is their bond, and that is even more
+than a common hope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. “STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE”
+
+On the evening of the day of the trial, Mrs. Tynan, having fixed the
+new blind to the window of Shiel Crozier’s room, which was on the
+ground-floor front, was lowering and raising it to see if it worked
+properly, when out in the moonlit street she saw a wagon approaching her
+house surrounded and followed by obviously excited men. Once before she
+had seen just such a group nearing her door. That was when her husband
+was brought home to die in her arms. She had a sudden conviction, as,
+holding the blind in her hand, she looked out into the night, that again
+tragedy was to cross her threshold. Standing for an instant under
+the fascination of terror, she recovered herself with a shiver, and,
+stepping down from the chair where she had been fixing the blind, with
+the instinct of real woman, she ran to the bed of the room where she
+was, and made it ready. Why did she feel that it was Shiel Crozier’s bed
+which should be made ready? Or did she not feel it? Was it only a dazed,
+automatic act, not connected with the person who was to lie in the bed?
+Was she then a fatalist? Were trouble and sorrow so much her portion
+that to her mind this tragedy, whatever it was, must touch the man
+nearest to her--and certainly Shiel Crozier was far nearer than Jesse
+Bulrush. Quite apart from wealth or position, personality plays a part
+more powerful than all else in the eyes of every woman who has a soul
+which has substance enough to exist at all. Such men as Crozier have
+compensations for “whate’er they lack.” It never occurred to Mrs. Tynan
+to go to Jesse Bulrush’s room or the room of middle-aged, comely Nurse
+Egan. She did the instinctive thing, as did the woman who sent a man a
+rope as a gift, on the ground that the fortune in his hand said that he
+was born not to be drowned.
+
+Mrs. Tynan’s instinct was right. By the time she had put the bed into
+shape, got a bowl of water ready, lighted a lamp, and drawn the bed out
+from the wall, there was a knocking at the door. In a moment she had
+opened it, and was faced by John Sibley, whose hat was off as though
+he were in the presence of death. This gave her a shock, and her eyes
+strove painfully to see the figure which was being borne feet foremost
+over her threshold.
+
+“It’s Mr. Crozier?” she asked.
+
+“He was shot coming home here--by the M’Mahon mob, I guess,” returned
+Sibley huskily.
+
+“Is--is he dead?” she asked tremblingly. “No. Hurt bad.”
+
+“The kindest man--it’d break Kitty’s heart--and mine,” she added
+hastily, for she might be misunderstood; and John Sibley had shown signs
+of interest in her daughter.
+
+“Where’s the Young Doctor?” she asked, catching sight of Crozier’s face
+as they laid him on the bed. “He’s done the first aid, and he’s off
+getting what’s needed for the operation. He’ll be here in a minute or
+so,” said a banker who, a few days before, had refused Crozier credit.
+
+“Gently, gently--don’t do it that way,” said Mrs. Tynan in sharp reproof
+as they began to take off Crozier’s clothes.
+
+“Are you going to stay while we do it?” asked a maker of mineral waters,
+who whined at the prayer meetings of a soul saved and roared at his
+employees like a soul damned.
+
+“Oh, don’t be a fool!” was the impatient reply. “I’ve a grown-up girl
+and I’ve had a husband. Don’t pull at his vest like that. Go away. You
+don’t know how. I’ve had experience--my husband... There, wait till
+I cut it away with the scissors. Cover him with the quilt. Now, then,
+catch hold of his trousers under the quilt, and draw them off slowly....
+There you are--and nothing to shock the modesty of a grown-up woman or
+any other when a life’s at stake. What does the Young Doctor say?”
+
+“Hush! He’s coming to,” interposed the banker. It was as though the
+quiet that followed the removal of his clothes and the touch of Mrs.
+Tynan’s hand on his head had called Crozier back from unconsciousness.
+
+The first face he saw was that of the banker. In spite of the loss of
+blood and his pitiable condition, a whimsical expression came to his
+eyes. “Lucky for you you didn’t lend me the money,” he said feebly.
+
+The banker shook his head. “I’m not thinking of that, Mr. Crozier. God
+knows, I’m not!”
+
+Crozier caught sight of Mrs. Tynan. “It’s hard on you to have me brought
+here,” he murmured as she took his hand.
+
+“Not so hard as if they hadn’t,” she replied. “That’s what a home’s
+for--not just a place for eating and drinking and sleeping.”
+
+“It wasn’t part of the bargain,” he said weakly.
+
+“It was my part of the bargain.”
+
+“Here’s Kitty,” said the maker of mineral waters, as there was the swish
+of a skirt at the door.
+
+“Who are you calling ‘Kitty’?” asked the girl indignantly, as they
+motioned her back from the bedside. “There’s too many people here,”
+ she added abruptly to her mother. “We can take care of him”--she nodded
+towards the bed. “We don’t want any help except--except from John
+Sibley, if he will stay, and you too,” she added to the banker.
+
+She had not yet looked at the figure on the bed. She felt she could not
+do so while all these people were in the room. She needed time to adjust
+herself to the situation. It was as though she was the authority in the
+household and took control even of her mother. Mrs. Tynan understood.
+She had a great belief in her daughter and admired her cleverness, and
+she was always ready to be ruled by her; it was like being “bossed” by
+the man she had lost.
+
+“Yes, you’d all better go,” Mrs. Tynan said. “He wants all the air he
+can get, and I can’t make things ready with all of you in the room. Go
+outdoors for a while, anyway. It’s summer and you’ll not take cold! The
+Young Doctor has work to do, and my girl and I and these two will help
+him plenty.” She motioned towards the banker and the gambling farmer.
+
+In a moment the room was cleared of all save the four and Crozier,
+who knew that upon the coming operation depended his life. He had been
+conscious when the Young Doctor said this was so, and he was thinking,
+as he lay there watching these two women out of his nearly closed eyes,
+that he would like to be back in Ireland at Castlegarry with the girl he
+had married and had left without a good-bye near five years gone. If he
+had to die he would like to die at home; and that could not be.
+
+Kitty had the courage to turn towards him now. As she caught sight
+of his face for the first time--she had so far kept her head turned
+away--she became very pale. Then, suddenly, she gathered herself
+together. Going over to the bed, she took the limp hand lying on the
+coverlet.
+
+“Courage, soldier,” she said in the colloquialism her father often used,
+and she smiled at Crozier a great-hearted, helpful smile.
+
+“You are a brick of bricks, Kitty Tynan,” he whispered, and smiled.
+
+“Here comes the Young Doctor,” said Mrs. Tynan as the door opened
+unceremoniously.
+
+“Well, I have to make an excursion,” Crozier said, “and I mayn’t come
+back. If I don’t, au revoir, Kitty.”
+
+“You are coming back all right,” she answered firmly. “It’ll take more
+than a horse-thief’s bullet to kill you. You’ve got to come back. You’re
+as tough as nails. And I’ll hold your hand all through it--yes, I will!”
+ she added to the Young Doctor, who had patted her shoulder and told her
+to go to another room.
+
+“I’m going to help you, doctor-man, if you please,” she said, as he
+turned to the box of instruments which his assistant held.
+
+“There’s another--one of my colleagues--coming I hope,” the Young Doctor
+replied.
+
+“That’s all right, but I am staying to see Mr. Crozier through. I said
+I’d hold his hand, and I’m going to do it,” she added firmly.
+
+“Very well; put on a big apron, and see that you go through with us if
+you start. No nonsense.”
+
+“There’ll be no nonsense from me,” she answered quietly.
+
+“I want the bed in the middle of the room,” the Young Doctor said, and
+the others gently moved it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. A STORY TO BE TOLD
+
+A great surgeon said a few years ago that he was never nervous when
+performing an operation, though there was sometimes a moment when every
+resource of character, skill, and brain came into play. That was when,
+having diagnosed correctly and operated, a new and unexpected seat of
+trouble and peril was exposed, and instant action had to be taken. The
+great man naturally rose to the situation and dealt with it coolly; but
+he paid the price afterwards in his sleep when, night after night, he
+performed the operation over and over again with the same strain on his
+subconscious self.
+
+So it was with Kitty Tynan in her small way. She had insisted on being
+allowed to help at the operation, and the Young Doctor, who had a good
+knowledge of life and knew the stuff in her, consented; and so far as
+the operation was concerned she justified his faith in her. When the
+banker had to leave the room at the sight of the carnage, she remained,
+and she and John Sibley were as cool as the Young Doctor and his
+fellow-anatomist, till it was all over, and Shiel Crozier was started
+again on a safe journey back to health. Then a thing, which would have
+been amusing if it had not been so deeply human, happened. She and John
+Sibley went out of the house together into the moonlit night, and the
+reaction seized them both at the same moment. She gave a gulp and burst
+into tears, and he, though as tall as Crozier, also broke down, and they
+sat on the stump of a tree together, her hand in his, and cried like two
+children.
+
+“Never since I was a little runt--did I--never cried in thirty
+years--and here I am-leaking like a pail!” Thus spoke John Sibley
+in gasps and squeezing Kitty’s hand all the time unconsciously, but
+spontaneously, and as part of what he felt. He would not, however, have
+dared to hold her hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to
+hold it, and wanting her also to share his not wholly reputed, though
+far from precarious, existence. He had never got so far as to tell her
+that; but if she had understanding she would realise after to-night what
+he had in his mind. She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of
+his very vital palm, had her turn at explanation. “I wouldn’t have broke
+down myself--it was all your fault,” she said. “I saw it--yes--in your
+face as we left the house. I’m so glad it’s over safe--no one belonging
+to him here, and not knowing if he’d wake up alive or not--I just was
+swamped.”
+
+He took up the misty excuse and explanation. “I had a feeling for him
+from the start; and then that Logan Trial to-day, and the way he talked
+out straight, and told the truth to shame the devil--it’s what does a
+man good! And going bung over a horserace--that’s what got me too, where
+I was young and tender. Swatted that Burlingame every time--one eye,
+two eyes all black, teeth out, nose flattened--called him an
+‘outrageous lawyer’--my, that last clip was a good one! You bet he’s a
+sport--Crozier.”
+
+Kitty nodded eagerly while still wiping her red eyes. “He made the judge
+smile--I saw it, not ten minutes before his honour put on the black cap.
+You couldn’t have believed it, if you hadn’t seen it--
+
+“Here, let go my hand,” she added, suddenly conscious of the enormity
+John Sibley was committing by squeezing it now.
+
+It is perfectly true that she did not quite realise that he had taken
+her hand--that he had taken her hand. She was conscious in a nice,
+sympathetic way that her hand had been taken, but it was lost in the
+abstraction of her emotion.
+
+“Oh, here, let it go quick!” she added--“and not because mother’s
+coming, either,” she added as the door opened and her mother came
+out--not to spy, not to reproach her daughter for sitting with a man
+in the moonlight at ten o’clock at night, but--good, practical soul--to
+bring them each a cup of beef-tea.
+
+“Here, you two,” she said as she hurried to them. “You need something
+after that business in there, and there isn’t time to get supper ready.
+It’s as good for you as supper, anyway. I don’t believe in underfeeding.
+Nothing’s too good to swallow.”
+
+She watched them sip the tea slowly like two schoolchildren.
+
+“And when you’ve drunk it you must go right to bed, Kitty,” she added
+presently. “You’ve had your own way, and you saw the thing through; but
+there’s always a reaction, and you’ll pay for it. It wasn’t fit work for
+a girl of your age; but I’m proud of your nerve, and I’m glad you showed
+the Young Doctor what you can do. You’ve got your father’s brains and
+my grit,” she added with a sigh of satisfaction. “Come along--bed now,
+Kitty. If you get too tired you’ll have bad dreams.”
+
+Perhaps she was too tired. In any case she had dreams. Just as the great
+surgeon performed his operation over and over in his sleep, so Kitty
+Tynan, through long hours that night, and for many nights afterwards,
+saw the swift knives, helped to staunch the blood, held the basin,
+disinfected the instruments which had made an attack on the man of men
+in her eyes, and saw the wound stitched up--the last act of the business
+before the Young Doctor turned to her and said, “You’ll do wherever
+you’re put in life, Miss Kitty Tynan. You’re a great girl. And now get
+some fresh air and forget all about it.”
+
+Forget all about it! So, the Young Doctor knew what happened after a
+terrific experience like that! In truth, he knew only too well. Great
+surgeons do surgery only and have innumerable operations to give them
+skill; but a country physician and surgeon must be a sane being to keep
+his nerve when called on to use the knife, and he must have a more than
+usual gift for such business. That is what the Young Doctor had; but he
+knew it was not easy to forget those scenes in which man carved the body
+of fellow-man, laying bare the very vitals of existence, seeing “the
+wheels go round.”
+
+It haunted Kitty Tynan in the night-time, and perhaps it was that which
+toned down a little the colour of her face--the kind of difference of
+colouring there is between natural gold and 14-carat. But in the daytime
+she was quite happy, and though there was haunting, it was Shiel Crozier
+who, first helpless, then convalescent, was haunted by her presence. It
+gave him pleasure, but it was a pleasure which brought pain. He was
+not so blind that he had not caught at her romance, in which he was
+the central figure--a romance which had not vanished since the day he
+declared in the court-room that he was married, or had been married.
+Kitty’s eyes told their own story, and it made him uneasy and
+remorseful. Yet he could not remember when, even for an instant, he had
+played with her. She had always seemed part of a simple family life for
+which he and Jesse Bulrush and her mother and the nurse-Nurse Egan-were
+responsible. What a blessing Nurse Egan had been! Otherwise, all the
+nursing would have been performed by Kitty and her mother, and it
+might well have broken them down, for they were determined to nurse him
+themselves.
+
+When, however, Nurse Egan came back, two days after the operation
+was performed, they included her in the responsibility, as one of
+the family; and as she had no other important case on at the time,
+fortunately she could give Crozier almost undivided attention. She had
+been at first disposed to keep Kitty out of the sick-chamber, as no
+place for a girl, but she soon abandoned that position, for Kitty was
+not the girl ever to think of impropriety. She was primitive and she had
+rather a before-the-flood nature, but she had not the faintest vulgar
+strain in her. Her mind was essentially pure; nothing material in her
+had been awakened. Her greatest joy was to do the many things for the
+patient which a nurse must do--prepare his food, give him drink, adjust
+his pillows, bathe his face and hands, take his temperature; and on his
+part he tried hard to disguise from her the apprehension he felt, and to
+avoid any hint by word or look that he saw anything save the actions of
+a kind heart. True, her views as to what was proper and improper might
+possibly be on a different plane from his own. For instance, he had seen
+girls of her station in the West kiss young men freely--men whom they
+had no thought of marrying; and that was not the custom of his own class
+in his home-country.
+
+As he got well slowly, and life opened out before him again, he felt he
+had to pursue a new course, and in that course he must take account of
+Kitty Tynan, though he could not decide how. He had a deep confidence in
+the Young Doctor, in his judgment and his character; and it was almost
+inevitable that he should tell his life-story to the man whose skill had
+saved him from death in a strange land, with all undone he wanted to do
+ere he returned to a land which was not strange.
+
+The thing happened, as such things do happen, in a quite natural way one
+day when he and the Young Doctor were discussing the probable verdict
+against the man who had shot him--the trial was to come on soon, and
+once again Augustus Burlingame was to be counsel for the defence, and
+once again Crozier would have to appear in a witness-box.
+
+“I think you ought to know, Crozier, that, in view of the trial,
+Burlingame has written to a firm of lawyers in Kerry to get full
+information about your past,” the Young Doctor said.
+
+Crozier gave one of those little jerks of the head characteristic of
+him and said: “Why, of course; I knew he would do that after I gave my
+evidence in the Logan Trial.” He raised himself on his elbow. “I owe
+you a great deal,” he added feelingly, “and I can’t repay you in cash or
+kindness for what you have done; but it is due you to tell you my whole
+story, and that is what I propose to do now.”
+
+“If you think--”
+
+“I do think; and also I want both Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear
+my story. Better, truer friends a man could not have; and I want them to
+know the worst and the best there is, if there is any best. They and you
+have trusted me, been too good to me, and what I said at the trial is
+not enough. I want to do what I’ve never done before. I want to tell
+everything. It will do me good; and perhaps as I tell it I’ll see myself
+and everything else in a truer light than I’ve yet seen it all.”
+
+“You are sure you want Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear?”
+
+“Absolutely sure.”
+
+“They are not in your rank in life, you know.”
+
+“They are my friends, and I owe them more than I can say. There is
+nothing they cannot or should not hear. I can say that at least.”
+
+“Shall I ask them to come?”
+
+“Yes. Give me a swig of water first. It won’t be easy, but--”
+
+He held out his hand, and the Young Doctor grasped it.
+
+Suddenly the latter said: “You are sure you will not be sorry? That it
+is not a mood of the moment due to physical weakness?”
+
+“Quite sure. I determined on it the day I was shot--and before I was
+shot.”
+
+“All right.” The Young Doctor disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. “HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON”
+
+The stillness of a summer’s day in Prairie Land has all the
+characteristics of music. That is not so paradoxical as it seems. The
+effect of some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the senses,
+a suspension of motion and aggressive life; to reduce existence to mere
+pulsation. It was this kind of feeling which pervaded that region
+of sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story. The sounds that
+sprinkled the general stillness were in themselves sleepy notes of the
+pervasive music of somnolent nature--the sough of the pine at the door,
+the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding beat of the steam-thresher
+out of sight hard by, the purring of the cat in the arms of Kitty Tynan
+as, with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the tale of a life
+as distant from that which she lived as she was from Eve.
+
+She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on; it even seemed to
+her she was listening to a theme beyond her sphere, like some shameless
+eavesdropper at the curtains of a secret ceremonial. Once or twice she
+looked at her mother and at the Young Doctor, as though to reassure
+herself that she was not a vulgar intruder. It was far more impressive
+to her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene at the Logan Trial
+when a man was sentenced to death. It was strangely magnetic, this
+tale of a man’s existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the
+mantelpiece, as it mechanically ticked off the time, seemed only part
+of some mysterious machinery of life. Once a dove swept down upon the
+window-sill, and, peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital
+with its deep contralto note, and then fled like a small blue cloud into
+the wide and--as it seemed--everlasting peace beyond the doorway.
+
+There was nothing at all between themselves and the far sky-line save
+little clumps of trees here and there, little clusters of buildings and
+houses--no visible animal life. Everything conspired to give a dignity
+in keeping with the drama of failure being unfolded in the commonplace
+home of the widow Tynan. Yet the home too had its dignity. The engineer
+father had had tastes, and he had insisted on plain, unfigured curtains
+and wallpaper and carpets, when carpets were used; and though his wife
+had at first protested against the unfigured carpets as more difficult
+to keep clean and as showing the dirt too easily, she had come to like
+the one-colour scheme, and in that respect her home had an individuality
+rare in her surroundings.
+
+That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background; for what her
+bright colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes
+and “Axminsters,” such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the
+imagination. It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous
+surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been
+arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the
+story; and if it were not a true tale told just as it happened.
+
+Perhaps the tale was the more impressive because of Crozier’s deep
+baritone voice, capable, as it was, of much modulation, yet, except
+when he was excited, having a slight monotone like the note of a violin
+with the mute upon the strings.
+
+This was his tale:
+
+“Well, to begin with, I was born at Castlegarry, in Kerry--you know the
+main facts from what I said in court. As a boy I wasn’t so bad a sort.
+I had one peculiarity. I always wanted ‘to have something on,’ as John
+Sibley would say. No matter what it was, I must have something on it.
+And I was very lucky--worse luck!”
+
+They all laughed at the bull. “I feel at home at once,” murmured the
+Young Doctor, for he had come from near Enniskillen years agone, and
+there is not so much difference between Enniskillen and Kerry when it
+comes to Irish bulls.
+
+“Worse luck, it was,” continued Crozier, “because it made me confident
+of always winning. It’s hard to say how early I began to believe I could
+see things that were going to happen. By the hour I used to shake the
+dice on the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes
+shut the numbers about to come up. Of course now and then I saw the
+right numbers; and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated
+the gift I’d be able to be right nearly every time. When I went to a
+horse-race I used to fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see
+beforehand the number of the winner. Again sometimes I was very right
+indeed, and that deepened my confidence in myself. I was always at it.
+I’d try and guess--try and see--the number of the hymn which was on the
+paper in the vicar’s hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with
+myself on it. I would bet with myself or with anybody available on any
+conceivable thing--the minutes late a train would be; the pints of
+milk a cow would give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the
+babies that would be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a
+peck of raw potatoes. I was out against the universe. But it wasn’t
+serious at all--just a boy’s mania--till one day my father met me in
+London when I came down from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite’s Club
+in St. James’s Street. There was the thing that finished me. I was
+twenty-one, and restless-minded, and with eyes wide open.
+
+“Well, he took me to Thwaite’s where I was to become a member, and
+after a little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the
+committee--he was a member of it. He told me to make myself at home,
+and I did so as soon as his back was turned. Almost the first thing with
+which I became sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a
+fascination for me. The binding was very old, and the leather was worn,
+as you will see the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels
+like a nice soap. That book brought me here.”
+
+He paused, and in the silence the Young Doctor pushed a glass of milk
+and brandy towards him. He sipped the contents. The others were in
+a state of tension. Kitty Tynan’s eyes were fixed on him as though
+hypnotised, and the Young Doctor was scarcely less interested; while the
+widow knitted harder and faster than she had ever done, and she could
+knit very fast indeed.
+
+“It was the betting-book of Thwaite’s, and it dated back almost to the
+time of the conquest of Quebec. Great men dead and gone long ago--near
+a hundred and fifty years ago-had put down their bets in the book, for
+Thwaite’s was then what it is now, the highest and best sporting club in
+the world.”
+
+Kitty Tynan’s face had a curious look, for there was a club in Askatoon,
+and it was said that all the “sports” assembled there. She had no idea
+what Thwaite’s Club in St. James’s Street would look like; but that did
+not matter. She supposed it must be as big as the Askatoon Court House
+at least.
+
+“Bets--bets--bets by men whose names were in every history, and the
+names of their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons; and all betting
+on the oddest things as well as the most natural things in the world.
+Some of the bets made were as mad as the bets I made myself. Oh!
+ridiculous, some of them were; and then again bets on things that
+stirred the world to the centre, from the loss of America to the
+beheading of Louis XVI.
+
+“It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis
+whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government
+which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six
+months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is
+now the United States if they revolted. This would be cheek-by-jowl with
+a bet that an heir would be born to one new-married pair before another
+pair. The very last bet made on the day I opened the book was that Queen
+Victoria would make Lord Salisbury a duke, that a certain gentleman
+known as S. S. could find his own door in St. James’s Square, blindfold,
+from the club, and that Corsair would win the Derby.
+
+“For two long hours I sat forgetful of everything around me, while I
+read that record--to me the most interesting the world could show. Every
+line was part of the history of the country, a part of the history of
+many lives, and it was all part of the ritual of the temple of the great
+god Chance. I was fascinated, lost in a land of wonders. Men came and
+went, but silently. At last there entered a gentleman whose picture I
+had so often seen in the papers--a man as well known in the sporting
+world as was Chamberlain in the political world. He was dressed
+spectacularly, but his face oozed good-nature, though his eyes were like
+bright bits of coal. He bred horses, he raced this, he backed that, he
+laid against the other; he was one of the greatest plungers, one of the
+biggest figures on the turf. He had been a kind of god to me--a god in
+a grey frock-coat, with a grey top-hat and field-glasses slung over
+his shoulder; or in a hunting-suit of the most picturesque kind--great
+pockets in a well-fitting coat, splendid striped waistcoat. Well, there,
+I only mention this because it played so big a part in bringing me to
+Askatoon.
+
+“He came up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful
+Adam’s fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and
+said, ‘Do you mind--for one minute?’ and he reached out a hand for the
+book.
+
+“I made way for him, and I suppose admiration showed in my eyes, because
+as he hastily wrote--what a generous scrawl it was!--he said to me,
+‘Haven’t we met somewhere before? I seem to remember your face.
+
+“Great gentleman, I thought, because it was certain he knew he had never
+seen me before, and I was overcome by the reflection that he wished
+to be civil in that way to me. ‘It’s my father’s face you remember, I
+should think,’ I answered. ‘He is a member here. I am only a visitor.
+I haven’t been elected yet.’ ‘Ah, we must see to that!’ he said with
+a smile, and laid a hand on my shoulder as though he’d known me many a
+year--and I only twenty-one. ‘Who is your father?’ he asked. When I told
+him he nodded. ‘Yes, yes, I know him--Crozier of Castlegarry; but I knew
+his father far better, though he was so much older than me, and indeed
+your grandfather also. Look--in this book is the first bet I ever
+made here after my election to the club, and it was made with your
+grandfather. There’s no age in the kingdom of sport, dear lad,’ he
+added, laughing--‘neither age nor sex nor position nor place. It’s the
+one democratic thing in the modern world. It’s a republic inside
+this old monarchy of ours. Look, here it is, my first bet with your
+grandfather--and I’m only sixty now!’ He smoothed the page with his hand
+in a manner such as I have seen a dean do with his sermon-paper in a
+cathedral puplit. ‘Here it is, thirty-six years ago.’ He read the bet
+aloud. It was on the Derby, he himself having bet that the Prince of
+Wale’s horse would win. ‘Your grandfather, dear lad,’ he repeated, ‘but
+you’ll find no bets of mine with your father. He didn’t inherit
+that strain, but your grandfather and your great-grandfather had
+it--sportsmen both, afraid of nothing, with big minds, great eyes for
+seeing, and a sense for a winner almost uncanny. Have you got it by any
+chance? Yes, yes, by George and by John, I see you have; you are your
+grandfather to a hair! His portrait is here in the club--in the next
+room. Have a look at it. He was only forty when it was done, and you’re
+very like him; the cut of the jib is there.’ He took my hand. ‘Good-bye,
+dear lad,’ he said; ‘we’ll meet-yes, we’ll meet often enough if you
+are like your grandfather. And I’ll always like to see you,’ he added
+generously.
+
+“‘I always wanted to meet you,’ I answered. ‘I’ve cut your pictures out
+of the papers to keep them--at Eton and Oxford.’ He laughed in great
+good-humour and pride. ‘So so, so so, and I am a hero then, with one
+follower! Well, well, dear lad, I don’t often go wrong, or anyhow I’m
+oftener right than wrong, and you might do worse than follow me--but no,
+I don’t want that responsibility. Go on your own--go on your own.’
+
+“A minute more and he was gone with a wave of the hand, and in
+excitement I picked up the betting-book. It almost took my breath away.
+He had staked a thousand pounds that the favourite of the Derby would
+not win the race, and that one of three outsiders would. As I sat
+overpowered by the magnitude of the bet the door opened, and he appeared
+with another man, not one with whose face I was then familiar, though as
+a duke and owner of great possessions, he was familiar to society. ‘I’ve
+put it down,’ he said. ‘Sign it, if it’s all in order.’ This the duke
+did, after apologizing for disturbing me. He looked at me keenly as
+he turned away. ‘Not the most elevating literature in the library,’
+he said, smiling ironically. ‘If you haven’t got a taste for it beyond
+control, don’t cultivate it.’ He nodded kindly, and left; and again,
+till my father came and found me, I buried myself in that book of
+fate--to me. I found many entries in my grandfather’s name, but not one
+in my father’s name. I have an idea that when a vice or virtue skips
+one generation, it appears with increased violence or persistence in the
+next, for, passing over my father into my defenceless breast, the spirit
+of sport went mad in me--or almost so. No miser ever had a more cheerful
+and happy hour than I had as I read the betting-book at Thwaites’.
+
+“I became a member of Thwaite’s soon after I left Oxford. As some men go
+to the Temple, some to the Stock Exchange, some to Parliament, I went to
+Thwaite’s. It was the centre of my interest, and I took chambers in Park
+Place, St. James’s Street, a few steps away. Here I met again constantly
+the great sportsman who had noticed me so kindly, and I became his
+follower, his disciple. I had started with him on a wave of prejudice in
+his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had
+staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could
+get with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred
+pounds. What he won--to my youthful eyes-was fabulous. There’s no use
+saying what you think--you kind friends, who’ve always done something
+in life--that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to
+the turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport. You must
+remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin
+of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in
+any generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the
+younger son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary
+for livelihood. If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman,
+had lived, it’s hard to tell what I should have become; for steered
+aright, given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have
+become ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another. But there
+it was, she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me. At
+Eton, at Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business
+of life. And when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left
+me, I had only one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman. I had
+a name as a cricketer--”
+
+“Ah--I remember, Crozier of Lammis!” interjected the Young Doctor
+involuntarily. “I’m a north of Ireland man, but I remember--”
+
+“Yes, Lammis,” the sick man went on. “Castlegarry was my father’s place,
+but my mother left me Lammis. When I got control of it, and of the
+securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn’t long in
+making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader.
+He gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed
+horses of my own. But the luck went against him at last, and then, of
+course, against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws
+the cash out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw
+also the whole internal economy out of your body--a ghastly, empty,
+collapsing thing.”
+
+Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh. She had once put two hundred dollars in
+a mine--on paper--and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in the
+lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more. When she read a
+fatal telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty,
+collapsing feeling.
+
+Pausing for a moment, in which he sipped some milk, Crozier then
+continued: “At last my leader died, and the see-saw of fortune began for
+me; and a good deal of my sound timber was sawed into logs and made
+into lumber to build some one else’s fortune. When things were balancing
+pretty easily, I married. It wasn’t a sordid business to restore my
+fortunes--I’ll say that for myself; but it wasn’t the thing to do, for
+I wasn’t secure in my position. I might go on the rocks; but was there
+ever a gambler who didn’t believe that he’d pull it off in a big way
+next time, and that the turn of the wheel against him was only to tame
+his spirit? Was there ever a gambler or sportsman of my class who didn’t
+talk about the ‘law of chances,’ on the basis that if red, as it were,
+came up three times, black stood a fair chance of coming up the fourth
+time? A silly enough conclusion; for on the law of chances there’s no
+reason why red shouldn’t come up three hundred times; and so I found
+that your run of bad luck may be so long that you cannot have a chance
+to recover, and are out of it before the wheel turns in your favour. I
+oughn’t to have married.”
+
+His voice had changed in tone, his look become most grave, there was
+something very like reverence in his face, and deprecating submission in
+his eyes. His fingers fussed with the rug that covered his knees.
+
+“God help the man that’s afraid of his own wife!” remarked the Young
+Doctor to himself, not erroneously reading the expression of Crozier’s
+face and the tone of his voice. “There’s nothing so unnerving.”
+
+“No, I oughtn’t to have done it,” Crozier went on. “But I will say again
+it wasn’t a sordid marriage, though she had great expectations, but
+not immediate; and she was a girl of great character. She was able and
+brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and she knew her own mind, and
+was radiantly handsome.”
+
+Kitty Tynan almost sniffed. Through a whole fortnight she had, with a
+courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation
+for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what
+his wife was like. She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman,
+delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw
+in the picture-papers. She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat,
+with a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief
+crossed on her breast, holding a basket of flowers, while a King Charles
+spaniel gambolled at her feet.
+
+This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
+Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
+exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
+afraid of stepping on her train. Was it strange she should think
+that? She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons
+according to her kind and from what she knew of life. So she imagined
+Crozier’s wife to have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who
+swept up the dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at
+all to the children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower
+than their ankles. She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a
+man like Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in
+the witness-box as he did; who took the bullet of the assassin with such
+courage; who broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech
+on a filly’s flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who,
+anyhow, couldn’t be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn’t a hand
+like a piece of steel and the skin of an antelope. It was enough to make
+a cat laugh, or a woman cry with rage.
+
+“Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly
+handsome!” There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing
+woman, in velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and
+overbearing, like grey poplin. Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the
+mirror-the half-length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her
+hands clench and her bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive
+calico frock, a thing for Chloe, not for Juno.
+
+She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
+deprecating homage, that “Hush-she-is-coming” in his eyes. What a fool a
+man was where a woman was concerned! Here she had been fighting herself
+for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the
+world, fit to command an array of giants; and she saw him now almost
+breathless as he spoke of a great wild-cat of a woman who ought to be by
+his side now. What sort of a woman was she anyhow, who could let him go
+into exile as he had done and live apart from her all these years,
+while he “slogged away”--that was the Western phrase which came to
+her mind--to pull himself level with things again? Her feet shuffled
+unevenly on the floor, and it would have been a joy to shake the in
+valid there with the rapt look in his face. Unable to bear the situation
+without some demonstration, she got to her feet and caught up the glass
+of brandy and milk with a little exclamation.
+
+“Here,” she said, holding the glass to his lips, “here, courage,
+soldier. You don’t need to be afraid at a six-thousand-mile range.”
+
+The Young Doctor started, for she had said what was in his own mind,
+but what he would not have said for a thousand dollars. It was fortunate
+that Crozier was scarcely conscious of what she was saying. His mind was
+far away. Yet, when she took the glass from him again, he touched her
+arm.
+
+“Nothing is good enough for your friends, is it?” he said gratefully.
+
+“That wouldn’t be an excuse for not getting them the best there was at
+hand,” she answered with a little laugh, and at least the Young Doctor
+read the meaning of her words.
+
+Presently Crozier, with a sigh, continued: “If I had done what my wife
+wanted from the start, I shouldn’t have been here. I’d have saved what
+was left of a fortune, and I’d have had a home of my own.”
+
+“Is she earning her living too?” asked Kitty softly, and Crozier did not
+notice the irony under the question.
+
+“She has a home of her own,” answered Crozier almost sharply. “Just
+before the worst came to the worst she inherited her fortune--plenty of
+it, as I got near the end of mine. One thing after another had gone.
+I was mortgaged up to the eyes. I knew the money-lenders from Newry
+to Jewry and Jewry to Jerusalem. Then it was I promised her I’d bet no
+more--never again: I’d give up the turf; I’d try and start again. Down
+in my soul I knew I couldn’t start again--not just then. But I wanted
+to please her. She was remarkable in her way; she had one of the most
+imposing intelligences I have ever known. So I promised. I promised I’d
+bet no more.”
+
+The Young Doctor caught Kitty Tynan’s eyes by accident, and there was
+the same look of understanding in both. They both knew that here was
+the real tragedy of Crozier’s life. If he had had less reverence for his
+wife, less of that obvious prostration of soul, he probably would never
+have come to Askatoon.
+
+“I broke my promise,” he murmured. “It was a horse--well, never mind.
+I was as sure of Flamingo as that the sun would rise by day and set by
+night. It was a certainty; and it was a certainty. The horse could win,
+it would win; I had it from a sure source. My judgment was right, too.
+I bet heavily on Flamingo, intending it for my last fling, and, to save
+what I had left, to get back what I had lost. I could get big odds on
+him. It was good enough. From what I knew, it was like picking up a
+gold-mine. And I was right, right as could be. There was no chance about
+it. It was being out where the rain fell to get wet. It was just being
+present when they called the roll of the good people that God wished to
+be kind to. It meant so much to me. I couldn’t bear to have nothing and
+my wife to have all. I simply couldn’t stand--”
+
+Again the Young Doctor met the glance of Kitty Tynan, and there was,
+once more, a new and sudden look of comprehension in the eyes of both.
+They began to see light where their man was concerned.
+
+After a moment of struggle to control himself, Crozier proceeded: “It
+didn’t seem like betting. Besides, I had planned it, that when I showed
+her what I had won, she would shut her eyes to the broken promise, and
+I’d make another, and keep it ever after. I put on all the cash there
+was to put on, all I could raise on what was left of my property.”
+
+He paused as though to get strength to continue. Then a look of intense
+excitement suddenly possessed him, and there--passed over him a wave of
+feeling which transformed him. The naturally grave mediaeval face became
+fired, the eyes blazed, the skin shone, the mouth almost trembled with
+agitation. He was the dreamer, the enthusiast, the fanatic almost, with
+that look which the pioneer, the discoverer, the adventurer has when he
+sees the end of his quest.
+
+His voice rose, vibrated. “It was a day to make you thank Heaven the
+world was made. Such days only come once in a while in England, but when
+they do come, what price Arcady or Askatoon! Never had there been so big
+a Derby. Everybody had the fever of the place at its worst. I was
+happy. I meant to pouch my winnings and go straight to my wife and say,
+‘Peccavi,’ and I should hear her say to me, ‘Go and sin no more.’ Yes,
+I was happy. The sky, the green of the fields, the still, home-like,
+comforting trees, the mass of glorious colour, the hundreds of horses
+that weren’t running and the scores that were to run, sleek and long,
+and made like shining silk and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to
+me--a horse-race heaven on earth. There you have the state of my mind in
+those days, the kind of man I was.”
+
+Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom
+Downs before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that
+bore him down. He was terribly, exhaustingly alive. Something possessed
+him, and he possessed his hearers.
+
+“It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away
+from the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
+ahead. It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it
+to be for me. The race was all Flamingo’s own, and the mob was going
+wild, when all of a sudden a woman--the widow of a racing-man gone
+suddenly mad--rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle
+with a shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey
+came, a melee of crushed humanity. And that was how I lost my last two
+thousand five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial.”
+
+“Oh! Oh!” said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns,
+her hands wringing. “Oh, that was--oh, poor Flamingo!” she added.
+
+A strange smile shot into Crozier’s face, and the dark passion of
+reminiscence fled from his eyes. “Yes, you are right, little friend,”
+ he said. “That was the real tragedy after all. There was the horse doing
+his best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on
+him, stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon,
+feeling the psalm of success in his heart--yes, he knows, he knows what
+he has done, none so well!--and out comes a black, hateful thing against
+him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run. I felt exactly as
+you do, and I felt that before everything else when it happened. Then I
+felt for myself afterwards, and I felt it hard, as you can think.”
+
+The break went from his voice, but it rang with reflective, remembered
+misery. “I was ruined. One thing was clear to me. I would not live on
+my wife’s money. I would not eat and drink what her money bought. No,
+I would not live on my wife. Her brother, a good enough, impulsive lad,
+with a tongue of his own and too small to thresh, came to me in London
+the night of the race. He said his sister had been in the country-down
+at Epsom--and that she bitterly resented my having broken my promise and
+lost all I had. He said he had never seen her so angry, and he gave me
+a letter from her. On her return to town she had been obliged to go
+away at once to see her sister taken suddenly ill. He added, with an
+unfeeling jibe, that he wouldn’t like the reading of the letter himself.
+If he hadn’t been such a chipmunk of a fellow I’d have wrung his neck. I
+put the letter her letter-in my pocket, and next day gave my lawyer full
+instructions and a power of attorney. Then I went straight to Glasgow,
+took steamer for Canada, and here I am. That was near five years ago.”
+
+“And the letter from your wife?” asked Kitty Tynan demurely and slyly.
+
+The Young Doctor looked at Crozier, surprised at her temerity, but
+Crozier only smiled gently. “It is in the desk there. Bring it to me,
+please,” he said.
+
+In a moment Kitty was beside him with the letter. He took it, turned it
+over, examined it carefully as though seeing it for the first time, and
+laid it on his knee.
+
+“I have never opened it,” he said. “There it is, just as it was handed
+to me.”
+
+“You don’t know what is in it?” asked Kitty in a shocked voice. “Why, it
+may be that--”
+
+“Oh, yes, I know what is in it!” he replied. “Her brother’s confidences
+were enough. I didn’t want to read it. I can imagine it all.”
+
+“It’s pretty cowardly,” remarked Kitty.
+
+“No, I think not. It would only hurt, and the hurting could do no good.
+I can hear what it says, and I don’t want to see it.”
+
+He held the letter up to his ear whimsically. Then he handed it back to
+her, and she replaced it in the desk.
+
+“So, there it is, and there it is,” he sighed. “You have got my
+story, and it’s bad enough, but you can see it’s not what Burlingame
+suggested.”
+
+“Burlingame--but Burlingame’s beneath notice,” rejoined Kitty. “Isn’t
+he, mother?”
+
+Mrs. Tynan nodded. Then, as though with sudden impulse, Kitty came
+forward to Crozier and leaned over him. The look of a mother was in her
+eyes. Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than this man
+with the heart of a boy, who was afraid of his own wife.
+
+“It’s time for your beef-tea, and when you’ve had it you must get your
+sleep,” she said, with a hovering solicitude.
+
+“I’d like to give him a threshing first, if you don’t mind,” said the
+Young Doctor to her.
+
+“Please let a little good advice satisfy you,” Crozier remarked
+ruefully. “It will seem like old times,” he added rather bitterly.
+
+“You are too young to have had ‘old times,’” said Kitty with gentle
+scorn. “I’ll like you better when you are older,” she added.
+
+“Naughty jade,” exclaimed the Young Doctor, “you ought to be more
+respectful to those older than yourself.”
+
+“Oh, grandpapa!” she retorted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. A WOMAN’S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+
+The harvest was over. The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved
+like a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose
+in innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye. The ground appeared
+bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could
+take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn
+sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert. The land now, all stubble,
+still looked good for anything. If bare, it did not seem starved. It was
+naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down
+after the fight. Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it
+was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed
+the fibre of its being to no disadvantage. And overhead the joy of the
+prairie grew apace.
+
+September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and
+shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come
+into the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of
+nature recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength,
+a battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and
+energy. Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must
+strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
+evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those
+colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his
+eyes. There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of
+pensiveness--the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian
+summer soon to come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to
+the past and forget that to-morrow was all in all.
+
+Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than
+elsewhere. Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself
+in the delicate contentment of the sunset. There were many who took it
+all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something
+from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at
+all, save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose
+solicitous friend is the sun. These heeded it little, even though a
+good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north
+Atlantic and the German Ocean. From Erin and England and the land o’
+cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity
+as to the permanency of such conditions, and then settled down to take
+it as it was, endless days of sunshine and stirring vivacious air--as
+though they had always known it and had it.
+
+There were exceptions, and these had joy in what they saw and felt
+according to the measure of their temperament. Shiel Crozier saw and
+felt much of it, and probably the Young Doctor saw more of it than any
+one; stray people here and there who take no part in this veracious tale
+had it in greater or less degree; fat Jesse Bulrush was so sensitive to
+it that he, as he himself said, “almost leaked sentimentality” and Kitty
+Tynan possessed it. She was pulsing with life, as a bird drunken with
+the air’s sweetness sings itself into an abandonment of motion.
+
+Before Crozier came she had enjoyed existence as existence, wondering
+often why it was she wanted to spring up from the ground with the idea
+that she could fly, if she chose to try. Once when she was quite a
+little girl she had said to her mother, “I’m going to ile away,” and her
+mother, puzzled, asked her what she meant. Her reply was, “It’s in
+the hymn.” Her mother persisted in asking what hymn; and was told with
+something like scorn that it was the hymn she herself had taught her
+only child--“I’ll away, I’ll away to the Promised Land.”
+
+Kitty had thought that “I’ll away” meant some delicious motion which was
+to ile, and she had visions of something between floating and flying as
+being that blessed means of transportation.
+
+As the years grew, she still wanted to “ile away” whenever the spirit
+of elation seized her, and it had increased greatly since Shiel Crozier
+came. Out of her star as he was, she still felt near to him, and as
+though she understood him and he comprehended her. He had almost at once
+become to her an admired mystery, which, however, at first she did not
+dare wish to solve. She had been content to be a kind of handmaiden to a
+generous and adored master. She knew that where he had been she could
+in one sense never go, and yet she wanted to be near him just the same.
+This was intensified after the Logan Trial and the shooting of the man
+who somehow seemed to have made her live in a new way.
+
+As long ago as she could recall she had, in a crude, untutored way, been
+fond of the things that nature made beautiful; but now she seemed to
+see them in a new light, but not because any one had deliberately taught
+her. Indeed, it bored her almost to hear books read as Jesse Bulrush
+and Nurse Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his
+operation, to help him pass away the time. The only time she ever cared
+to listen--at school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for
+the printed page--was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or
+recited. Then she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but
+by the music of the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying
+feeling; and she got something out of it which had in one sense nothing
+to do with the verses themselves or with the conception of the poet.
+
+Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read. He was
+a born sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to
+Kitty during Crozier’s illness. Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse
+contrived to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too;
+for he was a picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and
+clean linen--he always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and
+he had a taste in ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought
+by the yard. He was, in fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for
+material things, as he had shown in the land proposal on which Shiel
+Crozier’s fortunes hung, but with no gift for carrying them out, having
+neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose. Yet he was an
+agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found
+himself “an old bach,” as he called himself, in love at last with a
+middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent
+eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.
+
+Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
+volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
+the bedside of the wounded man. Jesse had been away so much in different
+parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
+had a real chance to make permanent impression. By accident, however,
+his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at
+the moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer
+feelings.
+
+It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened
+to his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville,
+and Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest. His
+content was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was
+lovely, as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their
+cordial, ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the
+divine lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice
+rising and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse; though
+it meant nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound was
+using it on her behalf.
+
+This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty
+understood. Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a
+mistress of his heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did
+not talk. That, to him, was the best thing of all. She was a superb
+listener, and he was a prodigious talker--was it not all appropriate?
+
+One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little
+knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made
+a pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point. He found her in her
+usual place, with a look almost pensive on her face. He did not notice
+that, for he was excited and elated.
+
+“I want to read you something I’ve written,” he said, and he drew from
+his pocket a paper.
+
+“If it’s another description of the timber-land you have for
+sale-please, not to me,” she answered provokingly, for she guessed well
+what he held in his hand. She had seen him writing it. She had even seen
+some of the lines scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing
+careful if not swift and skillful manufacture. One of these crumpled-up
+bits of paper she had in her pocket now, having recovered it that she
+might tease him by quoting the lines at a provoking opportunity.
+
+“It’s not that. It’s some verses I’ve written,” he said, with a wave of
+his hand.
+
+“All your own?” she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and
+he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of
+aloes on her tongue.
+
+“Yes. Yes. I’ve always written verses more or less--I write a good many
+advertisements in verse,” he added cheerfully. “They are very popular.
+Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses in
+commerce as in affairs of the heart. But if you’d rather not, if it
+makes you tired--”
+
+“Courage, soldier, bear your burden,” she said gaily. “Mount your horse
+and get galloping,” she added, motioning him to sit.
+
+A moment later he was pouring out his soul through a pleasing voice,
+from fat lips, flanked by a high-coloured healthy cheek like a russet
+apple:
+
+       “Like jewels of the sky they gleam,
+        Your eyes of light, your eyes of fire;
+        In their dark depths behold the dream
+        Of Life’s glad hope and Love’s desire.
+
+       “Above your quiet brow, endowed
+        With Grecian charm to crown your grace,
+        Your hair in one soft Titian cloud
+        Throws heavenly shadows on your face.”
+
+“Well, I’ve never had verses written to me before,” Kitty remarked
+demurely, when he had finished and sat looking at her questioningly.
+“But ‘dark depths’--that isn’t the right thing to say of my eyes! And
+Titian cloud of hair--is my hair Titian? I thought Titian hair
+was bronzy-tawny was what Mr. Burlingame called it when he was
+spouting,”--her upper lip curled in contempt.
+
+“It isn’t you, and you know it,” he replied jerkily. She bridled.
+“Do you mean to say that you come and read to me without a word of
+explanation, so that I shouldn’t misunderstand, verses written for
+another? Am I to be told now that my eyes aren’t eyes of light and eyes
+of fire, that I haven’t got a Grecian brow? Do you dare to say those
+verses don’t fit me--except for the Titian hair and heavenly shadows?
+And that I’ve got no right to think they’re meant for me? Is it so, that
+a man that’s lived in my mother’s house for years, eating at the same
+table with the family, and having his clothes mended free, with supper
+to suit him and no questions asked--is it so, that he reads me poetry,
+four lines at a stretch, and a rhyme every other line, and then
+announces it isn’t for me!”
+
+Her eyes flashed, her bosom palpitated, her hand made passionate
+gestures, and she really seemed a young fury let loose. For a moment
+he was deceived by her acting; he did not see the lurking grin in the
+depths of her eyes.
+
+Her voice shook with assumed passion. “Because I didn’t show what I felt
+all these years, and only exposed my real feelings when you read those
+verses to me, do you think any man who was a gentleman wouldn’t in the
+circumstances say, ‘These verses are for you, Kitty Tynan’? You betrayed
+me into showing you what I felt, and then you tell me your verses are
+for another girl!”
+
+“Girl! Girl! Girl!” he burst out. “Nurse is thirty-seven--she told me
+so herself, and how could I tell that you--why, it’s absurd! I’ve only
+thought of you always as a baby in long skirts”--she spasmodically drew
+her skirts down over her pretty, shapely ankles, while she kept her eyes
+covered with one hand--“and you’ve seen me makin’ up to her ever since
+Crozier got the bullet. Ever since he was operated on, I’ve--”
+
+“Yes, yes, that’s right,” she interrupted. “That’s manly! Put the blame
+on him--him that couldn’t help himself, struck by a horse-thief’s bullet
+in the dark; him that’s no more to blame for your carryings on while
+death was prowling about the door there--”
+
+“Carryings on! Carryings on!” Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and
+indignant. The little devil, to put him in a hole like this! “Carryings
+on! I’ve acted like a man all through--never anything else in your
+house, and it’s a shame that I’ve got to listen to things that have
+never been said of me in all my life. My mother was a good, true woman,
+and she brought me up--”
+
+“Yes, that’s it, put it on your mother now, poor woman! who isn’t here
+to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two
+girls so placed they couldn’t help themselves--just doing kind acts for
+a sick man.” Suddenly she got to her feet. “I tell you, Jesse Bulrush,
+that you’re a man--you’re a man--”
+
+But she could keep it up no longer. She burst out laughing, and the
+false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: “That
+you’re a man after my own heart. But you can’t have it, even if you are
+after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in
+there!” She tossed a hand towards the house.
+
+By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting. “Well, you wicked
+little rip--you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up
+like that! Why, never on the stage was there such--!”
+
+“It’s the poetry made me do it. It inspired me,” she gurgled. “I
+felt--why, I felt here”--she pressed her hand to her heart “all the
+pangs of unrequited love--oh, go away, go back to the house and read
+that to her! She’s in the sitting-room, and my mother’s away down-town.
+Now’s your chance, Claude Melnotte.”
+
+She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
+towards the house. “You’re good enough for anybody, and if I wasn’t so
+young and daren’t leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
+I’m thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!” She laughed till the tears came into her
+eyes. “This is as good as--as a play.”
+
+“It’s the best acted play I ever saw, from ‘Ten Nights in a Bar-room’
+to ‘Struck Oil,’” rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed
+yet beaming. “But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses
+worth anything? Do you think she’ll like them?”
+
+Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read
+deepened in her eyes. “Nurse ‘ll like them--of course she will,” she
+said gently. “She’ll like them because they are you. Read them to her as
+you read them to me, and she’ll only hear your voice, and she’ll think
+them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh
+a thousand pounds. It doesn’t matter to a woman what a man’s saying or
+doing, or whether he’s so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that
+under everything he’s saying, ‘I love you.’ A man isn’t that way, but a
+woman is. Now go.” Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.
+
+“Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” he said admiringly.
+
+“Then be a father to me,” she said teasingly.
+
+“I can’t marry both your mother and nurse.”
+
+“P’r’aps you can’t marry either,” she replied sarcastically, “and I know
+that in any case you’ll never be any relative of mine by marriage. Get
+going,” she said almost impatiently.
+
+He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, “I’ll let
+you hear some of my verses one day when you’re more developed and can
+understand them.”
+
+“I’ll bet they beat mine,” he called back.
+
+“You’ll win your bet,” she answered, and stood leaning against a tree
+with a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes. When he had
+disappeared, sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper,
+unfolded it, and laid it on her knee. “It is better,” she said. “It’s
+not good poetry, of course, but it’s truer, and it’s not done according
+to a pattern like his. Yes, it’s real, real, real, and he’ll never see
+it--never see it now, for I’ve fought it’ all out, and I’ve won.”
+
+Then she slowly read the verses aloud:
+
+“Yes, I’ve won,” she said with determination. So many of her sex have
+said things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their
+decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never,
+never, never do. Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a
+new force awakened in her character.
+
+For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the
+little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house. She was
+thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom
+in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social
+pale. Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world
+beyond this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the
+conscience of a man or woman was the only law. She was not lawless in
+mind or spirit. She was only rebelling against a situation in which she
+was bound hand and foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive
+desire, if she wished to do so.
+
+Here was a man who was married, yet in a real sense who had no wife.
+Suppose that man cared for her, what a tragedy it would be for them to
+be kept apart! This man did not love her, and so there was no tragedy
+for both. Still all was not over yet--yes, all was “over and over
+and over,” she said to herself as she sprang to her feet with a sharp
+exclamation of disgust--with herself.
+
+Her mother was coming hurriedly towards her from the house. There was
+a quickness in her walk suggesting excitement, yet from the look in her
+face it was plain that the news she brought was not painful. “He told me
+you were here, and--”
+
+“Who told you I was here?”
+
+“Mr. Bulrush.”
+
+“So it’s all settled,” she said, with a little quirk of her shoulders.
+
+“Yes, he’s asked her, and they’re going to be married. It’s enough to
+make you die laughing to see the two middle-aged doves cooing in there.”
+
+“I thought perhaps it would be you. He said he would like to be a father
+to me.”
+
+“That would prevent me if nothing else would,” answered the widow of
+Tyndall Tynan. “A stepfather to an unmarried girl, both eyeing each
+other for a chance to find fault--if you please, no thank you!”
+
+“That means you won’t get married till I’m out of the way?” asked Kitty,
+with a look which was as much touched with myrrh as with mirth.
+
+“It means I wouldn’t get married till you are married, anyway,” was the
+complacent answer.
+
+“Is there any one special that--”
+
+“Don’t talk nonsense. Since your father died I’ve only thought of his
+child and mine, and I’ve not looked where I might. Instead, I’ve done
+my best to prove that two women could live and succeed without a man
+to earn for them; though of course without the pension it couldn’t have
+been done in the style we’ve done it. We’ve got our place!”
+
+There is a dignity attached to a pension which has an influence quite
+its own, and in the most primitive communities it has an aristocratic
+character which commands general respect. In Askatoon people gave Mrs.
+Tynan a better place socially because of her pension than they would
+have done if she had earned double the money which the pension brought
+her.
+
+“Everybody has called on us,” she added with reflective pride.
+
+“Principally since Mr. Crozier came,” added Kitty. “It’s funny, isn’t
+it, how he made people respect him before they knew who he was?”
+
+“He would make Satan stand up and take off his hat, if he paid Hades a
+visit,” said Mrs. Tynan admiringly. “Anybody’d do anything for him.”
+
+Kitty eyed her mother closely. There was a strange, far-away, brooding
+look in Mrs. Tynan’s eyes, and she seemed for a moment lost in thought.
+
+“You’re in love with him,” said Kitty sharply.
+
+“I was, in a way,” answered her mother frankly. “I was, in a way, a kind
+of way, till I knew he was married. But it didn’t mean anything. I never
+thought of it except as a thing that couldn’t be.”
+
+“Why couldn’t it be?” asked Kitty, smothering an agitation rising in her
+breast.
+
+“Because I always knew he belonged to where we didn’t, and because if
+he was going to be in love himself, it would be with some girl like you.
+He’s young enough for that, and it’s natural he should get as his profit
+the years of youth that a young woman has yet to live.”
+
+“As though it was a choice between you and me, for instance!”
+
+Mrs. Tynan started, but recovered herself. “Yes. If there had been any
+choosing, he’d not have hesitated a minute. He’d have taken you, of
+course. But he never gave either of us a thought that way.”
+
+“I thought that till--till after he’d told us his story,” replied Kitty
+boldly.
+
+“What has happened since then?” asked her mother, with sudden
+apprehension.
+
+“Nothing has happened since. I don’t understand it, but it’s as though
+he’d been asleep for a long time and was awake again.”
+
+Mrs. Tynan gravely regarded her daughter, and a look of fear came into
+her face. “I knew you kept thinking of him always,” she said; “but you
+had such sense, and he never showed any feeling for you; and young
+girls get over things. Besides, you always showed you knew he wasn’t a
+possibility. But since he told us that day about his being married and
+all, has--has he been different towards you?”
+
+“Not a thing, not a word,” was the reply; “but--but there’s a difference
+with him in a way. I feel it when I go in the room where he is.”
+
+“You’ve got to stop thinking of him,” insisted the elder woman
+querulously. “You’ve got to stop it at once. It’s no good. It’s bad for
+you. You’ve too much sense to go on caring for a man that--”
+
+“I’m going to get married,” said Kitty firmly. “I’ve made up my mind.
+If you have to think about one person, you should stop thinking about
+another; anyhow, you’ve got to make yourself stop. So I’m going to
+marry--and stop.”
+
+“Who are you going to marry, Kitty? You don’t mean to say it’s John
+Sibley!”
+
+“P’r’aps. He keeps coming.”
+
+“That gambling and racing fellow!”
+
+“He owns a big farm, and it pays, and he has got an interest in a mine,
+and--”
+
+“I tell you, you shan’t,” peevishly interjected Mrs. Tynan. “You shan’t.
+He’s vicious. He’s--oh, you shan’t! I’d rather--”
+
+“You’d rather I threw myself away--on a married man?” asked Kitty
+covertly.
+
+“My God--oh, Kitty!” said the other, breaking down. “You can’t mean
+it--oh, you can’t mean that you’d--”
+
+“I’ve got to work out my case in my own way,” broke in Kitty calmly. “I
+know how I’ve got to do it. I have to make my own medicine--and take it.
+You say John Sibley is vicious. He has only got one vice.”
+
+“Isn’t it enough? Gambling--”
+
+“That isn’t a vice; it’s a sport. It’s the same as Mr. Crozier had.
+Mr. Crozier did it with horses only, the other does it with cards and
+horses. The only vice John Sibley’s got is me.”
+
+“Is you?” asked her mother bewilderedly.
+
+“Well, when you’ve got an idea you can’t control and it makes you its
+slave, it’s a vice. I’m John’s vice, and I’m thinking of trying to cure
+him of it--and cure myself too,” Kitty added, folding and unfolding the
+paper in her hand.
+
+“Here comes the Young Doctor,” said her mother, turning towards the
+house. “I think you don’t mean to marry Sibley, but if you do, make him
+give up gambling.”
+
+“I don’t know that I want him to give it up,” answered Kitty musingly.
+
+A moment later she was alone with the Young Doctor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+
+“What’s this you’ve been doing?” asked the Young Doctor, with a
+quizzical smile. “We never can tell where you’ll break out.”
+
+“Kitty Tynan’s measles!” she rejoined, swinging her hat by its ribbon.
+“Mine isn’t a one-sided character, is it?”
+
+“I know one of the sides quite well,” returned the Young Doctor.
+
+“Which, please, sir?”
+
+The Young Doctor pretended to look wise. “The outside. I read it like a
+book. It fits the life in which it moves like the paper on the wall. But
+I’m not sure of the inside. In fact, I don’t think I know that at all.”
+
+“So I couldn’t call you in if my character was sick inside, could I?”
+ she asked obliquely.
+
+“I might have an operation, and see what’s wrong with it,” he answered
+playfully.
+
+Suddenly she shivered. “I’ve had enough of operations to last me
+awhile,” she rejoined. “I thought I could stand anything, but your
+operation on Mr. Crozier taught me a lesson. I’d never be a doctor’s
+wife if I had to help him cut up human beings.”
+
+“I’ll remember that,” the Young Doctor replied mockingly.
+
+“But if it would help put things on a right basis, I’d make a bargain
+that I wasn’t to help do the carving,” she rejoined wickedly. The Young
+Doctor always incited her to say daring things. They understood each
+other well. “So don’t let that stand in the way,” she added slyly.
+
+“The man who marries you will be glad to get you without the anatomy,”
+ he returned gallantly.
+
+“I wasn’t talking of a man; I was talking of a doctor.”
+
+He threw up a hand and his eyebrows. “Isn’t a doctor a man?”
+
+“Those I’ve seen have been mostly fish.”
+
+“No feelings--eh?”
+
+She looked him in the eyes, and he felt a kind of shiver go through him.
+“Not enough to notice. I never observed you had any,” she replied. “If I
+saw that you had, I’d be so frightened I’d fly. I’ve seen pictures of
+an excited whale turning a boat full of men over. No, I couldn’t bear to
+see you show any feeling.”
+
+The dark eyes of the Young Doctor suddenly took on a look which was
+a stranger to them. In his relations with women he was singularly
+impersonal, but he was a man, and he was young enough to feel the Adam
+stir in him. The hidden or controlled thing suddenly emerged. It was not
+the look which would be in his eyes if he were speaking to the woman he
+wanted to marry. Kitty saw it, and she did not understand it, for she
+had at heart a feeling that she could go to him in any trouble of life
+and be sure of healing. To her he seemed wonderful; but she thought of
+him as she would have thought of her father, as a person of authority
+and knowledge--that operation showed him a great man, she thought, so
+skillful and precise and splendid; and the whole countryside had such
+confidence in him.
+
+She regarded him as a being apart; but for a moment, an ominous moment,
+he was almost one with that race of men who feed in strange pastures.
+She only half saw the reddish glow which came swimming into his eyes,
+and she did not realise it, for she did not expect to find it there.
+For an instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of
+woman life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material
+being, the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence. It was the
+emergence of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he
+had never married and had never dallied! But in a moment it was gone
+again--driven away.
+
+“What a wicked little flirt you are!” he said, with a shake of the head.
+“You’ll come to a bad end, if you don’t change your ways.”
+
+“Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what’s the matter
+with me,” she retorted. “Sometimes in operating for one disease we come
+on another, and then there’s a lot of thinking to be done.”
+
+The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive
+gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing. “If you were going to
+operate on me, what would it be for?” she asked more flippantly than her
+face showed.
+
+“Well, it’s obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike
+for the cancer love,” he answered, with a direct look.
+
+She flushed and changed on the instant. “Is love a cancer?” she asked.
+All at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something
+very like anger quickened in her.
+
+“Unrequited love is,” he answered deliberately. “How do you know it is
+unrequited?” she asked sharply.
+
+“Well, I don’t know it,” he answered, dismayed by the look in her face.
+“But I certainly hope I’m right. I do, indeed.”
+
+“And if you were right, what would you do--as a surgeon?” she
+questioned, with an undertone of meaning.
+
+“I would remove the cause of the disease.”
+
+She came close and looked him straight in the eyes. “You mean that he
+should go? You think that would cure the disease? Well, you are not
+going to interfere. You are not going to manoeuvre anything to get him
+away--I know doctors’ tricks. You’d say he must go away east or west
+to the sea for change of air to get well. That’s nonsense, and it isn’t
+necessary. You are absolutely wrong in your diagnosis--if that’s what
+you call it. He is going to stay here. You aren’t going to drive away
+one of our boarders and take the bread out of our mouths. Anyhow, you’re
+wrong. You think because a girl worships a man’s ability that she’s in
+love with him. I adore your ability, but I’d as soon fall in love with a
+lobster--and be boiled with the lobster in a black pot. Such conceit men
+have!”
+
+He was not convinced. He had a deep-seeing eye, and he saw that she was
+boldly trying to divert his belief or suspicion. He respected her for
+it. He might have said he loved her for it--with a kind of love which
+can be spoken of without blushing or giving cause to blush, or reason
+for jealousy, anger, or apprehension.
+
+He smiled down into her gold-brown eyes, and he thought what a real
+woman she was. He felt, too, that she would tell him something that
+would give him further light if he spoke wisely now.
+
+“I’d like to see some proof that you are right, if I am wrong,” he
+answered cautiously.
+
+“Well, I’m going to be married,” she said, with an air of finality.
+
+He waved a hand deprecatingly. “Impossible--there’s no man worth it. Who
+is the undeserving wretch?”
+
+“I’ll tell you to-morrow,” she replied. “He doesn’t know yet how happy
+he’s going to be. What did you come here for? Why did you want to see
+me?” she added. “You had something you were going to tell me. Hadn’t
+you?”
+
+“That’s quite right,” he replied. “It’s about Crozier. This is my last
+visit to him professionally. He can go on now without my care. Yours
+will be sufficient for him. It has been all along the very best care he
+could have had. It did more for him than all the rest, it--”
+
+“You don’t mean that,” she interrupted, with a flush and a bosom that
+leaped under her pretty gown. “You don’t mean that I was of more use
+than the nurse--than the future Mrs. Jesse Bulrush?”
+
+“I mean just that,” he answered. “Nearly every sick person, every sick
+man, I should say, has his mascot, his ministering angel, as it were.
+It’s a kind of obsession, and it often means life or death, whether the
+mascot can stand the strain of the situation. I knew an old man--down by
+Dingley’s Flat it was, and he wanted a boy--his grand-nephew-beside him
+always. He was getting well, but the boy took sick and the old man died
+the next day. The boy had been his medicine. Sometimes it’s a particular
+nurse that does the trick; but whoever it is, it’s a great vital fact.
+Well, that’s the part you played to Mr. Shiel Crozier of Lammis and
+Castlegarry aforetime. He owes you much.”
+
+“I am glad of that,” she said softly, her eyes on the distance.
+
+“She is in love with him in spite of what she says,” remarked the Young
+Doctor to himself. “Well,” he continued aloud, “the fact is, Crozier’s
+almost well in a way, but his mind is in a state, and he is not going to
+get wholly right as things are. Since things came out in court, since he
+told us his whole story, he has been different. It’s as though--”
+
+She interrupted him hastily and with suppressed emotion. “Yes, yes,
+do you think I’ve not noticed that? He’s been asleep in a way for five
+years, and now he’s awake again. He is not James Gathorne Kerry now;
+he is James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, and--oh, you understand: he’s back
+again where he was before--before he left her.”
+
+The Young Doctor nodded approvingly. “What a little brazen wonder you
+are! I declare you see more than--”
+
+“Yet you won’t have me?” she asked mockingly. “You’re too clever for
+me,” he rejoined with spirit. “I’m too conceited. I must marry a girl
+that’d kneel to me and think me as wise as Socrates. But he’s back
+again, as you say, and, in my view, his wife ought to be back again
+also.”
+
+“She ought to be here,” was Kitty’s swift reply, “though I think mighty
+little of her--mighty little, I can tell you. Stuckup, great tall stork
+of a woman, that lords it over a man as though she was a goddess. Wears
+diamonds in the middle of the day, I suppose, and cold-blooded as--as a
+fish.”
+
+“She ought to have married me, according to your opinion of me. You said
+I was a fish,” remarked the Young Doctor, with a laugh.
+
+“The whale and the catfish!”
+
+“Heavens, what spite!” he rejoined. “Catfish--what do you know about
+Mrs. Crozier? You may be brutally unjust--waspishly unjust, I should
+say.”
+
+“Do I look like a wasp?” she asked half tearfully. She was in a strange
+mood.
+
+“You look like a golden busy bee,” he answered. “But tell me, how did
+you come to know enough about her to call her a cat?”
+
+“Because, as you say, I was a busy golden bee,” she retorted.
+
+“That information doesn’t get me much further,” he answered.
+
+“I opened that letter,” she replied.
+
+“‘That letter’--you mean you opened the letter he showed us which he had
+left sealed as it came to him five years ago?” The Young Doctor’s face
+wore a look of dismay.
+
+“I steamed the envelope open--how else could I have done it! I steamed
+it open, saw what I wanted, and closed it up again.”
+
+The Young Doctor’s face was pale now. This was a terrible revelation. He
+had a man’s view of such conduct. He almost shrank from her, though she
+stood there as inviting and innocent a specimen of girlhood as the eye
+could wish to see. She did not look dishonourable.
+
+“Do you realise what that means?” he asked in a cold, hard tone.
+
+“Oh, come, don’t put on that look and don’t talk like John the
+Evangelist,” she retorted. “I did it, not out of curiosity, and not to
+do any one harm, but to do her good--his wife.”
+
+“It was dishonourable--wicked and dishonourable.”
+
+“If you talk like that, Mr. Piety, I’m off,” she rejoined, and she
+started away.
+
+“Wait--wait,” he said, laying firm fingers on her arm. “Of course you
+did it for a good purpose. I know. You cared enough for him for that.”
+
+He had said the right thing, and she halted and faced him. “I cared
+enough to do a good deal more than that if necessary. He has been like a
+second father to me, and--”
+
+Suddenly a light of humour shot into the eyes of both. Sheil Crozier as
+a “father” to her was too artificial not to provoke their sense of the
+grotesque.
+
+“I wanted to find out his wife’s address to write to her and tell her to
+come quick,” she explained. “It was when he was at the worst. And then,
+too, I wanted to know the kind of woman she was before I wrote to her.
+So--”
+
+“You mean to say you read that letter which he had kept unopened and
+unread for five long years?” The Young Doctor was certainly disturbed
+again.
+
+“Every word of it,” Kitty answered shamelessly, “and I’m not sorry. It
+was in a good cause. If he had said, ‘Courage, soldier,’ and opened it
+five years ago, it would have been good for him. Better to get things
+like that over.”
+
+“It was that kind of a letter, was it--a catfish letter?”
+
+Kitty laughed a little scornfully. “Yes, just like that, Mr. Easily
+Shocked. Great, showy, purse-proud creature!”
+
+“And you wrote to her?”
+
+“Yes--a letter that would make her come if anything would. Talk of
+tact--I was as smooth as a billiard-ball. But she hasn’t come.”
+
+“The day after the operation I cabled to her,” said the Young Doctor.
+
+“Then you steamed the letter open and read it too?” asked Kitty
+sarcastically.
+
+“Certainly not. Ladies first-and last,” was the equally sarcastic
+answer. “I cabled to Castlegarry, his father’s place, also to Lammis
+that he mentioned when he told us his story. Crozier of Lammis, he was.”
+
+“Well, I wrote to the London address in the letter,” added Kitty. “I
+don’t think she’ll come. I asked her to cable me, and she hasn’t. I
+wrote such a nice letter, too. I did it for his sake.”
+
+The Young Doctor laid his hands on both her shoulders. “Kitty Tynan, the
+man who gets you will get what he doesn’t deserve,” he remarked.
+
+“That might mean anything.”
+
+“It means that Crozier owes you more than he can guess.”
+
+Her eyes shone with a strange, soft glow. “In spite of opening the
+letter?”
+
+The Young Doctor nodded, then added humorously: “That letter you wrote
+her--I’m not sure that my cable wouldn’t have far more effect than your
+letter.”
+
+“Certainly not. You tried to frighten her, but I tried to coax her, to
+make her feel ashamed. I wrote as though I was fifty.”
+
+The Young Doctor regarded her dubiously. “What was the sort of thing you
+said to her?”
+
+“For one thing, I said that he had every comfort and attention two
+loving women and one fond nurse could give him; but that, of course, his
+legitimate wife would naturally be glad to be beside him when he passed
+away, and that if she made haste she might be here in time.”
+
+The Young Doctor leaned against a tree shaking with laughter.
+
+“What are you smiling at?” Kitty asked ironically. “Oh, she’ll be sure
+to come--nothing will keep her away after being coaxed like that!” he
+said, when he could get breath.
+
+“Laughing at me as though I was a clown in a circus!” she exclaimed.
+“Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she--the cat--wrote
+that fiendish letter to is in trouble.”
+
+“It was a fiendish letter, was it?” he asked, suddenly sobered again.
+“No, no, don’t tell me,” he added, with a protesting gesture. “I don’t
+want to hear. I don’t want to know. I oughtn’t to know. Besides, if she
+comes, I don’t want to be prejudiced against her. He is troubled, poor
+fellow.”
+
+“Of course he is. There’s the big land deal--his syndicate. He’s got
+a chance of making a fortune, and he can’t do it because--but Jesse
+Bulrush told me in confidence, so I can’t explain.”
+
+“I have an idea, a pretty good idea. Askatoon is small.”
+
+“And mean sometimes.”
+
+“Tell me what you know. Perhaps I can help him,” urged the Young Doctor.
+“I have helped more than one good man turn a sharp corner here.”
+
+She caught his arm. “You are as good as gold.”
+
+“You are--impossible,” he replied.
+
+They talked of Crozier’s land deal and syndicate as they walked slowly
+towards the house. Mrs. Tynan met them at the door, a look of excitement
+in her face. “A telegram for you Kitty,” she said.
+
+“For me!” exclaimed Kitty eagerly. “It’s a year since I had one.”
+
+She tore open the yellow envelope. A light shot up in her face. She
+thrust the telegram into the Young Doctor’s hands.
+
+“She’s coming; his wife’s coming. She’s in Quebec now. It was my
+letter--my letter, not your cable, that brought her,” Kitty added
+triumphantly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+
+It was as though Crozier had been told of the coming of his wife, for
+when night came, on the day Kitty had received her telegram, he could
+not sleep. He was the sport of a consuming restlessness. His brain would
+not be still. He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and
+make it vacuous. It would not relax. It seized with intentness on each
+thing in turn, which was part of his life at the moment, and gave it
+an abnormal significance. In vain he tried to shake himself free of the
+successive obsessions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging
+him after them, a slave lashed to the wheels of a chariot of flame.
+
+At last it was the land deal and syndicate on which his future depended,
+and the savage fate which seemed about to snatch his fortune away as it
+had done so often before; as it had done on the day when Flamingo went
+down near the post at the Derby with a madwoman dragging at the bridle.
+He had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would
+have enabled him to pass the crisis of his life. Wife, home, the old
+fascinating, crowded life--they had all vanished because of that vile
+trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the
+wilderness through years that brought no fruit of his labours. Yet here
+was his chance, his great chance, to get back what he had and was in the
+old misspent days, with new purposes in life to follow and serve; and
+it was all in cruel danger of being swept away when almost within his
+grasp.
+
+If he could but achieve the big deal, he could return to wife and home,
+he could be master in his own house, not a dependent on his wife’s
+bounty. That very evening Jesse Bulrush, elated by his own good fortune
+in capturing Cupid, had told him as sadly as was possible, while his
+own fortunes were, as he thought, soaring, that every avenue of credit
+seemed closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan
+company, would let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him
+to hold his place in the syndicate; while each of the other members
+of the clique had flatly and cheerfully refused, saying they were busy
+carrying their own loads. Crozier had commanded Jesse not to approach
+them, but the fat idealist had an idea that his tongue had a gift of
+wheedling, and he believed that he could make them “shell out,” as
+he put it. He had failed, and he was obliged to say so, when Crozier,
+suspecting, brought him to book.
+
+“They mean to crowd you out--that’s their game,” Bulrush had said.
+“They’ve closed up all the ways to cash or credit. They’re laying to do
+you out of your share. Unless you put up the cash within the four days
+left, they’ll put it through without you. They told me to tell you
+that.”
+
+And Crozier had not even cursed them. He said to Jesse Bulrush that it
+was an old game to get hold of a patent that made a fortune for a song
+while the patentee died in the poor-house. Yet that four days was time
+enough for a live man to do a “flurry of work,” and he was fit enough to
+walk up their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when
+a man was out for war.
+
+Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and
+in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little
+and big things to torture him--remembrances of incidents when debts and
+disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the
+elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman’s face. It
+was not his wife’s face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but
+one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years. It
+was the first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the
+operation which saved his life--the face of Kitty Tynan.
+
+And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face
+had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence. Kitty
+had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after
+he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was
+startlingly true. It was as though, while he was living under an assumed
+name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the
+far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry. His wife and
+the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived
+out, which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the
+present. Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her
+had seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of
+his own name and the telling if his story had produced a complete
+psychological change in him mentally and bodily. The impersonal feeling
+which had marked his relations with the two women of this household,
+and with all women, was suddenly gone. He longed for the arms of a woman
+round his neck--it was five years since any woman’s arms had been there,
+since he had kissed any woman’s lips. Now, in the hour when his fortunes
+were again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a
+fair race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another
+face came between.
+
+All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife
+was living, came to him. He had never for an instant thought of her as
+dead, but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him. If his wife
+was living! Living? Her death had never been even a remote possibility
+to his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death.
+Beneath all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a
+romanticist to whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.
+
+It was impossible to sleep. He tossed from side to side. Once he got up
+in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought
+of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a
+sudden impulse seized him. He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went
+to the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out. With the
+feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he
+knew, ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any
+cruelty, of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of
+the candle when he thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of
+his room gently closing. Laying the letter down, he went to the door
+and opened it. There was no one stirring. Yet he had a feeling as though
+some one was there in the darkness. His lips framed the words,
+
+“Who is it? Is any one there?” but he did not utter them.
+
+A kind of awe possessed him. He was Celtic; he had been fed on the
+supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable
+experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry,
+and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical. It is hard to
+tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness
+of the other room-the living-room of the house. He was in a state of
+trance, almost, a victim of the night. But as he closed the door softly
+the words of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he
+found her brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain. The last
+two verses of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was
+swayed by the superstition of bygone ancestors:
+
+     “Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
+     Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
+     Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown
+     Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
+
+     “When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+     Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+     I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
+     ‘Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?’”
+
+He went to bed again, but sleep would not come. The verses of the lament
+kept singing in his brain. He tossed from side to side, he sought to
+control himself, but it was of no avail. Suddenly he remembered the bed
+of boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her
+meeting with the Young Doctor the previous day. Before he was shot he
+used to sleep in the open in the summer-time. If he could get to sleep
+anywhere it would be there.
+
+Hastily dressing himself in flannel shirt and trousers, and dragging a
+blanket from the bed, he found his way to the bedroom door, went into
+the other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open
+into the night. All at once he was conscious of another presence in the
+room, but the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved
+himself for succumbing to fantasy. Finding the front door in the dark,
+he opened it and stepped outside. There was no moon, but there were
+millions of stars in the blue vault above, and there was enough light
+for him to make his way to the place where he had slept “hereaway and
+oft.”
+
+He knew that the bed of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his,
+and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet,
+infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth.
+He found the place and threw himself down. Why, here were green boughs
+under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there! Kitty--it
+was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing,
+thinking that he might want to sleep in the open again after his
+illness. Kitty--it was she who had so thoughtfully served him; Kitty,
+with the instinct of strong, unselfish womanhood, with the gift of the
+outdoor life, with the unpurchasable gift of friendship. What a girl she
+was! How rich she could make the life of a man!
+
+     “Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and laid his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies
+     Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?”
+
+How different she was, this child of the West, of Nature, from the
+woman he had left behind in England, the sophisticated, well-appointed,
+well-controlled girl; too well-controlled even in the first days of
+married life; too well-controlled for him who had the rushing impulses
+of a Celtic warrior of olden days. Delicate, refined, perfectly
+poised, and Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope!
+Mona--Kitty, the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life,
+each in her own way, as none others had done, they floated before his
+eyes till sight and feeling grew dim. With a last effort he strove to
+eject Kitty from his thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the
+race of life, and he must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly,
+even in exile from her, run straight, even with that unopened, bitter,
+upbraiding letter in the--
+
+He fell asleep, and soon and slowly and ever so dimly the opal light of
+the prairie dawn crept shyly over the landscape. With it came stealing
+the figure of a girl towards the group of trees where lay the man of
+Lammis on the bed of green boughs which she had renewed for him. She had
+followed him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through
+the night--near him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him
+and the kind, holy night before the morrow came which belonged to the
+other woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to
+any man in whose arms she ever had lain. And the pity and the tragedy
+of it was that he loved his wife--the catfish wife. The sharp, pitiless
+instinct of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come
+of late to him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near
+him now, was only the reflection of what he felt for his wife. She knew
+the unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet
+what she must put away from herself after to-morrow. Those verses she
+wrote--they were to show that she had conquered herself. Yet, but a few
+hours after, here she was kneeling outside his door at night, here she
+was pursuing him to the place where he slept. The coming of the other
+woman--she knew well that she was something to this man of men--had
+roused in her all she had felt, had intensified it.
+
+She trembled, but she drew near, accompanied by the heavenly odours of
+the freshened herbs and foliage and the cool tenderness of the river
+close by. In her white dress and loosened hair she was like some spirit
+of a new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home. It
+was all so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the
+bushes and the night. Noiselessly she stole over the grass and into
+the shadows of the trees where he lay. Again and again she paused. What
+would she do if he was awake and saw her? She did not know. The moment
+must take care of itself. She longed to find him sleeping.
+
+It was so. The hazy light showed his face upward to the skies, his
+breast rising and falling in a heavy, luxurious sleep.
+
+She drew nearer and nearer till she was kneeling beside him. His face
+was warm with colour even in the night air, warmer than she had ever
+seen it. One hand lay across his chest and one was thrown back over his
+head with the abandon of perfect rest. All the anxiety and restlessness
+which had tortured him had fled, and his manhood showed bold and serene
+in the brightening dusk.
+
+A sob almost broke from her as she gazed her fill, then slowly she
+leaned over and softly pressed her lips to his--the first time that ever
+in love they had been given to any man. She had the impulse to throw
+her arms round him, but she mastered herself. He stirred, but he did not
+wake. His lips moved as she withdrew hers.
+
+“My darling!” he said in the quick, broken way of the dreamer.
+
+She rose swiftly and fled away among the trees towards the house.
+
+What he had said in his sleep--was it in reality the words of
+unconsciousness, or was it subconscious knowledge?--they kept ringing in
+her ears.
+
+“My darling!” he had said when she kissed him. There was a light of joy
+in her eyes now, though she felt that the words were meant for another.
+Yet it was her kiss, her own kiss, which had made him say it. If--but
+with happy eyes she stole to her room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. “S. O. S.”
+
+At breakfast next morning Kitty did not appear. Had it been possible
+she would have fled into the far prairie and set up a lonely tabernacle
+there; for with the day came a reaction from the courage possessing
+her the night before and in the opal wakening of the dawn. When broad
+daylight came she felt as though her bones were water and her body a
+wisp of straw. She could not bear to meet Shiel Crozier’s eyes, and thus
+it was she had an early breakfast on the plea that she had ironing to
+do. She was not, however, prepared to see Jesse Bulrush drive up with
+a buggy after breakfast and take Crozier away. When she did see them at
+the gate the impulse came to cry out to Crozier; what to say she did not
+know, but still to cry out. The cry on her lips was that which she
+had seen in the newspaper the day before, the cry of the shipwrecked
+seafarers, the signal of the wireless telegraphy, “S. O. S.”--the
+piteous call, “Save Our Souls!” It sprang to her lips, but it got no
+farther except in an unconscious whisper. On the instant she felt
+so weak and shaken and lonely that she wanted to lean upon some one
+stronger than herself; as she used to lean against her father, while he
+sat with one arm round her studying his railway problems. She had been
+self-sufficient enough all her life,--“an independent little bird of
+freedom,” as Crozier had called her; but she was like a boat tossed on
+mountainous waves now.
+
+“S. O. S.!--Save Our Souls!”
+
+As though she really had made this poignant call Crozier turned round in
+the buggy where he sat with Jesse Bulrush, pale but erect; and, with a
+strange instinct, he looked straight to where she was. When he saw her
+his face flushed, he could not have told why. Was it that there had
+passed to him in his sleep the subconscious knowledge of the kiss which
+Kitty had given him; and, after all, had he said “My darling” to her
+and not to the wife far away across the seas, as he thought? A strange
+feeling, as of secret intimacy, never felt before where Kitty was
+concerned, passed through him now, and he was suddenly conscious
+that things were not as they had ever been; that the old impersonal
+comradeship had vanished. It disturbed, it almost shocked him. Whereupon
+he made a valiant effort to recover the old ground, to get out of the
+new atmosphere into the old, cheering air.
+
+“Come and say good-bye, won’t you?” he called to her.
+
+“S. O. S.--S. O. S.--S. O. S.!” was the cry in her heart, but she called
+back to him from her lips, “I can’t. I’m too busy. Come back soon,
+soldier.”
+
+With a wave of the hand he was gone. “Not a care in the world she has,”
+ Crozier said to Jesse Bulrush. “She’s the sunniest creature Heaven ever
+made.”
+
+“Too skittish for me,” responded the other with a sidelong look, for he
+had caught a note in Crozier’s voice which gave him a sudden suspicion.
+
+“You want the kind you can drive with an oatstraw and a chirp--eh, my
+friend?”
+
+“Well, I’ve got what I want,” was the reply. “Neither of us ‘ll kick
+over the traces.”
+
+“You are a lucky man,” replied Crozier. “You’ve got a remarkably big
+prize in the lottery. She is a fine woman, is Nurse Egan, and I owe her
+a great deal. I only hope things turn out so well that I can give her
+a good fat wedding-present. But I shan’t be able to do anything
+that’s close to my heart if I can’t get the cash for my share in the
+syndicate.”
+
+“Courage, soldier, as Kitty Tynan says,” responded Jesse Bulrush
+cheerily. “You never know your luck. The cash is waiting for you
+somewhere, and it’ll turn up, be sure of that.”
+
+“I’m not sure of that. I can see as plain as your nose how Bradley and
+his clique have blocked me everywhere from getting credit, and I’d give
+five years of my life to beat them in their dirty game. If I fail to get
+it at Aspen Vale I’m done. But I’ll have a try, a good big try. How far
+exactly is it? I’ve never gone by this trail.”
+
+Bulrush shook his head reprovingly. “It’s too long a journey for you to
+take after your knock-out. You’re not fit to travel yet. I don’t like
+it a bit. Lydia said this morning it was a crime against yourself, going
+off like this, and--”
+
+“Lydia?--oh yes, pardonnez-moi, m’sieu’! I did not know her name was
+Lydia.”
+
+“I didn’t either till after we were engaged.” Crozier stared in blank
+amazement. “You didn’t know her name till after you were engaged? What
+did you call her before that?”
+
+“Why, I called her Nurse.” answered the fat lover. “We all called her
+that, and it sounded comfortable and homelike and good for every day.
+It had a sort of York-shilling confidence, and your life was in her
+hands--a first-class you-and-me kind of feeling.”
+
+“Why don’t you stick to it, then?”
+
+“She doesn’t want it. She says it sounds so old, and that I’d be calling
+her ‘mother’ next.”
+
+“And won’t you?” asked Crozier slyly. “Everything in season,” beamed
+Jesse, and he shone, and was at once happy and composed. Crozier
+relapsed into silence, for he was thinking that the lost years had been
+barren of children. He turned to look at the home they had left. It was
+some distance away now, but he could see Kitty still at the corner of
+the house with a small harvest of laundered linen in her hand.
+
+“She made that fresh bed of boughs for me--ah, but I had a good sleep
+last night!” he added aloud. “I feel fit for the fight before me.” He
+drew himself up and began to nod here and there to people who greeted
+him.
+
+In the house behind them at that moment Kitty was saying to her mother,
+“Where is he going, mother?”
+
+“To Aspen Vale,” was the reply. “If you’d been at breakfast you’d have
+heard. He’ll be gone two days, perhaps three.”
+
+Three days! She regretted now that she had not said to herself,
+“Courage, soldier,” and gone to say good-bye to him when he called
+to her. Perhaps she would not see him again till after the other
+woman--till after the wife-came. Then--then the house would be empty;
+then the house would be so still. And then John Sibley would come and--
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+Three days passed, but before they ended there came another telegram
+from Mrs. Crozier stating the time of her expected arrival at Askatoon.
+It was addressed to Kitty, and Kitty almost savagely tore it up into
+little pieces and scattered it to the winds. She did not even wait to
+show it to the Young Doctor; but he had a subtle instinct as to why she
+did not; and he was rather more puzzled than usual at what was passing
+before his eyes. In any case, the coming of the wife must alter all
+the relations existing in the household of the widow Tynan. The old,
+unrestrained, careless friendship could not continue. The newcomer
+would import an element of caste and class which would freeze mother and
+daughter to the bones. Crozier was the essence of democracy, which in
+its purest form is akin to the most aristocratic element and is easily
+affiliated with it. He had no fear of Crozier. Crozier would remain
+exactly the same; but would not Crozier be whisked away out of Askatoon
+to a new fate, reconciled to being a receiver of his wife’s bounty.
+
+“If his wife gets her arms round his neck, and if she wants to get them
+there, she will, and once there he’ll go with her like a gentleman,”
+ said the Young Doctor sarcastically. Admiring Crozier as he did, he also
+had underneath all his knowledge of life an unreasonable apprehension
+of man’s weakness where a woman was concerned. The man who would face
+a cannon’s mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could
+crumple with one hand.
+
+The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and
+Kitty met the train. The local operator had not divulged to any one the
+contents of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators
+on the platform. As the great express stole in almost noiselessly, like
+a tired serpent, Kitty watched its approach with outward cheerfulness.
+She had braced herself to this moment, till she looked the most buoyant,
+joyous thing in the world. It had not come easily. With desperation she
+had fought a fight during these three lonely days, till at last she had
+conquered, sleeping each night on Crozier’s star-lit bed of boughs and
+coming in with the silver-grey light of dawn. Now she leaned forward
+with heart beating fast; but with smiling face and with eyes so bright
+that she deceived the Young Doctor.
+
+There was no sign of inward emotion, of hidden troubles, as she leaned
+forward to see the great lady step from the train--great in every sense
+was this lady in her mind; imposing in stature, a Juno, a tragedy queen,
+a Zenobia, a daughter of the gods who would not stoop to conquer. She
+looked in vain, however, for the Mrs. Crozier she had imagined made no
+appearance from the train. She hastened down the platform still with
+keen eyes scanning the passengers, who were mostly alighting to stretch
+their legs and get a breath of air.
+
+“She’s not here,” she said at last darkly to the Young Doctor who had
+followed her.
+
+Then suddenly she saw emerge from a little group at the steps of a car
+a child in a long dress--so it seemed to her, the being was so small
+and delicate--and come forward, having hastily said good-bye to her
+fellow-passengers. As the Young Doctor said afterwards, “She wasn’t
+bigger than a fly,” and she certainly was as graceful and pretty and
+piquante as a child-woman could be.
+
+Presently, with her alert, rather assertive blue eyes she saw Kitty, and
+came forward. “Miss Tynan?” she asked, with an encompassing look.
+
+Now Kitty was idiomatic in her speech at times, and she occasionally
+used slang of the best brand, but she avoided those colloquialisms
+which were of the vocabulary of the uneducated. Indeed, she had had no
+inclination to use them, for her father had set her a good example, and
+she liked to hear good English spoken. That was why Crozier’s talk had
+been like music to her; and she had been keen to distinguish between the
+rhetorical method of Augustus Burlingame, who modelled himself on the
+orators of all the continents, and was what might be called a synthetic
+elocutionist. Kitty was as simple and natural as a girl could be, and
+as a rule had herself in perfect command; but she was so stunned by the
+sight of this petite person before her that, in reply to Mrs. Crozier’s
+question, she only said abruptly
+
+“The same!”
+
+Then she came to herself and could have bitten her tongue out for that
+plunge into the vernacular of the West; and forthwith a great prejudice
+was set up in her mind against Mona Crozier, in whose eyes she caught
+a look of quizzical criticism or, as she thought, contemptuous comment.
+That for one instant she had been caught unawares and so had put
+herself at a disadvantage angered her; but she had been embarrassed and
+confounded by this miniature goddess, and her reply was a vague echo
+of talk she heard around her every day. Also she could have choked the
+Young Doctor, whom she caught looking at her with wondering humour,
+as though he was trying to see “what her game was,” as he said to her
+afterwards.
+
+It was all due to the fact that from the day of the Logan Trial, and
+particularly from the day when Shiel Crozier had told his life-story,
+she had always imagined his wife as a stately Amazonian being with
+the carriage of a Boadicea. She had looked for an empress in splendid
+garments, and--and here was a humming-bird of a woman, scarcely bigger,
+than a child, with the buzzing energy of a bee, but with a queer sort of
+manfulness too; with a square, slightly-projecting chin, as Kitty came
+to notice afterwards; together with some small lines about the mouth and
+at the eyes, which came from trouble endured and suffering undergone.
+Kitty did not notice that, but the Young Doctor took it in with his
+embracing glance, as the wife saluted Kitty with her inward comment,
+which was:
+
+“So this is the chit who wrote to me like a mother!” But Mona Crozier
+did not underestimate Kitty for all that, and she wondered why it was
+that Kitty had written as she did. One thing was quite clear: Kitty had
+had good intentions, else why have written at all?
+
+All these thoughts had passed through the mind of each, with a good many
+others, while they were shaking hands; and the Young Doctor summoned his
+man to carry Mona’s hand-luggage to the extra buggy he had brought to
+the station. One of the many other thoughts that were passing through
+three active minds was Kitty’s unspoken satire:
+
+“Just think; this is the woman he talked of as though she was a moving
+mountain which would fall on you and crush you, if you didn’t look out!”
+
+No doubt Crozier would have repudiated this description of his talk, but
+the fact was he had unconsciously spoken of Mona with a sort of hush in
+his voice; for a woman to him was something outside real understanding.
+He had a romantic mediaeval view, which translated weakness and beauty
+into a miracle, and what psychologists call “an inspired control.”
+
+“She’s no bigger than--than a wasp,” said Kitty to herself, after the
+Young Doctor had assured Mrs. Crozier that her husband was almost well
+again; that he had recovered more quickly than was expected, and had
+gained strength wonderfully after the crisis was passed.
+
+“An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you,” was Kitty’s
+further inward comment, “and that’s why he was always nervous when he
+spoke of her.” Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed
+the tiny lines about the tiny mouth, and the fine-spun webs about the
+bird-bright eyes.
+
+The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward
+suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward
+fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more
+offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most,
+spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey--and this, a
+journey across a continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and
+fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold
+of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the
+decision of every step and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and she said
+to herself,
+
+“Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo,” and she instinctively felt
+the little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she
+ever wore, or had ever worn.
+
+“Sensible of her not to bring a maid,” commented the Young Doctor
+inwardly. “That would have thrown Kitty into a fit. Yet how she manages
+to look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is
+beyond me--and Crozier so rather careless in his ways. Not what you
+would call two notes in the same key, she and Crozier,” he reflected as
+he told her she need not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of
+the checks for it.
+
+“My husband--is--is he quite better now?” Mrs. Crozier asked with sharp
+anxiety, as the two-seated “rig” started away with the ladies in the
+back seat.
+
+“Oh, better, thanks to him,” was Kitty’s reply, nodding towards the
+Young Doctor.
+
+“You have told him I was coming?”
+
+“Wasn’t it better to have a talk with you first?” asked Kitty meaningly.
+
+Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried,
+then she looked Kitty in the eyes.
+
+“You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it,” was
+her enigmatical reply. “And of course you will tell me. You did not let
+him know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?”
+
+“Oh, you got his cable?” questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph
+in her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor. It did reach
+him, and he replied to the question.
+
+“We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country
+planned his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did
+not, unfortunately, take you into account.”
+
+The little lady blushed, or flushed. “May I ask how you know this to be
+so, if it is so?” she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in
+her tone, as it seemed to Kitty.
+
+“The Logan Trial--I mentioned it in my letter to you,” interposed Kitty.
+“He was shot for the evidence he gave at the trial. Well, at the trial a
+great many questions were asked by a lawyer who wanted to hurt him, and
+he answered them.”
+
+“Why did the lawyer want to hurt him?” Mona Crozier asked quickly.
+
+“Just mean-hearted envy and spite and devilry,” was Kitty’s answer.
+“They were both handsome men, and perhaps that was it.”
+
+“I never thought my husband handsome, though he was always distinguished
+looking,” was the quiet reply.
+
+“Ah, but you haven’t seen him at all for so long!” remarked Kitty, a
+little spitefully.
+
+“How do you know that?” Mrs. Crozier was nettled, though she did not
+show it; but Kitty felt it was so, and was glad.
+
+“He said so at the Logan Trial.”
+
+“Was that the kind of question asked at the trial?” the wife quickly
+interjected.
+
+“Yes, lots of that kind,” returned Kitty.
+
+“What was the object?”
+
+“To make him look not so distinguished--like nothing. If a man isn’t
+handsome, but only distinguished”--Kitty’s mood was dangerous--“and you
+make him look cheap, that’s one advantage, and--”
+
+Here the Young Doctor, having observed the rising tide of antagonism in
+the tone of the voices behind him, gently interposed, and made it clear
+that the purpose was to throw a shadow on the past of her husband
+in order to discredit his evidence; to which Mrs. Crozier nodded her
+understanding. She liked the Young Doctor, as who did not who came in
+contact with him, except those who had fear of him, and who had an idea
+that he could read their minds as he read their bodies. And even this
+girl at her side--Mona Crozier realised that the part she had played was
+evidently an unselfish one, though she felt with piercing intuition that
+whatever her husband thought of the girl, the girl thought too much of
+her husband. Somehow, all in a moment, it made her sorry for the girl’s
+sake. The girl had meant well by her husband in sending for his wife,
+that was certain; and she did not look bad. She was too sedately and
+reservedly dressed, in spite of her auriferous face and head and her
+burnished tone, to be bad; too fearless in eye, too concentrated to be
+the rover in fields where she had no tenure or right.
+
+She turned and looked Kitty squarely in the eyes, and a new, softer look
+came into her own, subduing what to Kitty was the challenging alertness
+and selfish inquisitiveness.
+
+“You have been very good to Shiel--you two kind people,” she said, and
+there came a sudden faint mist to her eyes.
+
+That was her lucky moment, and she spoke as she did just in time, for
+Kitty was beginning to resent her deeply; to dislike her far more than
+was reasonable, and certainly without any justice.
+
+Kitty spoke up quickly. “Well, you see, he was always kind and good to
+other people, and that was why--”
+
+“But that Mr. Burlingame did not like him?” The wife had a strange
+intuition regarding Mr. Burlingame. She was sure that there was a woman
+in the case--the girl beside her?
+
+“That was because Mr. Burlingame was not kind or good to other people,”
+ was Kitty’s sedate response. There was an undertone of reflection in the
+voice which did not escape Mrs. Crozier’s senses, and it also caught the
+ear of the Young Doctor, to whom there came a sudden revelation of the
+reason why Burlingame had left Mrs. Tynan’s house.
+
+“Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Crozier enigmatically. Presently, with suppressed
+excitement as she saw the Young Doctor reining in the horses slowly, she
+added: “My husband--when have you arranged that I should see him?”
+
+“When he gets back--home,” Kitty replied, with an accent on the last
+word.
+
+Mrs. Crozier started visibly. “When he gets back home-back from where?
+He is not here?” she asked in a tone of chagrin. She had come a long
+way, and she had pictured this meeting at the end of the journey with
+a hundred variations, but never with this one--that she should not see
+Shiel at once when the journey was over, if he was alive. Was it hurt
+pride or disappointed love which spoke in her face, in her words? After
+all, it was bad enough that her private life and affairs should be
+dragged out in a court of law; that these two kind strangers, whom she
+had never seen till a few minutes ago, should be in the inner circle
+of knowledge of the life of her husband and herself, without her
+self-esteem being hurt like this. She was very woman, and the look
+of the thing was not nice to her eyes, while it must belittle her in
+theirs. Had this girl done it on purpose? Yet why should she--she who
+had so appealed to her to come to him--have sought to humiliate her?
+
+Kitty was not quite sure what she ought to say. “You see, we expected
+him back before this. He is very exact!”
+
+“Very exact?” asked Mrs. Crozier in astonishment. This was a new phase
+of Shiel Crozier’s character. He must, indeed, have changed since he had
+caused her so much anxiety in days gone by.
+
+“Usen’t he to be so?” asked Kitty, a little viciously. “He is so very
+exact now,” she added. “He expected to be back home before this”--how
+she loved to use that word home--“and so we thought he would be here
+when you arrived. But he has been detained at Aspen Vale. He had a big
+business deal on--”
+
+“A big business deal? Is he--is he in a large way of business?” Mona
+asked almost incredulously. Shiel Crozier in a large way of business,
+in a big business deal? It did not seem possible. His had ever been the
+game of chance. Business--business?
+
+“He doesn’t talk himself, of course; that wouldn’t be like him,”--Kitty
+had joy in giving this wife the character of her husband, “but they say
+that if he succeeds in what he’s trying to do now he will make a great
+deal of money.”
+
+“Then he has not made it yet?” asked Mrs. Crozier.
+
+“He has always been able to pay his board regularly, with enough left
+for a pew in church,” answered Kitty with dry malice; for she mistook
+the light in the other’s eyes, and thought it was avarice; and the love
+of money had no place in Kitty’s make-up. She herself would never have
+been influenced by money where a man was concerned.
+
+“Here’s the house,” she quickly added; “our home, where Mr. Crozier
+lives. He has the best room, so yours won’t be quite so good. It’s
+mother’s--she’s giving it up to you. With your trunks and things, you’ll
+want a room to yourself,” Kitty added, not at all unconscious that she
+was putting a phase of the problem of Crozier and his wife in a very
+commonplace way; but she did not look into Mrs. Crozier’s face as she
+said it.
+
+Mrs. Crozier, however, was fully conscious of the poignancy of the
+remark, and once again her face flushed slightly, though she kept
+outward composure.
+
+“Mother, mother, are you there?” Kitty called, as she escorted the wife
+up the garden walk.
+
+An instant later Mrs. Tynan cheerfully welcomed the disturber of the
+peace of the home where Shiel Crozier had been the central figure for so
+long.
+
+
+
+
+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 eyes 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 doesn’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:
+
+     And I was very lucky--worse luck!
+     Any man as is a man has to have one vice
+     God help the man that’s afraid of his own wife!
+     He saw what he wished to see, which is the way of man
+     Her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios
+     Law’s delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed
+     Searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
+     Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+     She looked too gay to be good
+     Telling the unnecessary truth
+     They had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler
+     What isn’t never was to those that never knew
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of You Never Know Your Luck, Complete
+by Gilbert Parker
+
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      You Never Know Your Luck, by Gilbert Parker
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+Project Gutenberg's You Never Know Your Luck, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: You Never Know Your Luck, Complete
+       Being The Story Of A Matrimonial Deserter
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2006 [EBook #6288]
+Last Updated: August 27, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <h1>
+      YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      [BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Gilbert Parker
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <a href="#link2H_INTR"> INTRODUCTION </a><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK</b> </a><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0003"> PROEM </a><br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0001">
+        CHAPTER I. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;"PIONEERS, O PIONEERS&rdquo; <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;CLOSING THE DOORS
+        <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE
+        LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0004">
+        CHAPTER IV. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;"STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE&rdquo; <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;A STORY TO BE TOLD
+        <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;"HERE
+        ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON&rdquo; <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER
+        VII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;A WOMAN&rsquo;S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;ALL ABOUT AN
+        UNOPENED LETTER <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;NIGHT
+        SHADE AND MORNING GLORY <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X.
+        </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;"S. O. S.&rdquo; <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER
+        XI. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;AT THE RECEIPT OF
+        CUSTOM <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;KITTY
+        SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV.
+        </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;AWAITING THE VERDICT <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0015">
+        CHAPTER XV. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;"MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM&rdquo; <br /><br />
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;&lsquo;TWAS FOR YOUR
+        PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE,&rdquo; <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER
+        XVII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT? <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_EPIL"> EPILOGUE. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_INTR" id="link2H_INTR">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      INTRODUCTION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      This volume contains two novels dealing with the life of prairie people in
+      the town of Askatoon in the far West. &lsquo;The World for Sale&rsquo; and the latter
+      portion of &lsquo;The Money Master&rsquo; deal with the same life, and &lsquo;The Money
+      Master&rsquo; contained some of the characters to be found in &lsquo;Wild Youth&rsquo;. &lsquo;The
+      World for Sale&rsquo; also was a picture of prairie country with strife between
+      a modern Anglo-Canadian town and a French-Canadian town in the West. These
+      books are of the same people; but &lsquo;You Never Know Your Luck&rsquo; and &lsquo;Wild
+      Youth&rsquo; have several characters which move prominently through both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the introduction to &lsquo;The World for Sale&rsquo; in this series, I drew a
+      description of prairie life, and I need not repeat what was said there.
+      &lsquo;In You Never Know Your Luck&rsquo; there is a Proem which describes briefly the
+      look of the prairie and suggests characteristics of the life of the
+      people. The basis of the book has a letter written by a wife to her
+      husband at a critical time in his career when he had broken his promise to
+      her. One or two critics said the situation is impossible, because no man
+      would carry a letter unopened for a long number of years. My reply is:
+      that it is exactly what I myself did. I have still a letter written to me
+      which was delivered at my door sixteen years ago. I have never read it,
+      and my reason for not reading it was that I realised, as I think, what its
+      contents were. I knew that the letter would annoy, and there it lies. The
+      writer of the letter who was then my enemy is now my friend. The chief
+      character in the book, Crozier, was an Irishman, with all the Irishman&rsquo;s
+      cleverness, sensitiveness, audacity, and timidity; for both those latter
+      qualities are characteristic of the Irish race, and as I am half Irish I
+      can understand why I suppressed a letter and why Crozier did. Crozier is
+      the type of man that comes occasionally to the Dominion of Canada; and
+      Kitty Tynan is the sort of girl that the great West breeds. She did an
+      immoral thing in opening the letter that Crozier had suppressed, but she
+      did it in a good cause&mdash;for Crozier&rsquo;s sake; she made his wife write
+      another letter, and she placed it again in the envelope for Crozier to
+      open and see. Whatever lack of morality there was in her act was balanced
+      by the good end to the story, though it meant the sacrifice of Kitty&rsquo;s
+      love for Crozier, and the making of his wife happy once more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for &lsquo;Wild Youth&rsquo; I make no apology for it. It is still fresh in the
+      minds of the American public, and it is true to the life. Some critics
+      frankly called it melodramatic. I do not object to the term. I know
+      nothing more melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+      plays. Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic; Balzac
+      was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Sir Walter
+      Scott. The charge of melodrama is not one that should disturb a writer of
+      fiction. The question is, are the characters melodramatic. Will anyone
+      suggest to me the marriage of a girl of seventeen with a man over sixty is
+      melodramatic. It may be, but I think it tragical, and so it was in this
+      case. As for Orlando Guise, I describe the man as I knew him, and he is
+      still alive. Some comments upon the story suggested that it was impossible
+      for a man to spend the night on the prairie with a woman whom he loved
+      without causing her to forget her marriage vows. It is not sentimental to
+      say that is nonsense. It is a prurient mind that only sees evil in a
+      situation of the sort. Why it should be desirable to make a young man and
+      woman commit a misdemeanor to secure the praise of a critic is beyond
+      imagination. It would be easy enough to do. I did it in The Right of Way.
+      I did it in others of my books. What happens to one man and one woman does
+      not necessarily happen to another. There are men who, for love of a woman,
+      would not take advantage of her insecurity. There are others who would. In
+      my books I have made both classes do their will, and both are true to
+      life. It does not matter what one book is or is not, but it does matter
+      that an author writes his book with a sense of the fitting and the true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both these books were written to present that side of life in Canada which
+      is not wintry and forbidding. There is warmth of summer in both tales, and
+      thrilling air and the beauty of the wild countryside. As for the cold, it
+      is severe in most parts of Canada, but the air is dry, and the sharpness
+      is not felt as it is in this damper climate of England. Canadians feel the
+      cold of a March or November day in London far more than the cold of a day
+      in Winnipeg, with the thermometer many degrees below zero. Both these
+      books present the summer side of Canada, which is as delightful as that of
+      any climate in the world; both show the modern western life which is
+      greatly changed since the days when Pierre roamed the very fields where
+      these tales take place. It should never be forgotten that British Columbia
+      has a climate like that of England, where, on the Coast, it is never
+      colder than here, and where there is rain instead of snow in winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is much humour and good nature in the West, and this also I tried to
+      bring out in these two books; and Askatoon is as cosmopolitan as London.
+      Canada in the West has all races, and it was consistent of me to give a
+      Chinaman of noble birth a part to play in the tragicomedy. I have a great
+      respect for the Chinaman, and he is a good servant and a faithful friend.
+      Such a Chinaman as Li Choo I knew in British Columbia, and all I did was
+      to throw him on the Eastern side of the Rockies, a few miles from the
+      border of the farthest Western province. The Chinaman&rsquo;s death was faithful
+      in its detail, and it was true to his nature. He had to die, and with the
+      old pagan philosophy, still practised in China and Japan, he chose the
+      better way, to his mind. Princes still destroy themselves in old Japan, as
+      recent history proves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PROEM
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Have you ever seen it in reaping-time? A sea of gold it is, with gentle
+      billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
+      salute the reaper and say, &ldquo;All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
+      the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall.&rdquo; The countless million
+      heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles them
+      to the hour of harvest. The air-like the tingle of water from a
+      mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
+      the dust of the world flushed away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arcady? Look closely. Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are houses&mdash;sometimes
+      in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed domesticity or naked
+      industry in the workfield. Also rising here and there in the expanse,
+      clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a powdery mist. They look like
+      the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice. Sacrifice it is. The vast
+      steam-threshers are mightily devouring what their servants, the monster
+      steam-reapers, have gleaned for them. Soon, when September comes, all that
+      waving sea will be still. What was gold will still be a rusted gold, but
+      near to the earth-the stubble of the corn now lying in vast garners by the
+      railway lines, awaiting transport east and west and south and across the
+      seas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
+      whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
+      chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature&rsquo;s travail which
+      is not pain. Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
+      white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun will
+      be a soft&mdash;sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
+      wool. Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the threshers,
+      will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home. There the
+      farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought that while he
+      waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding; and as in April,
+      the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it will push upward
+      and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with the &ldquo;What cheer,
+      partner!&rdquo; of a mate in the scheme of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here&mdash;bright,
+      singing birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel
+      in the wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth,
+      the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
+      plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash of
+      the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the mallard
+      from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by its joy in
+      song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I. &ldquo;PIONEERS, O PIONEERS&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <p>
+      If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
+      pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
+      have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
+      possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the &ldquo;field of the
+      cloth of gold,&rdquo; which your eye has already been invited to see. With the
+      gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very joyously
+      at twenty-two. This morning singer was just that age; and if you had
+      looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of miles,
+      before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in tone
+      with the scene. She was a symphony in gold&mdash;nothing less. Her hair,
+      her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all gold.
+      Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might have had
+      a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal, and the
+      girl herself a proper subject of suspicion. The eyelashes were so long and
+      so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a cloud of
+      gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval painter, that
+      an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every other way a
+      remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she was so very
+      busy, a keynote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
+      not; but it is a libel. She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and is
+      never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There was, however,
+      just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl&rsquo;s presentation&mdash;that
+      you were bound to say, if you considered her quite apart from her place in
+      this nature-scheme. She was not wholly aristocratic; she was lacking in
+      that high, social refinement which would have made her gold not so golden,
+      her black eyelashes not so black. Being unaristocratic is not always a
+      matter of birth, though it may be a matter of parentage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted. Her father had
+      been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West. His
+      widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to maintain
+      her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her daughter was
+      now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the origin of the girl&rsquo;s
+      slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of selection which
+      nature arranges long before society makes its judicial decision. The
+      father had been a man of high intelligence, which his daughter to a real
+      degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul as ever lived, was a
+      product of southern English rural life&mdash;a little sumptuous, but
+      wholesome, and for her daughter&rsquo;s sake at least, keeping herself well and
+      safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked temptations. She was
+      forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample but proper graces that
+      at forty-five she had numerous admirers. The girl was English in
+      appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish&mdash;why, who can say? Was it
+      because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish coast long since?
+      Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her father&rsquo;s. You would
+      have liked her, everybody did,&mdash;yet you would have thought that
+      nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so pointedly
+      designed to express the ancient dame&rsquo;s colour-scheme, even to the delicate
+      auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud look of her
+      faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a purse and
+      scarcely needed one. In any case she had an ample pocket in her dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
+      important person in the story, but because the end of the story would have
+      been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she herself
+      was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or chance that
+      they express the full meaning of the title of this story. As a line
+      beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial deserter.
+      Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she had on more
+      than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean and low enough
+      to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of matrimony without
+      its status.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
+      misleading. A man had once said to her that &ldquo;she looked too gay to be
+      good,&rdquo; but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
+      rather better. Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
+      getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
+      knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
+      turned from her wiser if not better men. Because they had pursued the old
+      but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan had
+      exacted compensation in one way or another&mdash;by extras, by occasional
+      and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for
+      their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
+      themselves well. She scored in any contest&mdash;in spite of her rather
+      small brain, large heart, and ardent appearance. A very clever, shiftless
+      Irish husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy
+      watching and fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and fend
+      herself to the same extent as she would have done had she been free and
+      childless and thirty. The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw none of
+      those things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time and look
+      into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or the
+      grey-blue foothills. She never sang&mdash;she had never sung a note in her
+      life; but this girl of hers, with a man&rsquo;s coat in her hand, and eyes on
+      the joyous scene before her, was for ever humming or singing. She had even
+      sung in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer, because
+      strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not so vain as
+      people of her colouring sometimes are. It was just as bad, however, when
+      she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang, people stared at
+      her. So it was that she seldom went to church at all; but it was not
+      because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were quite individual
+      and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial deserter will show.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom to
+      the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when he was in
+      his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair proportion of
+      the time. It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy and the creepy
+      melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as a child she had
+      become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the alternate pensive
+      gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular man whose coat she
+      now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust upon it. This was the
+      song she sang:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
+     Hereaway I waited him, hereaway and oft;
+     When I sang my song to him, bright his eyes began to shine&mdash;
+     Hereaway I loved him well, for my heart was soft.
+
+     &ldquo;Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies&mdash;
+     &lsquo;Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?&rsquo;&rdquo;
+ 
+     &ldquo;Whereaway goes my lad&mdash;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&mdash;
+     Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
+
+     &ldquo;When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+     Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+     I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say&mdash;
+     &lsquo;Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?&rsquo;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      There was a plaintive quality in the voice of this russet maiden in
+      perfect keeping with the music and the words; and though her lips smiled,
+      there was a deep, wistful look in her eyes more in harmony with the coming
+      autumn than with this gorgeous harvest-time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment after she had finished singing she stood motionless, absorbed
+      by the far horizon; then suddenly she gave a little shake of the body and
+      said in a brisk, playfully chiding way:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!&rdquo; There was no one near, so
+      far as eye could see, so it was clear that the words were addressed to
+      herself. She was expressing that wonder which so many people feel at
+      discovering in themselves long-concealed characteristics, or find
+      themselves doing things out of their natural orbit, as they think. If any
+      one had told Kitty Tynan that she had rare imagination, she would have
+      wondered what was meant. If anyone had said to her, &ldquo;What are you dreaming
+      about, Kitty?&rdquo; she would have understood, however, for she had had fits of
+      dreaming ever since she was a child, and they had increased during the
+      past few years&mdash;since the man came to live with them whose coat she
+      was brushing. Perhaps this was only imitation, because the man had a habit
+      of standing or sitting still and looking into space for minutes&mdash;and
+      on Sundays for hours&mdash;at a time; and often she had watched him as he
+      lay on his back in the long grass, head on a hillock, hat down over his
+      eyes, while the smoke from his pipe came curling up from beneath the rim.
+      Also she had seen him more than once sitting with a letter before him and
+      gazing at it for many minutes together. She had also noted that it was the
+      same letter on each occasion; that it was a closed letter, and also that
+      it was unstamped. She knew that, because she had seen it in his desk&mdash;the
+      desk once belonging to her father, a sloping thing with a green-baize top.
+      Sometimes he kept it locked, but very often he did not; and more than
+      once, when he had asked her to get him something from the desk, not out of
+      meanness, but chiefly because her moral standard had not a multitude of
+      delicate punctilios, she had examined the envelope curiously. The envelope
+      bore a woman&rsquo;s handwriting, and the name on it was not that of the man who
+      owned the coat&mdash;and the letter. The name on the envelope was Shiel
+      Crozier, but the name of the man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry&mdash;James
+      Gathorne Kerry, so he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
+      mystery. She wondered greatly what it all meant. Never in anything else
+      had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but she
+      felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up fifty
+      stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who for over
+      four years had lived in her mother&rsquo;s house. He had become part of her
+      life, perhaps just because he was a man,&mdash;and what home is a real
+      home without a man?&mdash;perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet,
+      confidential word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness; indeed,
+      he showed in his manner occasionally almost a boisterous hilarity. He
+      undoubtedly was what her mother called &ldquo;a queer dick,&rdquo; but also &ldquo;a pippin
+      with a perfect core,&rdquo; which was her way of saying that he was a man to be
+      trusted with herself and with her daughter; one who would stand loyally by
+      a friend or a woman. He had stood by them both when Augustus Burlingame,
+      the lawyer, who had boarded with them when J. G. Kerry first came,
+      coarsely exceeded the bounds of liberal friendliness which marked the
+      household, and by furtive attempts at intimacy began to make life
+      impossible for both mother and daughter. Burlingame took it into his head,
+      when he received notice that his rooms were needed for another boarder,
+      that J. G. Kerry was the cause of it. Perhaps this was not without reason,
+      since Kerry had seen Kitty Tynan angrily unclasping Burlingame&rsquo;s arm from
+      around her waist, and had used cutting and decisive words to the
+      sensualist afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had taken the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent&mdash;Jesse
+      Bulrush&mdash;who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three
+      days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous
+      fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and
+      adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient for
+      harmless deceit. He was fifty, and no gallant save in words; and, as a
+      wary bachelor of many years&rsquo; standing, it was a long time before he showed
+      a tendency to blandish a good-looking middle-aged nurse named Egan who
+      also lodged with Mrs. Tynan; though even a plain-faced nurse in uniform
+      has an advantage over a handsome unprofessional woman. Jesse Bulrush and
+      J. G. Kerry were friends&mdash;became indeed such confidential friends to
+      all appearance, though their social origin was evidently so different,
+      that Kitty Tynan, when she wished to have a pleasant conversation which
+      gave her a glow for hours afterwards, talked to the fat man of his lean
+      and aristocratic-looking friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Got his head where it ought to be&mdash;on his shoulders; and it ain&rsquo;t
+      for playing football with,&rdquo; was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush
+      concerning Mr. Kerry. This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she could
+      not have told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a long
+      history of the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and whom
+      even the inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to &ldquo;discover&rdquo; when he
+      lived in the same house. But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing as a
+      canary, and relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and becoming
+      means, with her good contralto voice. She was indeed a creature of
+      contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice it was
+      she. She looked a soprano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry&rsquo;s coat in her hand it
+      would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the detectives
+      say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no consequence; but
+      it was clear that the song she sang had moved her, for there was the glint
+      of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the house, the words of the
+      lyric singing themselves over in her brain:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the hearth, heaven stood there in the skies&rsquo; 
+     Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?&rdquo;&rsquo; 
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of laying
+      his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had said
+      aloud to herself, &ldquo;Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!&rdquo; Perhaps&mdash;and
+      perhaps not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the
+      house, and she quickened her footsteps. The blood in her face, the look in
+      her eye quickened also. And now a figure appeared in the doorway&mdash;a
+      figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Villain&rsquo;!&rdquo; he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient
+      moods&mdash;after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush. &ldquo;Hither with my coat; my
+      spotless coat in a spotted world,&mdash;the unbelievable anomaly&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         &ldquo;&lsquo;For the earth of a dusty to-day
+          Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought it
+      was clever beyond thinking&mdash;a heavenly jumble. &ldquo;If it wasn&rsquo;t for me
+      you&rsquo;d be carted for rubbish,&rdquo; she replied joyously as she helped him on
+      with his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard you singing&mdash;what was it?&rdquo; he asked cheerily, while it could
+      be seen that his mind was preoccupied. The song she had sung, floating
+      through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
+      engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long time,
+      with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or rear-guard
+      or what you will:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;&lsquo;Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
+     Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft&mdash;&lsquo;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
+      saddened her, she knew not why. At the words the flaming exhilaration of
+      the man&rsquo;s face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&mdash;oh, that!&rdquo; he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a
+      clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your hat!&rdquo; she called after him, and ran inside the house. An instant
+      later she gave it to him. Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
+      kindly at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Whereaway, hereaway&rsquo; is a wonderful song,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We used to sing it
+      when I was a boy&mdash;and after, and after. It&rsquo;s an old song&mdash;old as
+      the hills. Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan. What a girl you are&mdash;to be so
+      kind to a fellow like&mdash;me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!&rdquo;&mdash;these were the very words she
+      had used about herself a little while before. The song&mdash;why did it
+      make Mr. Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it?
+      Kitty watched him striding down the street into the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now a voice&mdash;a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat,&rdquo; it said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
+      struggle, into his coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly,&rdquo; she answered cheerily as she entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I&rsquo;m not the star boarder&mdash;nothing for me!&rdquo; he said in
+      affected protest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little more to starboard and you&rsquo;ll get it on,&rdquo; she retorted with a
+      glint of her late father&rsquo;s raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch which
+      put it right on the ample shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bully! bully!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a Christian. I hate horse-racers and gamblers,&rdquo; she returned
+      mockingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll turn Christian&mdash;I want to be loved,&rdquo; he bleated from the
+      doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Roll on, proud porpoise!&rdquo; she rejoined, which shows that her conversation
+      was not quite aristocratic at all times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Golly, but she&rsquo;s a gold dollar in a gold bank,&rdquo; remarked Jesse Bulrush
+      warmly as he lurched into the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down the
+      way the two men had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her. She heard the dizzy din
+      of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of the
+      solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing,
+      machine-like sound. This particular sound went on and on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She opened the door of the next room. Her mother sat at a sewing-machine
+      intent upon some work, the needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you making, mother?&rdquo; Kitty asked. &ldquo;New blinds for Mr. Kerry&rsquo;s
+      bedroom-he likes this green colour,&rdquo; the widow added with a slight flush,
+      due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody does everything for him,&rdquo; remarked the girl almost pettishly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a nice spirit, I must say!&rdquo; replied her mother reprovingly, the
+      machine almost stopping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I said it in a different way it would be all right,&rdquo; the other
+      returned with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft
+      inflection, like a born actress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!&rdquo; declared her mother, and she
+      bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring
+      way. Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes. A look of
+      pleasure stole over the girl&rsquo;s face, and her bosom rose and fell with a
+      happy sigh. Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II. CLOSING THE DOORS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There are many people who, in some subtle psychological way, are very like
+      their names; as though some one had whispered to &ldquo;the parents of this
+      child&rdquo; the name designed for it from the beginning of time. So it was with
+      Shiel Crozier. Does not the name suggest a man lean and flat, sinewy,
+      angular and isolated like a figure in one of El Greco&rsquo;s pictures in the
+      Prado at Madrid? Does not the name suggest a figure of elongated humanity
+      with a touch of ancient mysticism and yet also of the fantastical humour
+      of Don Quixote?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In outward appearance Shiel Crozier, otherwise J. G. Kerry, of Askatoon,
+      was like his name for the greater part of the time. Take him in repose,
+      and he looked a lank ascetic who dreamed of a happy land where
+      flagellation was a joy and pain a panacea. In action, however, as when
+      Kitty Tynan helped him on with his coat, he was a pure improvisation of
+      nature. He had a face with a Cromwellian mole, which broke out in emotion
+      like an April day, with eyes changing from a blue-grey to the deepest
+      ultramarine that ever delighted the soul and made the reputation of an Old
+      Master. Even in the prairie town of Askatoon, where every man is so busy
+      that he scarcely knows his own children when he meets them, and almost
+      requires an introduction to his wife when the door closes on them at
+      bedtime, people took a second look at him when he passed. Many who came in
+      much direct contact with him, as Augustus Burlingame the lawyer had done,
+      tried to draw from him all there was to tell about himself; which is a
+      friendly custom of the far West. The native-born greatly desire to tell
+      about themselves. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, and are
+      childlike in the frank recitals of all they were and are and hope to be.
+      This covers up also a good deal of business acumen, shrewdness, and
+      secretiveness which is not so childlike and bland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this they are in sharp contrast to those not native-born. These come
+      from many places on the earth, and they are seldom garrulously historical.
+      Some of them go to the prairie country to forget they ever lived before,
+      and to begin the world again, having been hurt in life undeservingly; some
+      go to bury their mistakes or worse in pioneer work and adventure; some
+      flee from a wrath that would devour them&mdash;the law, society, or a
+      woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This much must be said at once for Crozier, that he had no crime to hide.
+      It was not because of crime that &ldquo;He buckles up his talk like the
+      bellyband on a broncho,&rdquo; as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said of
+      him; and Deely was a man of &ldquo;horse-sense,&rdquo; no doubt because he was a
+      horse-doctor&mdash;&ldquo;a veterenny surgeon,&rdquo; as his friends called him when
+      they wished to flatter him. Deely supplemented this chaste remark about
+      the broncho with the observation that, &ldquo;Same as the broncho, you buckle
+      him tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush.&rdquo; And
+      he added further, &ldquo;&lsquo;Tis a woman that&rsquo;s put the mumplaster on his tongue,
+      Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it&rsquo;s another man&rsquo;s wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of his
+      bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law, or with
+      another man&rsquo;s wife, nor yet with any single maid&mdash;not yet; though
+      there was now Kitty Tynan in his path. Yet he had had trouble. There was
+      hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more than all else
+      in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived his life for over
+      four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer, and stud-manager for
+      Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire. In the opinion of the West,
+      &ldquo;big-bugs&rdquo; did not come down to this kind of occupation unless they had
+      been roughly handled by fate or fortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk? Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame,&rdquo; said Malachi
+      Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling young
+      farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and farming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Words to him are like nuts to a monkey. He&rsquo;s an artist, that man is. Been
+      in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the music smells&mdash;fairly
+      smells like parfumery,&rdquo; responded Sibley. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to get at the bottom
+      of him. There&rsquo;s a real good story under his asbestos vest&mdash;something
+      that&rsquo;d make a man call for the oh-be-joyful, same as I do now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After they had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler Deely
+      continued the gossip. &ldquo;Watch me now, been a friend of dukes in England&mdash;and
+      Ireland, that Mr. James Gathorne Kerry, as any one can see; and there he
+      is feelin&rsquo; the hocks of a filly or openin&rsquo; the jaws of a stud horse,
+      age-hunting! Why, you needn&rsquo;t tell me&mdash;I&rsquo;ve had my mind made up ever
+      since the day he broke the temper of Terry Brennan&rsquo;s Inniskillen chestnut,
+      and won the gold cup with her afterwards. He just sort of appeared out of
+      the mist of the marnin&rsquo;, there bein&rsquo; a divil&rsquo;s lot of excursions and
+      conferences and holy gatherin&rsquo;s in Askatoon that time back, ostensible for
+      the business which their names denote, like the Dioceesan Conference and
+      the Pure White Water Society. That was their bluff; but they&rsquo;d come
+      herealong for one good pure white dioceesan thing before all, and that was
+      to see the dandiest horse-racing which ever infested the West. Come&mdash;he
+      come like that!&rdquo;&mdash;Deely made a motion like a swoop of an aeroplane to
+      earth&mdash;&ldquo;and here he is buckin&rsquo; about like a rough-neck same as you
+      and me; but yet a gent, a swell, a cream della cream, that&rsquo;s turned his
+      back on a lady&mdash;a lady not his own wife, that&rsquo;s my sure and sacred
+      belief.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You certainly have got women on the brain,&rdquo; retorted Sibley. &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t
+      ever seen such a man as you. There never was a woman crossing the street
+      on a muddy day that you didn&rsquo;t sprint to get a look at her ankles. Behind
+      everything you see a woman. Horses is your profession, but woman is your
+      practice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There ain&rsquo;t but one thing worth livin&rsquo; for, and that&rsquo;s a woman,&rdquo; remarked
+      Deely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you tell Mrs. Deely that?&rdquo; asked Sibley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Watch me now, she knows. What woman is there don&rsquo;t know when her husband
+      is what he is! And it&rsquo;s how I know that the trouble with James Gathorne
+      Kerry is a woman. I know the signs. Divils me own, he&rsquo;s got &lsquo;em in his
+      face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s got in his face what don&rsquo;t belong here and what you don&rsquo;t know much
+      about&mdash;never having kept company with that sort,&rdquo; rejoined Sibley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The way he lives and talks&mdash;&lsquo;No, thank you, I don&rsquo;t care for any
+      thing,&rsquo; says he, when you&rsquo;re standin&rsquo; at the door of a friendly saloon,
+      which is established by law to bespeak peace and goodwill towards men, and
+      you ask him pleasant to step inside. He don&rsquo;t seem to have a single vice.
+      Haven&rsquo;t we tried him? There was Belle Bingley, all frizzy hair and a
+      kicker; we put her on to him. But he give her ten dollars to buy a hat on
+      condition she behaved like a lady in the future&mdash;smilin&rsquo; at her, the
+      divil! And Belle, with temper like dinnemite, took it kneelin&rsquo; as it were,
+      and smiled back at him&mdash;her! Drink, women&mdash;nothin&rsquo; seems to have
+      a hold on him. What&rsquo;s his vice? Sure, then, that&rsquo;s what I say, what&rsquo;s his
+      vice? He&rsquo;s got to have one; any man as is a man has to have one vice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bosh! Look at me,&rdquo; rejoined Sibley. &ldquo;Drink women&mdash;nit! Not for me!
+      I&rsquo;ve got no vice. I don&rsquo;t even smoke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No vice? Begobs, yours has got you like a tire on a wheel! Vice&mdash;what
+      do you call gamblin&rsquo;? It&rsquo;s the biggest vice ever tuk grip of a man. It&rsquo;s
+      like a fever, and it&rsquo;s got you, John, like the nail on your finger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, p&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps, he&rsquo;s got that vice too. P&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps J. G. Kerry&rsquo;s got that
+      vice same as me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anyhow, we&rsquo;ll get to know all we want when he goes into the witness box
+      at the Logan murder trial next week. That&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;m waitin&rsquo; for,&rdquo; Deely
+      returned, with a grin of anticipation. &ldquo;That drug-eating Gus Burlingame&rsquo;s
+      got a grudge against him somehow, and when a lawyer&rsquo;s got a grudge against
+      you it&rsquo;s just as well to look where y&rsquo; are goin&rsquo;. Burlingame don&rsquo;t care
+      what he does to get his way in court. What set him against Kerry I ain&rsquo;t
+      sure, but, bedad, I think it&rsquo;s looks. Burlingame goes in for lookin&rsquo; like
+      a picture in a frame&mdash;gold seals hangin&rsquo; beyant his vestpocket, broad
+      silk cord to his eye-glass, loose flowin&rsquo; tie, and long hair-makes him
+      look pretentuous and showy. But your &lsquo;Mr. Kerry, sir,&rsquo; he don&rsquo;t have any
+      tricks to make him look like a doge from Veenis and all the eyes of the
+      females battin&rsquo; where&rsquo;er he goes. Jealousy, John Sibley, me boy, is a
+      cruil thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why is it you ain&rsquo;t jealous of him? There&rsquo;s plenty of women that watch
+      you go down-town&mdash;you got a name for it, anyway,&rdquo; remarked Sibley
+      maliciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Deely nodded sagely. &ldquo;Watch me now, that&rsquo;s right, me boy. I got a name for
+      it, but I want the game without the name, and that&rsquo;s why I ain&rsquo;t puttin&rsquo; 
+      on any airs&mdash;none at all. I depend on me tongue, not on me looks,
+      which goes against me. I like Mr. J. G. Kerry. I&rsquo;ve plenty dealin&rsquo;s with
+      him, naturally, both of us being in the horse business, and I say he&rsquo;s
+      right as a minted dollar as he goes now. Also, and behold, I&rsquo;d take my
+      oath he never done anything to blush for. His touble&rsquo;s been a woman&mdash;wayward
+      woman what stoops to folly! I give up tryin&rsquo; to pump him just as soon as I
+      made up my mind it was a woman. That shuts a man&rsquo;s mouth like a poor-box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Next week&rsquo;s fixed for the Logan killin&rsquo; case, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monday comin&rsquo;, for sure. I wouldn&rsquo;t like to be in Mr. Kerry&rsquo;s shoes.
+      Watch me now, if he gives the evidence they say he can give&mdash;the
+      prasecution say it&mdash;that M&rsquo;Mahon Gang behind Logan &lsquo;ll get him sure
+      as guns, one way or another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some one ought to give Mr. Kerry the tip to get out and not give
+      evidence,&rdquo; remarked Sibley sagely. Deely shook his head vigorously.
+      &ldquo;Begobs, he&rsquo;s had the tip all right, but he&rsquo;s not goin&rsquo;. He&rsquo;s got as much
+      fear as a canary has whiskers. He doesn&rsquo;t want to give evidence, he says,
+      but he wants to see the law do its work. Burlingame &lsquo;ll try to make it out
+      manslaughter; but there&rsquo;s a widow with children to suffer for the
+      manslaughter, just as much as though it was murder, and there isn&rsquo;t a man
+      that doesn&rsquo;t think murder was the game, and the grand joory had that idea
+      too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Between Gus Burlingame and that M&rsquo;Mahon bunch of horse-thieves, the
+      stranger in a strange land &lsquo;ll have to keep his eyes open, I&rsquo;m thinkin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Divils me darlin&rsquo;, his eyes are open all right,&rdquo; returned Deely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still, I&rsquo;d like to jog his elbow,&rdquo; Sibley answered reflectively. &ldquo;It
+      couldn&rsquo;t do any harm, and it might do good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Deely nodded good-naturedly. &ldquo;If you want to so bad as that, John, you&rsquo;ve
+      got the chance, for he&rsquo;s up at the Sovereign Bank now. I seen him leave
+      the Great Overland Railway Bureau ten minutes ago and get away quick to
+      the bank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s he got on at the bank and the railway?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some big deal, I guess. I&rsquo;ve seen him with Studd Bradley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Great North Trust Company boss?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On it, my boy, on it&mdash;the other day as thick as thieves. Studd
+      Bradley doesn&rsquo;t knit up with an outsider from the old country unless
+      there&rsquo;s reason for it&mdash;good gold-currency reasons.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A land deal, eh?&rdquo; ventured Sibley. &ldquo;What did I say&mdash;speculation,
+      that&rsquo;s his vice, same as mine! P&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps that&rsquo;s what ruined him. Cards,
+      speculation, what&rsquo;s the difference? And he&rsquo;s got a quiet look, same as
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Deely laughed loudly. &ldquo;And bursts out same as you! Quiet one hour like a
+      mill-pond or a well, and then&mdash;swhish, he&rsquo;s blazin&rsquo;! He&rsquo;s a volcano
+      in harness, that spalpeen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a volcano that doesn&rsquo;t erupt when there&rsquo;s danger,&rdquo; responded Sibley.
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s when there&rsquo;s just fun on that his volcano gets loose. I&rsquo;ll go wait
+      for him at the bank. I got a fellow-feeling for Mr. Kerry. I&rsquo;d like to
+      whisper in his ear that he&rsquo;d better be lookin&rsquo; sharp for the M&rsquo;Mahon Gang,
+      and that if he&rsquo;s a man of peace he&rsquo;d best take a holiday till after next
+      week, or get smallpox or something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two friends lounged slowly up the street, and presently parted near
+      the door of the bank. As Sibley waited, his attention was drawn to a
+      window on the opposite side of the street at an angle from themselves. The
+      light was such that the room was revealed to its farthest corners, and
+      Sibley noted that three men were evidently carefully watching the bank,
+      and that one of the men was Studd Bradley, the so-called boss. The others
+      were local men of some position commercially and financially in the town.
+      Sibley did not give any sign that he noticed the three men, but he watched
+      carefully from under the rim of his hat. His imagination, however, read a
+      story of consequence in the secretive vigilance of the three, who
+      evidently thought that, standing far back in the room, they could not be
+      seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the door of the bank opened, and Sibley saw Studd Bradley lean
+      forward eagerly, then draw back and speak hurriedly to his companions,
+      using a gesture of satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something damn funny there!&rdquo; Sibley said to himself, and stepped forward
+      to Crozier with a friendly exclamation. Crozier turned rather impatiently,
+      for his face was aflame with some exciting reflection. At this moment his
+      eyes were the deepest blue that could be imagined&mdash;an almost
+      impossible colour, like that of the Mediterranean when it reflects the
+      perfect sapphire of the sky. There was something almost wonderful in their
+      expression. A woman once said as she looked at a picture of Herschel,
+      whose eyes had the unworldly gaze of the great dreamer looking beyond this
+      sphere, &ldquo;The stars startled him.&rdquo; Such a look was in Crozier&rsquo;s eyes now,
+      as though he was seeing the bright end of a long road, the desire of his
+      soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That, indeed, was what he saw. After two years of secret negotiation he
+      had (inspired by information dropped by Jesse Bulrush, his fellow-boarder)
+      made definite arrangements for a big land-deal in connection with the
+      route of a new railway and a town-site, which would mean more to him than
+      any one could know. If it went through, he would, for an investment of ten
+      thousand dollars, have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars; and that
+      would solve an everlasting problem for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had reached a critical point in his enterprise. All that was wanted now
+      was ten thousand dollars in cash to enable him to close the great bargain
+      and make his hundred and fifty thousand. But to want ten thousand dollars
+      and to get it in a given space of time, when you have neither securities,
+      cash, nor real estate, is enough to keep you awake at night. Crozier had
+      been so busy with the delicate and difficult negotiations that he had not
+      deeply concerned himself with the absence of the necessary ten thousand
+      dollars. He thought he could get the money at any time, so good was the
+      proposition; and it was best to defer raising it to the last moment lest
+      some one learning the secret should forestall him. He must first have the
+      stake to be played for before he moved to get the cash with which to make
+      the throw. This is not generally thought a good way, but it was his way,
+      and it had yet to be tested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no cloud of apprehension, however, in Crozier&rsquo;s eyes as they met
+      those of Sibley. He liked Sibley. At this point it is not necessary to say
+      why. The reason will appear in due time. Sibley&rsquo;s face had always
+      something of that immobility and gravity which Crozier&rsquo;s face had part of
+      the time-paler, less intelligent, with dark lines and secret shadows
+      absent from Crozier&rsquo;s face; but still with some of the El Greco
+      characteristics which marked so powerfully that of the man who passed as
+      J. G. Kerry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Sibley,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;glad to see you! Anything I can do for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the other way if there&rsquo;s any doing at all,&rdquo; was the quick response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, let&rsquo;s walk along together,&rdquo; remarked Crozier a little abstractedly,
+      for he was thinking hard about his great enterprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might be seen,&rdquo; said Sibley, with an obvious undermeaning meant to
+      provoke a question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier caught the undertone of suggestion. &ldquo;Being about to burgle the
+      bank, it&rsquo;s well not to be seen together&mdash;eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I&rsquo;m not in on that business, Mr. Kerry. I&rsquo;m for breaking banks, not
+      burgling &lsquo;em,&rdquo; was the cheerful reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They laughed, but Crozier knew that the observant gambling farmer was not
+      talking at haphazard. They had met on the highway, as it were, many times
+      since Crozier had come to Askatoon, and Crozier knew his man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what are we going to do, and who will see us if we do it?&rdquo; Crozier
+      asked briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Studd Bradley and his secret-service corps have got their eyes on this
+      street&mdash;and on you,&rdquo; returned Sibley dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier&rsquo;s face sobered and his eyes became less emotional. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see
+      them anywhere,&rdquo; he answered, but looking nowhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re in Gus Burlingame&rsquo;s office. They had you under observation while
+      you were in the bank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t run off with the land, could I?&rdquo; Crozier remarked dryly, yet
+      suggestively, in his desire to see how much Sibley knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you said it was a bank. I&rsquo;ve no more idea what it is you&rsquo;re tryin&rsquo; 
+      to run off with than I know what an ace is goin&rsquo; to do when there&rsquo;s a
+      joker in the pack,&rdquo; remarked Sibley; &ldquo;but I thought I&rsquo;d tell you that
+      Bradley and his lot are watchin&rsquo; you gettin&rsquo; ready to run.&rdquo; Then he
+      hastily told what he had seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier was reassured. It was natural that Bradley &amp; Co. should take
+      an interest in his movements. They would make a pile of money if he pulled
+      off the deal-far more than he would. It was not strange that they should
+      watch his invasion of the bank. They knew he wanted money, and a bank was
+      the place to get it. That was the way he viewed the matter on the instant.
+      He replied to Sibley cheerfully. &ldquo;A hundred to one is a lot when you win
+      it,&rdquo; he said enigmatically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It depends on how much you have on,&rdquo; was Sibley&rsquo;s quiet reply&mdash;&ldquo;a
+      dollar or a thousand dollars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you&rsquo;ve got a big thing on, and you&rsquo;ve got an outsider that you think
+      is goin&rsquo; to win and beat the favourite, it&rsquo;s just as well to run no risks.
+      Believe me, Mr. Kerry, if you&rsquo;ve got anything on that asks for your
+      attention, it&rsquo;d be sense and saving if you didn&rsquo;t give evidence at the
+      Logan Trial next week. It&rsquo;s pretty well-guessed what you&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; to say
+      and what you know, and you take it from me, the M&rsquo;Mahon mob that&rsquo;s behind
+      Logan &lsquo;ll have it in for you. They&rsquo;re terrors when they get goin&rsquo;, and if
+      your evidence puts one of that lot away, ther&rsquo;ll be trouble for you. I
+      wouldn&rsquo;t do it&mdash;honest, I wouldn&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;ve been out West here a good
+      many years, and I know the place and the people. It&rsquo;s a good place, and
+      there&rsquo;s lots of first-class people here, but there&rsquo;s a few offscourings
+      that hang like wolves on the edge of the sheepfold, ready to murder and
+      git.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was what you wanted to see me about, wasn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; Crozier asked
+      quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; the other was just a shot on the chance. I don&rsquo;t like to see men
+      sneakin&rsquo; about and watching. If they do, you can bet there&rsquo;s something
+      wrong. But the other thing, the Logan Trial business, is a dead certainty.
+      You&rsquo;re only a new-comer, in a kind of way, and you don&rsquo;t need to have the
+      same responsibility as the rest. The Law&rsquo;ll get what it wants whether you
+      chip in or not. Let it alone. What&rsquo;s the Law ever done for you that you
+      should run risks for it? It&rsquo;s straight talk, Mr. Kerry. Have a cancer in
+      the bowels next week or go off to see a dyin&rsquo; brother, but don&rsquo;t give
+      evidence at the Logan Trial&mdash;don&rsquo;t do it. I got a feeling&mdash;I&rsquo;m
+      superstitious&mdash;all sportsmen are. By following my instincts I&rsquo;ve
+      saved myself a whole lot in my time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; all men that run chances have their superstitions, and they&rsquo;re not
+      to be sneered at,&rdquo; replied Crozier thoughtfully. &ldquo;If you see black, don&rsquo;t
+      play white; if you see a chestnut crumpled up, put your money on the bay
+      even when the chestnut is a favourite. Of course you&rsquo;re superstitious,
+      Sibley. The tan and the green baize are covered with ghosts that want to
+      help you, if you&rsquo;ll let them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sibley&rsquo;s mouth opened in amazement. Crozier was speaking with the look of
+      the man who hypnotises himself, who &ldquo;sees things,&rdquo; who dreams as only the
+      gambler and the plunger on the turf do dream, not even excepting the
+      latter-day Irish poets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say, I was right what I said to Deely&mdash;I was right,&rdquo; remarked Sibley
+      almost huskily, for it seemed to him as though he had found a long-lost
+      brother. No man except one who had staked all he had again and again could
+      have looked or spoken like that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier looked at the other thoughtfully for a moment, then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you said to Deely, but I do know that I&rsquo;m going to the
+      Logan Trial in spite of the M&rsquo;Mahon mob. I don&rsquo;t feel about it as you do.
+      I&rsquo;ve got a different feeling, Sibley. I&rsquo;ll play the game out. I shall not
+      hedge. I shall not play for safety. It&rsquo;s everything on the favourite this
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll excuse me, but Gus Burlingame is for the defence, and he&rsquo;s got his
+      knife into you,&rdquo; returned Sibley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet.&rdquo; Crozier smiled sardonically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I apologise, but what I&rsquo;ve said, Mr. Kerry, is said as man to man.
+      You&rsquo;re ridin&rsquo; game in a tough place, as any man has to do who starts with
+      only his pants and his head on. That&rsquo;s the way you begun here, I guess;
+      and I don&rsquo;t want to see your horse tumble because some one throws a
+      fence-rail at its legs. Your class has enemies always in a new country&mdash;jealousy,
+      envy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lean, aristocratic, angular Crozier, with a musing look on his long
+      face, grown ascetic again, as he held out his hand and gripped that of the
+      other, said warmly: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m just as much obliged to you as though I took your
+      advice, Sibley. I am not taking it, but I am taking a pledge to return the
+      compliment to you if ever I get the chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, most men get chances of that kind,&rdquo; was the gratified reply of the
+      gambling farmer, and then Crozier turned quickly and entered the doorway
+      of the British Bank, the rival of that from which he had turned in brave
+      disappointment a little while before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Left alone in the street, Sibley looked back with the instinct of the
+      hunter. As he expected, he saw a head thrust out from the window where
+      Studd Bradley and his friends had been. There was an hotel opposite the
+      British Bank. He entered and waited. Bradley and one of his companions
+      presently came in and seated themselves far back in the shadow, where they
+      could watch the doorway of the bank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was quite a half-hour before Shiel Crozier emerged from the bank. His
+      face was set and pale. For an instant he stood as though wondering which
+      way to go, then he moved up the street the way he had come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sibley heard a low, poisonous laugh of triumph rankle through the hotel
+      office. He turned round. Bradley, the over-fed, over-confident,
+      over-estimated financier, laid a hand on the shoulder of his companion as
+      they moved towards the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s another gate shut,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I guess we can close &lsquo;em all with a
+      little care. It&rsquo;s working all right. He&rsquo;s got no chance of raising the
+      cash,&rdquo; he added, as the two passed the chair where Sibley sat&mdash;with
+      his hat over his eyes, chewing an unlighted cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what it is, but it&rsquo;s dirt&mdash;and muck at that,&rdquo; John
+      Sibley remarked as he rose from his chair and followed the two into the
+      street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bradley and his friends were trying steadily to close up the avenues of
+      credit to the man to whom the success of his enterprise meant so much. To
+      crowd him out would mean an extra hundred and fifty thousand dollars for
+      themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III. THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      What the case was in which Shiel Crozier was to give evidence is not
+      important; what came from the giving of his testimony is all that matters;
+      and this story would never have been written if he had not entered the
+      witness-box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A court-room at any time seems a little warmer than any other spot to all
+      except the prisoner; but on a July day it is likely to be a punishment for
+      both innocent and guilty. A man had been killed by one of the group of
+      toughs called locally the M&rsquo;Mahon Gang, and against the charge of murder
+      that of manslaughter had been set up in defence; and manslaughter might
+      mean jail for a year or two or no jail at all. Any evidence which
+      justified the charge of murder would mean not jail, but the rope in due
+      course; for this was not Montana or Idaho, where the law&rsquo;s delays
+      outlasted even the memory of the crime committed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The court-room of Askatoon was crowded to suffocation, for the M&rsquo;Mahons
+      were detested, and the murdered man had a good reputation in the district.
+      Besides, a widow and three children mourned their loss, and the widow was
+      in court. Also Crozier&rsquo;s evidence was expected to be sensational, and to
+      prove the swivel on which the fate of the accused man would hang. Among
+      those on the inside it was also known that the clever but dissipated
+      Augustus Burlingame, the counsel for the prisoner, had a grudge against
+      Crozier,&mdash;no one quite knew why except Kitty Tynan and her mother,
+      and that cross-examination would be pressed mercilessly when Crozier
+      entered the witness-box. As Burlingame came into the court-room he said to
+      the Young Doctor&mdash;he was always spoken of as the Young Doctor in
+      Askatoon, though he had been there a good many years and he was no longer
+      as young as he looked&mdash;who was also called as a witness, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll know
+      more about Mr. J. G. Kerry when this trial is over than will suit his
+      book.&rdquo; It did not occur to Augustus Burlingame that in Crozier, who knew
+      why he had fled the house of the showy but virtuous Mrs. Tynan, he might
+      find a witness of a mental and moral calibre with baffling qualities and
+      some gift of riposte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier entered the witness-box at a stage when excitement was at fever
+      height; for the M&rsquo;Mahon Gang had given evidence which every one believed
+      to be perjured; and the widow of the slain man was weeping bitterly in her
+      seat because of noxious falsehoods sworn against her honest husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was certainly something credible and prepossessing in the look of
+      Crozier. He might be this or that, but he carried no evil or vice of
+      character in his face. He was in his grave mood this summer afternoon.
+      There he stood with his long face and the very heavy eyebrows,
+      clean-shaven, hard-bitten, as though by wind and weather, composed and
+      forceful, the mole on his chin a kind of challenge to the vertical dimple
+      in his cheek, his high forehead more benevolent than intellectual, his
+      brown hair faintly sprinkled with grey and a bit unmanageable, his
+      fathomless eyes shining. &ldquo;No man ought to have such eyes,&rdquo; remarked a
+      woman present to the Young Doctor, who abstractedly nodded assent, for,
+      like Malachi Deely and John Sibley, he himself had a theory about Crozier;
+      and he had a fear of what the savage enmity of the morally diseased
+      Burlingame might do. He had made up his mind that so intense a
+      scrupulousness as Crozier had shown since coming to Askatoon had behind it
+      not only character, but the rigidity of a set purpose; and that view was
+      supported by the stern economy of Crozier&rsquo;s daily life, broken only by
+      sudden bursts of generosity for those in need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the box Crozier kept his eye on the crown attorney, who prosecuted, and
+      on the judge. He appeared not to see any one in the court-room, though
+      Kitty Tynan had so placed herself that he must see her if he looked at the
+      audience at all. Kitty thought him magnificent as he told his story with a
+      simple parsimony but a careful choice of words which made every syllable
+      poignant with effect. She liked him in his grave mood even better than
+      when he was aflame with an internal fire of his own creation, when he was
+      almost wildly vivid with life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s two men,&rdquo; she had often said to herself; and she said it now as she
+      looked at him in the witness-box, measuring out his words and measuring
+      off at the same time the span of a murderer&rsquo;s life; for when the crown
+      attorney said to the judge that he had concluded his examination there was
+      no one in the room&mdash;not even the graceless Burlingame&mdash;who did
+      not think the prisoner guilty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is all,&rdquo; the crown attorney said to Crozier as he sank into his
+      chair, greatly pleased with one of the best witnesses who had ever been
+      through his hands&mdash;lucid, concentrated, exact, knowing just where he
+      was going and reaching his goal without meandering. Crozier was about to
+      step down when Burlingame rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish to ask a few questions,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier bowed and turned, again grasping the rail of the witness-box with
+      one hand, while with an air of cogitation and suspense he stroked his chin
+      with the long fingers of the other hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo; asked Burlingame in a tone a little louder than he
+      had used hitherto in the trial, indeed even louder than lawyers generally
+      use when they want to bully a witness. In this case it was as though he
+      wished to summon the attention of the court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a second Crozier&rsquo;s fingers caught his chin almost spasmodically. The
+      real meaning of the question, what lay behind it, flashed to his mind. He
+      saw in lightning illumination the course Burlingame meant to pursue. For a
+      moment his heart seemed to stand still, and he turned slightly pale, but
+      the blue of his eyes took on a new steely look&mdash;a look also of
+      striking watchfulness, as of an animal conscious of its danger, yet
+      conscious too of its power when at bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo; Burlingame asked again in a somewhat louder tone, and
+      turned to look at the jury, as if bidding them note the hesitation of the
+      witness; though, indeed, the waiting was so slight that none but a
+      trickster like Burlingame would have taken advantage of it, and only then
+      when there was much behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment longer Crozier remained silent, getting strength, as it were,
+      and saying to himself, &ldquo;What does he know?&rdquo; and then, with a composed look
+      of inquiry at the judge, who appeared to take no notice, he said: &ldquo;I have
+      already, in evidence, given my name to the court.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Witness, what is your name?&rdquo; again almost shouted the lawyer, with a note
+      of indignation in his voice, as though here was a dangerous fellow
+      committing a misdemeanour in their very presence. He spread out his hands
+      to the jury, as though bidding them observe, if they would, this witness
+      hesitating in answer to a simple, primary question&mdash;a witness who had
+      just sworn a man&rsquo;s life away!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;James Gathorne Kerry, as I have already given it to the court,&rdquo; was the
+      calm reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where do you live?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Askatoon, as I have already said in evidence; and if it is necessary
+      to give my domicile, I live at the house of Mrs. Tyndall Tynan, Pearl
+      Street&mdash;as you know so well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tone in which he uttered the last few words was such that even the
+      judge pricked up his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A look of hatred came into the decadent but able lawyer&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where do you live when you are at home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s house is the only home I have at present.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was outwitting the pursuer so far, but it only gained him time, as he
+      knew; and he knew also that no suggestive hint concerning the episode at
+      Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s, when Burlingame was asked to leave her house, would be of
+      any avail now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where were you born?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Ireland.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What part of Ireland?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;County Kerry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What place&mdash;what town or city or village in County Kerry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In neither.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What house, then&mdash;what estate?&rdquo; Burlingame was more than nettled;
+      and he sharpened his sword.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The estate of Castlegarry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was your name in Ireland?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the short silence that followed, the quick-drawn breath of many excited
+      and some agitated people could be heard. Among the latter were Mrs. Tynan
+      and her daughter and Malachi Deely; among those who held their breath in
+      suspense were John Sibley, Studd Bradley the financier, and the Young
+      Doctor. The swish of a skirt seemed ridiculously loud in the hush, and the
+      scratching of the judge&rsquo;s quill pen was noisily irritating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name in Ireland was James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, commonly called
+      Shiel Crozier,&rdquo; came the even reply from the witness-box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;James Shiel Gathorne Crozier in Ireland, but James Gathorne Kerry here!&rdquo;
+       Burlingame turned to the jury significantly. &ldquo;What other name have you
+      been known by in or out of Ireland?&rdquo; he added sharply to Crozier. &ldquo;No
+      other name so far as I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No other name so far as you know,&rdquo; repeated the lawyer in a sarcastic
+      tone intended to impress the court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who was your father?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;John Gathorne Crozier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any title?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was a baronet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was his business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had no profession, though he had business, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, he lived by his wits?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he was not a lawyer! I have said he had no profession. He lived on
+      his money on his estate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge waved down the laughter at Burlingame&rsquo;s expense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In official documents what was his description?&rdquo; snarled Burlingame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Gentleman&rsquo; was his designation in official documents.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You, then, were the son of a gentleman?&rdquo; There was a hateful suggestion
+      in the tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A legitimate son?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing in Crozier&rsquo;s face showed what he felt, except his eyes, and they
+      had a look in them which might well have made his questioner shrink. He
+      turned calmly to the judge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your honour, does this bear upon the case? Must I answer this legal
+      libertine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the word libertine, the judge, the whole court, and the audience
+      started; but it was presently clear the witness meant that the questioner
+      was abusing his legal privileges, though the people present interpreted it
+      another way, and quite rightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reply of the judge was in favour of the lawyer. &ldquo;I do not quite see
+      the full significance of the line of defence, but I think I must allow the
+      question,&rdquo; was the judge&rsquo;s gentle and reluctant reply, for he was greatly
+      impressed by this witness, by his transparent honesty and
+      straightforwardness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you a legitimate son of John Gathorne Crozier and his wife?&rdquo; asked
+      Burlingame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, a legitimate son,&rdquo; answered Crozier in an even voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is John Gathorne Crozier still living?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said that gentleman was his designation in official documents. I
+      supposed that would convey the fact that he was not living, but I see you
+      do not quickly grasp a point.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Burlingame was stung by the laughter in the court and ventured a riposte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But is once a gentleman always a gentleman an infallible rule?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose not; I did not mean to convey that; but once a rogue always a
+      bad lawyer holds good in every country,&rdquo; was Crozier&rsquo;s comment in a low,
+      quiet voice which stirred and amused the audience again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must ask counsel to put questions which have some relevance even to his
+      own line of defence,&rdquo; remarked the judge sternly. &ldquo;This is not a corner
+      grocery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Burlingame bowed. He had had a facer, but he had also shown the witness to
+      have been living under an assumed name. That was a good start. He hoped to
+      add to the discredit. He had absolutely no knowledge of Crozier&rsquo;s origin
+      and past; but he was in a position to find it out if Crozier told the
+      truth on oath, and he was sure he would.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where was your domicile in the old country?&rdquo; Burlingame asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In County Kerry&mdash;with a flat in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An estate in County Kerry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A house and two thousand acres.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it your property still?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You sold it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you did not sell, how is it that you do not own it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was sold for me&mdash;in spite of me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge smiled, the people smiled, the jury smiled. Truly, though a
+      life-history was being exposed with incredible slowness&mdash;&ldquo;like
+      pulling teeth,&rdquo; as the Young Doctor said&mdash;it was being touched off
+      with laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were in debt?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you get into debt?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By spending more than my income.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If Askatoon had been proud of its legal talent in the past it had now
+      reason for revising its opinion. Burlingame was frittering away the effect
+      of his inquiry by elaboration of details. What he gained by the main
+      startling fact he lost in the details by which the witness scored. He
+      asked another main question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you leave Ireland?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To make money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You couldn&rsquo;t do it there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They were too many for me over there, so I thought I&rsquo;d come here,&rdquo; slyly
+      answered Crozier, and with a grave face; at which the solemn scene of a
+      prisoner being tried for his life was shaken by a broad smiling, which in
+      some cases became laughter haughtily suppressed by the court attendant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you made money here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little&mdash;with expectations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was your income in Ireland?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It began with three thousand pounds&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fifteen thousand dollars about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About that&mdash;about a lawyer&rsquo;s fee for one whisper to a client less
+      than that. It began with that and ended with nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you escaped?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From creditors, lawyers, and other such? No, I found you here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge intervened again almost harshly on the laughter of the court,
+      with the remark that a man was being tried for his life; that ribaldry was
+      out of place; and that, unless the course pursued by the counsel was to
+      discredit the reliability of the character of the witness, the examination
+      was in excess of the privilege of counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your honour has rightly apprehended what my purpose is,&rdquo; Burlingame said
+      deprecatingly. He then turned to Crozier again, and his voice rose as it
+      did when he began the examination. It was as though he was starting all
+      over again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was it compelled&rdquo; (he was boldly venturing) &ldquo;you to leave Ireland at
+      last? What was the incident which drove you out from the land where you
+      were born&mdash;from being the owner of two thousand acres&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Partly bog,&rdquo; interposed Crozier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;From being the owner of two thousand acres to becoming a kind of
+      head-groom on a ranch? What was the cause of your flight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Flight! I came in one of the steamers of the Company for which your firm
+      are the agents. Eleven days it took to come from Glasgow to Quebec.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the court rippled, again the attendant intervened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Burlingame was nonplussed this time, but he gathered himself together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was the process of law which forced you to leave your own land?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What were your debts when you left?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much was the last debt you paid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two thousand five hundred pounds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was its nature?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a debt of honour&mdash;do you understand?&rdquo; The subtle challenge of
+      the voice, the sarcasm, was not lost. Again there was a struggle on the
+      part of the audience not to laugh outright, and so be driven from the
+      court as had been threatened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge interposed again with the remark, not very severe in tone, that
+      the witness was not in the box to ask questions, but to answer them. At
+      the same time he must remind counsel that the examination must discontinue
+      unless something more relevant immediately appeared in the evidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was silence again for a moment, and even Crozier himself seemed to
+      steel himself for a question he felt was coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you married or single?&rdquo; asked Burlingame, and he did not need to
+      raise his voice to summon the interest of the court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One person in the audience nearly cried out. It was Kitty Tynan. She had
+      never allowed herself to think of that, but even if she had, what
+      difference could it make whether he was married or single, since he was
+      out of her star?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you not married now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean you do not know if you have been divorced?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean your wife is dead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean? That you do not know whether your wife is living or
+      dead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you heard from her since you saw her last?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had one letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty Tynan thought of the unopened letter in a woman&rsquo;s handwriting in the
+      green baize desk in her mother&rsquo;s house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are we to understand that you do not know whether your wife is living or
+      dead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no information that she is dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you leave her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not said that I left her. Primarily I left Ireland.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Assuming that she is alive, your wife will not live with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, what information have you to that effect?&rdquo; The judge informed Crozier
+      that he must not ask questions of counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why is she not with you here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As you said, I am only picking up a living here, and even the passage by
+      your own second-class steamship line is expensive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge suppressed a smile. He greatly liked the witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you deny that you parted from your wife in anger?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I am asked that question I will try to answer it. Meanwhile, I do
+      not deny what has not been put before me in the usual way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here the judge sternly rebuked the counsel, who ventured upon one last
+      question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you any children?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has your brother, who inherited, any children?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None that I know of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you the heir-presumptive to the baronetcy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet your wife will not live with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call Mrs. Crozier as a witness and see. Meanwhile, I am not upon my
+      trial.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the judge, who promptly called upon Burlingame to conclude
+      his examination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Burlingame asked two questions more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you change your name when you came here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to obliterate myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I put it to you, that what you want is to avoid the outraged law of your
+      own country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;I want to avoid the outrageous lawyers of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there was a pause in the proceedings, and on a protest from the
+      crown attorney the judge put an end to the cross-examination with the
+      solemn reminder that a man was being tried for his life, and that the
+      present proceedings were a lamentable reflection on the levity of human
+      nature&mdash;in Askatoon. Turning with friendly scrutiny to Crozier, he
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the early stage of his examination the witness informed the court that
+      he had made a heavy loss through a debt of honour immediately before
+      leaving England. Will he say in what way he incurred the obligation? Are
+      we to assume that it was through gambling-card-playing, or other games of
+      chance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Through backing the wrong horse,&rdquo; was Crozier&rsquo;s instant reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That phrase is often applied to mining or other unreal flights for
+      fortune,&rdquo; said the judge, with a dry smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This was a real horse on a real flight to the winning-post,&rdquo; added
+      Crozier, with a quirk at the corner of his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Honest contest with man or horse is no crime, but it is tragedy to stake
+      all on the contest and lose,&rdquo; was the judge&rsquo;s grave and pedagogic comment.
+      &ldquo;We shall now hear from the counsel for defence his reason for conducting
+      his cross-examination on such unusual lines. Latitude of this kind is only
+      permissible if it opens up any weakness in the case against the prisoner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge thus did Burlingame a good turn as well as Crozier, by creating
+      an atmosphere of gravity, even of tragedy, in which Burlingame could make
+      his speech in defence of the prisoner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Burlingame started hesitatingly, got into his stride, assembled the points
+      of his defence with the skill of which he really was capable. He made a
+      strong appeal for acquittal, but if not acquittal, then a verdict of
+      manslaughter. He showed that the only real evidence which could convict
+      his man of murder was that of the witness Crozier. If he had been content
+      to discredit evidence of the witness by an adroit but guarded misuse of
+      the facts he had brought out regarding Crozier&rsquo;s past, to emphasise the
+      fact that he was living under an assumed name and that his bona fides was
+      doubtful, he might have impressed the jury to some slight degree. He could
+      not, however, control the malice he felt, and he was smarting from
+      Crozier&rsquo;s retorts. He had a vanity easily lacerated, and he was now too
+      savage to abate the ferocity of his forensic attack. He sat down, however,
+      with a sure sense of failure. Every orator knows when he is beating the
+      air, even when his audience is quiet and apparently attentive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crown attorney was a man of the serenest method and of cold,
+      unforensic logic. He had a deadly precision of speech, a very remarkable
+      memory, and a great power of organising and assembling his facts. There
+      was little left of Burlingame&rsquo;s appeal when he sat down. He declared that
+      to discredit Crozier&rsquo;s evidence because he chose to use another name than
+      his own, because he was parted from his wife, because he left England
+      practically penniless to earn an honest living&mdash;no one had shown it
+      was not&mdash;was the last resort of legal desperation. It was an
+      indefensible thing to endeavour to create prejudice against a man because
+      of his own evidence given with great frankness. Not one single word of
+      evidence had the defence brought to discredit Crozier, save by Crozier&rsquo;s
+      own word of mouth; and if Crozier had cared to commit perjury, the defence
+      could not have proved him guilty of it. Even if Crozier had not told the
+      truth as it was, counsel for the defence would have found it impossible to
+      convict him of falsehood. But even if Crozier was a perjurer, justice
+      demanded that his evidence should be weighed as truth from its own
+      inherent probability and supported by surrounding facts. In a long
+      experience he had never seen animus against a witness so recklessly
+      exhibited as by counsel in this case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The judge was not quite so severe in his summing up, but he did say of
+      Crozier that his direct replies to Burlingame&rsquo;s questions, intended to
+      prejudice him in the eyes of the community into which he had come a
+      stranger, bore undoubted evidence of truth; for if he had chosen to say
+      what might have saved him from the suspicions, ill or well founded, of his
+      present fellow-citizens, he might have done so with impunity, save for the
+      reproach of his own conscience. On the whole, the judge summed up
+      powerfully against the prisoner Logan, with the result that the jury were
+      not out for more than a half-hour. Their verdict was, guilty of murder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the scene which followed, Crozier dropped his head into his hand and
+      sat immovable as the judge put on the black cap and delivered sentence.
+      When the prisoner left the dock, and the crowd began to disperse,
+      satisfied that justice had been done&mdash;save in that small circle where
+      the M&rsquo;Mahons were supreme&mdash;Crozier rose with other witnesses to
+      leave. As he looked ahead of him the first face he saw was that of Kitty
+      Tynan, and something in it startled him. Where had he seen that look
+      before? Yes, he remembered. It was when he was twenty-one and had been
+      sent away to Algiers because he was falling in love with a farmer&rsquo;s
+      daughter. As he drove down a lane with his father towards the railway
+      station, those long years ago, he had seen the girl&rsquo;s face looking at him
+      from the window of a labourer&rsquo;s cottage at the crossroads; and its
+      stupefied desolation haunted him for many years, even after the girl had
+      married and gone to live in Scotland&mdash;that place of torment for an
+      Irish soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The look in Kitty Tynan&rsquo;s face reminded him of that farmer&rsquo;s lass in his
+      boyhood&rsquo;s history. He was to blame then&mdash;was he to blame now?
+      Certainly not consciously, not by any intended word or act. Now he met her
+      eyes and smiled at her, not gaily, not gravely, but with a kind of
+      whimsical helplessness; for she was the first to remind him that he was
+      leaving the court-room in a different position (if not a different man)
+      from that in which he entered it. He had entered the court-room as James
+      Gathorne Kerry, and he was leaving it as Shiel Crozier; and somehow James
+      Gathorne Kerry had always been to himself a different man from Shiel
+      Crozier, with different views, different feelings, if not different
+      characteristics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw faces turned to him, a few with intense curiosity, fewer still with
+      a little furtiveness, some with amusement, and many with unmistakable
+      approval; for one thing was clear, if his own evidence was correct: he was
+      the son of a baronet, he was heir-presumptive to a baronetcy, and he had
+      scored off Augustus Burlingame in a way which delighted a naturally
+      humorous people. He noted, however, that the nod which Studd Bradley, the
+      financier, gave him had in it an enigmatic something which puzzled him.
+      Surely Bradley could not be prejudiced against him because of the evidence
+      he had given. There was nothing criminal in living under an assumed name,
+      which, anyhow, was his own name in three-fourths of it, and in the other
+      part was the name of the county where he was born.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Divils me own, I told you he was up among the dukes,&rdquo; said Malachi Deely
+      to John Sibley as they came out. &ldquo;And he&rsquo;s from me own county, and I know
+      the name well enough; an&rsquo; a damn good name it is. The bulls of Castlegarry
+      was famous in the south of Ireland.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a warm spot for him. I was right, you see. Backing horses ruined
+      him,&rdquo; said Sibley in reply; and he looked at Crozier admiringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is the communion of saints, but nearer and dearer is the communion
+      of sinners; for a common danger is their bond, and that is even more than
+      a common hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV. &ldquo;STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the evening of the day of the trial, Mrs. Tynan, having fixed the new
+      blind to the window of Shiel Crozier&rsquo;s room, which was on the ground-floor
+      front, was lowering and raising it to see if it worked properly, when out
+      in the moonlit street she saw a wagon approaching her house surrounded and
+      followed by obviously excited men. Once before she had seen just such a
+      group nearing her door. That was when her husband was brought home to die
+      in her arms. She had a sudden conviction, as, holding the blind in her
+      hand, she looked out into the night, that again tragedy was to cross her
+      threshold. Standing for an instant under the fascination of terror, she
+      recovered herself with a shiver, and, stepping down from the chair where
+      she had been fixing the blind, with the instinct of real woman, she ran to
+      the bed of the room where she was, and made it ready. Why did she feel
+      that it was Shiel Crozier&rsquo;s bed which should be made ready? Or did she not
+      feel it? Was it only a dazed, automatic act, not connected with the person
+      who was to lie in the bed? Was she then a fatalist? Were trouble and
+      sorrow so much her portion that to her mind this tragedy, whatever it was,
+      must touch the man nearest to her&mdash;and certainly Shiel Crozier was
+      far nearer than Jesse Bulrush. Quite apart from wealth or position,
+      personality plays a part more powerful than all else in the eyes of every
+      woman who has a soul which has substance enough to exist at all. Such men
+      as Crozier have compensations for &ldquo;whate&rsquo;er they lack.&rdquo; It never occurred
+      to Mrs. Tynan to go to Jesse Bulrush&rsquo;s room or the room of middle-aged,
+      comely Nurse Egan. She did the instinctive thing, as did the woman who
+      sent a man a rope as a gift, on the ground that the fortune in his hand
+      said that he was born not to be drowned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s instinct was right. By the time she had put the bed into
+      shape, got a bowl of water ready, lighted a lamp, and drawn the bed out
+      from the wall, there was a knocking at the door. In a moment she had
+      opened it, and was faced by John Sibley, whose hat was off as though he
+      were in the presence of death. This gave her a shock, and her eyes strove
+      painfully to see the figure which was being borne feet foremost over her
+      threshold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Mr. Crozier?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was shot coming home here&mdash;by the M&rsquo;Mahon mob, I guess,&rdquo; returned
+      Sibley huskily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is&mdash;is he dead?&rdquo; she asked tremblingly. &ldquo;No. Hurt bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The kindest man&mdash;it&rsquo;d break Kitty&rsquo;s heart&mdash;and mine,&rdquo; she added
+      hastily, for she might be misunderstood; and John Sibley had shown signs
+      of interest in her daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where&rsquo;s the Young Doctor?&rdquo; she asked, catching sight of Crozier&rsquo;s face as
+      they laid him on the bed. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s done the first aid, and he&rsquo;s off getting
+      what&rsquo;s needed for the operation. He&rsquo;ll be here in a minute or so,&rdquo; said a
+      banker who, a few days before, had refused Crozier credit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gently, gently&mdash;don&rsquo;t do it that way,&rdquo; said Mrs. Tynan in sharp
+      reproof as they began to take off Crozier&rsquo;s clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to stay while we do it?&rdquo; asked a maker of mineral waters,
+      who whined at the prayer meetings of a soul saved and roared at his
+      employees like a soul damned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t be a fool!&rdquo; was the impatient reply. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a grown-up girl and
+      I&rsquo;ve had a husband. Don&rsquo;t pull at his vest like that. Go away. You don&rsquo;t
+      know how. I&rsquo;ve had experience&mdash;my husband... There, wait till I cut
+      it away with the scissors. Cover him with the quilt. Now, then, catch hold
+      of his trousers under the quilt, and draw them off slowly.... There you
+      are&mdash;and nothing to shock the modesty of a grown-up woman or any
+      other when a life&rsquo;s at stake. What does the Young Doctor say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush! He&rsquo;s coming to,&rdquo; interposed the banker. It was as though the quiet
+      that followed the removal of his clothes and the touch of Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s
+      hand on his head had called Crozier back from unconsciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first face he saw was that of the banker. In spite of the loss of
+      blood and his pitiable condition, a whimsical expression came to his eyes.
+      &ldquo;Lucky for you you didn&rsquo;t lend me the money,&rdquo; he said feebly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The banker shook his head. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not thinking of that, Mr. Crozier. God
+      knows, I&rsquo;m not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier caught sight of Mrs. Tynan. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard on you to have me brought
+      here,&rdquo; he murmured as she took his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so hard as if they hadn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what a home&rsquo;s for&mdash;not
+      just a place for eating and drinking and sleeping.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t part of the bargain,&rdquo; he said weakly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was my part of the bargain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s Kitty,&rdquo; said the maker of mineral waters, as there was the swish
+      of a skirt at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you calling &lsquo;Kitty&rsquo;?&rdquo; asked the girl indignantly, as they
+      motioned her back from the bedside. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s too many people here,&rdquo; she
+      added abruptly to her mother. &ldquo;We can take care of him&rdquo;&mdash;she nodded
+      towards the bed. &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t want any help except&mdash;except from John
+      Sibley, if he will stay, and you too,&rdquo; she added to the banker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not yet looked at the figure on the bed. She felt she could not do
+      so while all these people were in the room. She needed time to adjust
+      herself to the situation. It was as though she was the authority in the
+      household and took control even of her mother. Mrs. Tynan understood. She
+      had a great belief in her daughter and admired her cleverness, and she was
+      always ready to be ruled by her; it was like being &ldquo;bossed&rdquo; by the man she
+      had lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you&rsquo;d all better go,&rdquo; Mrs. Tynan said. &ldquo;He wants all the air he can
+      get, and I can&rsquo;t make things ready with all of you in the room. Go
+      outdoors for a while, anyway. It&rsquo;s summer and you&rsquo;ll not take cold! The
+      Young Doctor has work to do, and my girl and I and these two will help him
+      plenty.&rdquo; She motioned towards the banker and the gambling farmer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment the room was cleared of all save the four and Crozier, who
+      knew that upon the coming operation depended his life. He had been
+      conscious when the Young Doctor said this was so, and he was thinking, as
+      he lay there watching these two women out of his nearly closed eyes, that
+      he would like to be back in Ireland at Castlegarry with the girl he had
+      married and had left without a good-bye near five years gone. If he had to
+      die he would like to die at home; and that could not be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty had the courage to turn towards him now. As she caught sight of his
+      face for the first time&mdash;she had so far kept her head turned away&mdash;she
+      became very pale. Then, suddenly, she gathered herself together. Going
+      over to the bed, she took the limp hand lying on the coverlet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Courage, soldier,&rdquo; she said in the colloquialism her father often used,
+      and she smiled at Crozier a great-hearted, helpful smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a brick of bricks, Kitty Tynan,&rdquo; he whispered, and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here comes the Young Doctor,&rdquo; said Mrs. Tynan as the door opened
+      unceremoniously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I have to make an excursion,&rdquo; Crozier said, &ldquo;and I mayn&rsquo;t come
+      back. If I don&rsquo;t, au revoir, Kitty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are coming back all right,&rdquo; she answered firmly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;ll take more
+      than a horse-thief&rsquo;s bullet to kill you. You&rsquo;ve got to come back. You&rsquo;re
+      as tough as nails. And I&rsquo;ll hold your hand all through it&mdash;yes, I
+      will!&rdquo; she added to the Young Doctor, who had patted her shoulder and told
+      her to go to another room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to help you, doctor-man, if you please,&rdquo; she said, as he turned
+      to the box of instruments which his assistant held.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s another&mdash;one of my colleagues&mdash;coming I hope,&rdquo; the
+      Young Doctor replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, but I am staying to see Mr. Crozier through. I said I&rsquo;d
+      hold his hand, and I&rsquo;m going to do it,&rdquo; she added firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well; put on a big apron, and see that you go through with us if you
+      start. No nonsense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;ll be no nonsense from me,&rdquo; she answered quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want the bed in the middle of the room,&rdquo; the Young Doctor said, and the
+      others gently moved it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V. A STORY TO BE TOLD
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A great surgeon said a few years ago that he was never nervous when
+      performing an operation, though there was sometimes a moment when every
+      resource of character, skill, and brain came into play. That was when,
+      having diagnosed correctly and operated, a new and unexpected seat of
+      trouble and peril was exposed, and instant action had to be taken. The
+      great man naturally rose to the situation and dealt with it coolly; but he
+      paid the price afterwards in his sleep when, night after night, he
+      performed the operation over and over again with the same strain on his
+      subconscious self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was with Kitty Tynan in her small way. She had insisted on being
+      allowed to help at the operation, and the Young Doctor, who had a good
+      knowledge of life and knew the stuff in her, consented; and so far as the
+      operation was concerned she justified his faith in her. When the banker
+      had to leave the room at the sight of the carnage, she remained, and she
+      and John Sibley were as cool as the Young Doctor and his fellow-anatomist,
+      till it was all over, and Shiel Crozier was started again on a safe
+      journey back to health. Then a thing, which would have been amusing if it
+      had not been so deeply human, happened. She and John Sibley went out of
+      the house together into the moonlit night, and the reaction seized them
+      both at the same moment. She gave a gulp and burst into tears, and he,
+      though as tall as Crozier, also broke down, and they sat on the stump of a
+      tree together, her hand in his, and cried like two children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never since I was a little runt&mdash;did I&mdash;never cried in thirty
+      years&mdash;and here I am-leaking like a pail!&rdquo; Thus spoke John Sibley in
+      gasps and squeezing Kitty&rsquo;s hand all the time unconsciously, but
+      spontaneously, and as part of what he felt. He would not, however, have
+      dared to hold her hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to hold
+      it, and wanting her also to share his not wholly reputed, though far from
+      precarious, existence. He had never got so far as to tell her that; but if
+      she had understanding she would realise after to-night what he had in his
+      mind. She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of his very vital
+      palm, had her turn at explanation. &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t have broke down myself&mdash;it
+      was all your fault,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I saw it&mdash;yes&mdash;in your face as
+      we left the house. I&rsquo;m so glad it&rsquo;s over safe&mdash;no one belonging to
+      him here, and not knowing if he&rsquo;d wake up alive or not&mdash;I just was
+      swamped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took up the misty excuse and explanation. &ldquo;I had a feeling for him from
+      the start; and then that Logan Trial to-day, and the way he talked out
+      straight, and told the truth to shame the devil&mdash;it&rsquo;s what does a man
+      good! And going bung over a horserace&mdash;that&rsquo;s what got me too, where
+      I was young and tender. Swatted that Burlingame every time&mdash;one eye,
+      two eyes all black, teeth out, nose flattened&mdash;called him an
+      &lsquo;outrageous lawyer&rsquo;&mdash;my, that last clip was a good one! You bet he&rsquo;s
+      a sport&mdash;Crozier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty nodded eagerly while still wiping her red eyes. &ldquo;He made the judge
+      smile&mdash;I saw it, not ten minutes before his honour put on the black
+      cap. You couldn&rsquo;t have believed it, if you hadn&rsquo;t seen it&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here, let go my hand,&rdquo; she added, suddenly conscious of the enormity John
+      Sibley was committing by squeezing it now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is perfectly true that she did not quite realise that he had taken her
+      hand&mdash;that he had taken her hand. She was conscious in a nice,
+      sympathetic way that her hand had been taken, but it was lost in the
+      abstraction of her emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, here, let it go quick!&rdquo; she added&mdash;&ldquo;and not because mother&rsquo;s
+      coming, either,&rdquo; she added as the door opened and her mother came out&mdash;not
+      to spy, not to reproach her daughter for sitting with a man in the
+      moonlight at ten o&rsquo;clock at night, but&mdash;good, practical soul&mdash;to
+      bring them each a cup of beef-tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here, you two,&rdquo; she said as she hurried to them. &ldquo;You need something
+      after that business in there, and there isn&rsquo;t time to get supper ready.
+      It&rsquo;s as good for you as supper, anyway. I don&rsquo;t believe in underfeeding.
+      Nothing&rsquo;s too good to swallow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She watched them sip the tea slowly like two schoolchildren.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when you&rsquo;ve drunk it you must go right to bed, Kitty,&rdquo; she added
+      presently. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve had your own way, and you saw the thing through; but
+      there&rsquo;s always a reaction, and you&rsquo;ll pay for it. It wasn&rsquo;t fit work for a
+      girl of your age; but I&rsquo;m proud of your nerve, and I&rsquo;m glad you showed the
+      Young Doctor what you can do. You&rsquo;ve got your father&rsquo;s brains and my
+      grit,&rdquo; she added with a sigh of satisfaction. &ldquo;Come along&mdash;bed now,
+      Kitty. If you get too tired you&rsquo;ll have bad dreams.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps she was too tired. In any case she had dreams. Just as the great
+      surgeon performed his operation over and over in his sleep, so Kitty
+      Tynan, through long hours that night, and for many nights afterwards, saw
+      the swift knives, helped to staunch the blood, held the basin, disinfected
+      the instruments which had made an attack on the man of men in her eyes,
+      and saw the wound stitched up&mdash;the last act of the business before
+      the Young Doctor turned to her and said, &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll do wherever you&rsquo;re put in
+      life, Miss Kitty Tynan. You&rsquo;re a great girl. And now get some fresh air
+      and forget all about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Forget all about it! So, the Young Doctor knew what happened after a
+      terrific experience like that! In truth, he knew only too well. Great
+      surgeons do surgery only and have innumerable operations to give them
+      skill; but a country physician and surgeon must be a sane being to keep
+      his nerve when called on to use the knife, and he must have a more than
+      usual gift for such business. That is what the Young Doctor had; but he
+      knew it was not easy to forget those scenes in which man carved the body
+      of fellow-man, laying bare the very vitals of existence, seeing &ldquo;the
+      wheels go round.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It haunted Kitty Tynan in the night-time, and perhaps it was that which
+      toned down a little the colour of her face&mdash;the kind of difference of
+      colouring there is between natural gold and 14-carat. But in the daytime
+      she was quite happy, and though there was haunting, it was Shiel Crozier
+      who, first helpless, then convalescent, was haunted by her presence. It
+      gave him pleasure, but it was a pleasure which brought pain. He was not so
+      blind that he had not caught at her romance, in which he was the central
+      figure&mdash;a romance which had not vanished since the day he declared in
+      the court-room that he was married, or had been married. Kitty&rsquo;s eyes told
+      their own story, and it made him uneasy and remorseful. Yet he could not
+      remember when, even for an instant, he had played with her. She had always
+      seemed part of a simple family life for which he and Jesse Bulrush and her
+      mother and the nurse-Nurse Egan-were responsible. What a blessing Nurse
+      Egan had been! Otherwise, all the nursing would have been performed by
+      Kitty and her mother, and it might well have broken them down, for they
+      were determined to nurse him themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, however, Nurse Egan came back, two days after the operation was
+      performed, they included her in the responsibility, as one of the family;
+      and as she had no other important case on at the time, fortunately she
+      could give Crozier almost undivided attention. She had been at first
+      disposed to keep Kitty out of the sick-chamber, as no place for a girl,
+      but she soon abandoned that position, for Kitty was not the girl ever to
+      think of impropriety. She was primitive and she had rather a
+      before-the-flood nature, but she had not the faintest vulgar strain in
+      her. Her mind was essentially pure; nothing material in her had been
+      awakened. Her greatest joy was to do the many things for the patient which
+      a nurse must do&mdash;prepare his food, give him drink, adjust his
+      pillows, bathe his face and hands, take his temperature; and on his part
+      he tried hard to disguise from her the apprehension he felt, and to avoid
+      any hint by word or look that he saw anything save the actions of a kind
+      heart. True, her views as to what was proper and improper might possibly
+      be on a different plane from his own. For instance, he had seen girls of
+      her station in the West kiss young men freely&mdash;men whom they had no
+      thought of marrying; and that was not the custom of his own class in his
+      home-country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he got well slowly, and life opened out before him again, he felt he
+      had to pursue a new course, and in that course he must take account of
+      Kitty Tynan, though he could not decide how. He had a deep confidence in
+      the Young Doctor, in his judgment and his character; and it was almost
+      inevitable that he should tell his life-story to the man whose skill had
+      saved him from death in a strange land, with all undone he wanted to do
+      ere he returned to a land which was not strange.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing happened, as such things do happen, in a quite natural way one
+      day when he and the Young Doctor were discussing the probable verdict
+      against the man who had shot him&mdash;the trial was to come on soon, and
+      once again Augustus Burlingame was to be counsel for the defence, and once
+      again Crozier would have to appear in a witness-box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you ought to know, Crozier, that, in view of the trial,
+      Burlingame has written to a firm of lawyers in Kerry to get full
+      information about your past,&rdquo; the Young Doctor said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier gave one of those little jerks of the head characteristic of him
+      and said: &ldquo;Why, of course; I knew he would do that after I gave my
+      evidence in the Logan Trial.&rdquo; He raised himself on his elbow. &ldquo;I owe you a
+      great deal,&rdquo; he added feelingly, &ldquo;and I can&rsquo;t repay you in cash or
+      kindness for what you have done; but it is due you to tell you my whole
+      story, and that is what I propose to do now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you think&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do think; and also I want both Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear my
+      story. Better, truer friends a man could not have; and I want them to know
+      the worst and the best there is, if there is any best. They and you have
+      trusted me, been too good to me, and what I said at the trial is not
+      enough. I want to do what I&rsquo;ve never done before. I want to tell
+      everything. It will do me good; and perhaps as I tell it I&rsquo;ll see myself
+      and everything else in a truer light than I&rsquo;ve yet seen it all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are sure you want Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Absolutely sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are not in your rank in life, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are my friends, and I owe them more than I can say. There is nothing
+      they cannot or should not hear. I can say that at least.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I ask them to come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Give me a swig of water first. It won&rsquo;t be easy, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held out his hand, and the Young Doctor grasped it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the latter said: &ldquo;You are sure you will not be sorry? That it is
+      not a mood of the moment due to physical weakness?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite sure. I determined on it the day I was shot&mdash;and before I was
+      shot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right.&rdquo; The Young Doctor disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI. &ldquo;HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <p>
+      The stillness of a summer&rsquo;s day in Prairie Land has all the
+      characteristics of music. That is not so paradoxical as it seems. The
+      effect of some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the senses, a
+      suspension of motion and aggressive life; to reduce existence to mere
+      pulsation. It was this kind of feeling which pervaded that region of
+      sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story. The sounds that
+      sprinkled the general stillness were in themselves sleepy notes of the
+      pervasive music of somnolent nature&mdash;the sough of the pine at the
+      door, the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding beat of the
+      steam-thresher out of sight hard by, the purring of the cat in the arms of
+      Kitty Tynan as, with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the tale
+      of a life as distant from that which she lived as she was from Eve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on; it even seemed to her
+      she was listening to a theme beyond her sphere, like some shameless
+      eavesdropper at the curtains of a secret ceremonial. Once or twice she
+      looked at her mother and at the Young Doctor, as though to reassure
+      herself that she was not a vulgar intruder. It was far more impressive to
+      her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene at the Logan Trial when a
+      man was sentenced to death. It was strangely magnetic, this tale of a
+      man&rsquo;s existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the mantelpiece,
+      as it mechanically ticked off the time, seemed only part of some
+      mysterious machinery of life. Once a dove swept down upon the window-sill,
+      and, peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital with its deep
+      contralto note, and then fled like a small blue cloud into the wide and&mdash;as
+      it seemed&mdash;everlasting peace beyond the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing at all between themselves and the far sky-line save
+      little clumps of trees here and there, little clusters of buildings and
+      houses&mdash;no visible animal life. Everything conspired to give a
+      dignity in keeping with the drama of failure being unfolded in the
+      commonplace home of the widow Tynan. Yet the home too had its dignity. The
+      engineer father had had tastes, and he had insisted on plain, unfigured
+      curtains and wallpaper and carpets, when carpets were used; and though his
+      wife had at first protested against the unfigured carpets as more
+      difficult to keep clean and as showing the dirt too easily, she had come
+      to like the one-colour scheme, and in that respect her home had an
+      individuality rare in her surroundings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background; for what her bright
+      colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes and
+      &ldquo;Axminsters,&rdquo; such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the
+      imagination. It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous
+      surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been
+      arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the
+      story; and if it were not a true tale told just as it happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the tale was the more impressive because of Crozier&rsquo;s deep
+      baritone voice, capable, as it was, of much modulation, yet, except when
+      he was excited, having a slight monotone like the note of a violin with
+      the mute upon the strings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was his tale:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, to begin with, I was born at Castlegarry, in Kerry&mdash;you know
+      the main facts from what I said in court. As a boy I wasn&rsquo;t so bad a sort.
+      I had one peculiarity. I always wanted &lsquo;to have something on,&rsquo; as John
+      Sibley would say. No matter what it was, I must have something on it. And
+      I was very lucky&mdash;worse luck!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They all laughed at the bull. &ldquo;I feel at home at once,&rdquo; murmured the Young
+      Doctor, for he had come from near Enniskillen years agone, and there is
+      not so much difference between Enniskillen and Kerry when it comes to
+      Irish bulls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Worse luck, it was,&rdquo; continued Crozier, &ldquo;because it made me confident of
+      always winning. It&rsquo;s hard to say how early I began to believe I could see
+      things that were going to happen. By the hour I used to shake the dice on
+      the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes shut the
+      numbers about to come up. Of course now and then I saw the right numbers;
+      and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated the gift I&rsquo;d be able
+      to be right nearly every time. When I went to a horse-race I used to
+      fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see beforehand the number of
+      the winner. Again sometimes I was very right indeed, and that deepened my
+      confidence in myself. I was always at it. I&rsquo;d try and guess&mdash;try and
+      see&mdash;the number of the hymn which was on the paper in the vicar&rsquo;s
+      hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with myself on it. I would bet
+      with myself or with anybody available on any conceivable thing&mdash;the
+      minutes late a train would be; the pints of milk a cow would give; the
+      people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would be
+      christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes. I
+      was out against the universe. But it wasn&rsquo;t serious at all&mdash;just a
+      boy&rsquo;s mania&mdash;till one day my father met me in London when I came down
+      from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite&rsquo;s Club in St. James&rsquo;s Street. There
+      was the thing that finished me. I was twenty-one, and restless-minded, and
+      with eyes wide open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he took me to Thwaite&rsquo;s where I was to become a member, and after a
+      little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the committee&mdash;he
+      was a member of it. He told me to make myself at home, and I did so as
+      soon as his back was turned. Almost the first thing with which I became
+      sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a fascination for
+      me. The binding was very old, and the leather was worn, as you will see
+      the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels like a nice soap.
+      That book brought me here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, and in the silence the Young Doctor pushed a glass of milk and
+      brandy towards him. He sipped the contents. The others were in a state of
+      tension. Kitty Tynan&rsquo;s eyes were fixed on him as though hypnotised, and
+      the Young Doctor was scarcely less interested; while the widow knitted
+      harder and faster than she had ever done, and she could knit very fast
+      indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the betting-book of Thwaite&rsquo;s, and it dated back almost to the
+      time of the conquest of Quebec. Great men dead and gone long ago&mdash;near
+      a hundred and fifty years ago-had put down their bets in the book, for
+      Thwaite&rsquo;s was then what it is now, the highest and best sporting club in
+      the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty Tynan&rsquo;s face had a curious look, for there was a club in Askatoon,
+      and it was said that all the &ldquo;sports&rdquo; assembled there. She had no idea
+      what Thwaite&rsquo;s Club in St. James&rsquo;s Street would look like; but that did
+      not matter. She supposed it must be as big as the Askatoon Court House at
+      least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bets&mdash;bets&mdash;bets by men whose names were in every history, and
+      the names of their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons; and all betting
+      on the oddest things as well as the most natural things in the world. Some
+      of the bets made were as mad as the bets I made myself. Oh! ridiculous,
+      some of them were; and then again bets on things that stirred the world to
+      the centre, from the loss of America to the beheading of Louis XVI.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis
+      whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government
+      which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six
+      months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is
+      now the United States if they revolted. This would be cheek-by-jowl with a
+      bet that an heir would be born to one new-married pair before another
+      pair. The very last bet made on the day I opened the book was that Queen
+      Victoria would make Lord Salisbury a duke, that a certain gentleman known
+      as S. S. could find his own door in St. James&rsquo;s Square, blindfold, from
+      the club, and that Corsair would win the Derby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For two long hours I sat forgetful of everything around me, while I read
+      that record&mdash;to me the most interesting the world could show. Every
+      line was part of the history of the country, a part of the history of many
+      lives, and it was all part of the ritual of the temple of the great god
+      Chance. I was fascinated, lost in a land of wonders. Men came and went,
+      but silently. At last there entered a gentleman whose picture I had so
+      often seen in the papers&mdash;a man as well known in the sporting world
+      as was Chamberlain in the political world. He was dressed spectacularly,
+      but his face oozed good-nature, though his eyes were like bright bits of
+      coal. He bred horses, he raced this, he backed that, he laid against the
+      other; he was one of the greatest plungers, one of the biggest figures on
+      the turf. He had been a kind of god to me&mdash;a god in a grey
+      frock-coat, with a grey top-hat and field-glasses slung over his shoulder;
+      or in a hunting-suit of the most picturesque kind&mdash;great pockets in a
+      well-fitting coat, splendid striped waistcoat. Well, there, I only mention
+      this because it played so big a part in bringing me to Askatoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He came up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful Adam&rsquo;s
+      fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and said, &lsquo;Do
+      you mind&mdash;for one minute?&rsquo; and he reached out a hand for the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I made way for him, and I suppose admiration showed in my eyes, because
+      as he hastily wrote&mdash;what a generous scrawl it was!&mdash;he said to
+      me, &lsquo;Haven&rsquo;t we met somewhere before? I seem to remember your face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great gentleman, I thought, because it was certain he knew he had never
+      seen me before, and I was overcome by the reflection that he wished to be
+      civil in that way to me. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s my father&rsquo;s face you remember, I should
+      think,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;He is a member here. I am only a visitor. I haven&rsquo;t
+      been elected yet.&rsquo; &lsquo;Ah, we must see to that!&rsquo; he said with a smile, and
+      laid a hand on my shoulder as though he&rsquo;d known me many a year&mdash;and I
+      only twenty-one. &lsquo;Who is your father?&rsquo; he asked. When I told him he
+      nodded. &lsquo;Yes, yes, I know him&mdash;Crozier of Castlegarry; but I knew his
+      father far better, though he was so much older than me, and indeed your
+      grandfather also. Look&mdash;in this book is the first bet I ever made
+      here after my election to the club, and it was made with your grandfather.
+      There&rsquo;s no age in the kingdom of sport, dear lad,&rsquo; he added, laughing&mdash;&lsquo;neither
+      age nor sex nor position nor place. It&rsquo;s the one democratic thing in the
+      modern world. It&rsquo;s a republic inside this old monarchy of ours. Look, here
+      it is, my first bet with your grandfather&mdash;and I&rsquo;m only sixty now!&rsquo; 
+      He smoothed the page with his hand in a manner such as I have seen a dean
+      do with his sermon-paper in a cathedral puplit. &lsquo;Here it is, thirty-six
+      years ago.&rsquo; He read the bet aloud. It was on the Derby, he himself having
+      bet that the Prince of Wale&rsquo;s horse would win. &lsquo;Your grandfather, dear
+      lad,&rsquo; he repeated, &lsquo;but you&rsquo;ll find no bets of mine with your father. He
+      didn&rsquo;t inherit that strain, but your grandfather and your
+      great-grandfather had it&mdash;sportsmen both, afraid of nothing, with big
+      minds, great eyes for seeing, and a sense for a winner almost uncanny.
+      Have you got it by any chance? Yes, yes, by George and by John, I see you
+      have; you are your grandfather to a hair! His portrait is here in the club&mdash;in
+      the next room. Have a look at it. He was only forty when it was done, and
+      you&rsquo;re very like him; the cut of the jib is there.&rsquo; He took my hand.
+      &lsquo;Good-bye, dear lad,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;we&rsquo;ll meet-yes, we&rsquo;ll meet often enough if
+      you are like your grandfather. And I&rsquo;ll always like to see you,&rsquo; he added
+      generously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I always wanted to meet you,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve cut your pictures out of
+      the papers to keep them&mdash;at Eton and Oxford.&rsquo; He laughed in great
+      good-humour and pride. &lsquo;So so, so so, and I am a hero then, with one
+      follower! Well, well, dear lad, I don&rsquo;t often go wrong, or anyhow I&rsquo;m
+      oftener right than wrong, and you might do worse than follow me&mdash;but
+      no, I don&rsquo;t want that responsibility. Go on your own&mdash;go on your
+      own.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A minute more and he was gone with a wave of the hand, and in excitement
+      I picked up the betting-book. It almost took my breath away. He had staked
+      a thousand pounds that the favourite of the Derby would not win the race,
+      and that one of three outsiders would. As I sat overpowered by the
+      magnitude of the bet the door opened, and he appeared with another man,
+      not one with whose face I was then familiar, though as a duke and owner of
+      great possessions, he was familiar to society. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve put it down,&rsquo; he
+      said. &lsquo;Sign it, if it&rsquo;s all in order.&rsquo; This the duke did, after
+      apologizing for disturbing me. He looked at me keenly as he turned away.
+      &lsquo;Not the most elevating literature in the library,&rsquo; he said, smiling
+      ironically. &lsquo;If you haven&rsquo;t got a taste for it beyond control, don&rsquo;t
+      cultivate it.&rsquo; He nodded kindly, and left; and again, till my father came
+      and found me, I buried myself in that book of fate&mdash;to me. I found
+      many entries in my grandfather&rsquo;s name, but not one in my father&rsquo;s name. I
+      have an idea that when a vice or virtue skips one generation, it appears
+      with increased violence or persistence in the next, for, passing over my
+      father into my defenceless breast, the spirit of sport went mad in me&mdash;or
+      almost so. No miser ever had a more cheerful and happy hour than I had as
+      I read the betting-book at Thwaites&rsquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I became a member of Thwaite&rsquo;s soon after I left Oxford. As some men go
+      to the Temple, some to the Stock Exchange, some to Parliament, I went to
+      Thwaite&rsquo;s. It was the centre of my interest, and I took chambers in Park
+      Place, St. James&rsquo;s Street, a few steps away. Here I met again constantly
+      the great sportsman who had noticed me so kindly, and I became his
+      follower, his disciple. I had started with him on a wave of prejudice in
+      his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had
+      staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could get
+      with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred
+      pounds. What he won&mdash;to my youthful eyes-was fabulous. There&rsquo;s no use
+      saying what you think&mdash;you kind friends, who&rsquo;ve always done something
+      in life&mdash;that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to
+      the turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport. You must
+      remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin of
+      succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in any
+      generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the younger
+      son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary for
+      livelihood. If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman, had
+      lived, it&rsquo;s hard to tell what I should have become; for steered aright,
+      given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have become
+      ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another. But there it was,
+      she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me. At Eton, at
+      Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business of life. And
+      when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left me, I had only
+      one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman. I had a name as a
+      cricketer&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah&mdash;I remember, Crozier of Lammis!&rdquo; interjected the Young Doctor
+      involuntarily. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a north of Ireland man, but I remember&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Lammis,&rdquo; the sick man went on. &ldquo;Castlegarry was my father&rsquo;s place,
+      but my mother left me Lammis. When I got control of it, and of the
+      securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn&rsquo;t long in
+      making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader. He
+      gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed horses of
+      my own. But the luck went against him at last, and then, of course,
+      against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws the cash
+      out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw also the
+      whole internal economy out of your body&mdash;a ghastly, empty, collapsing
+      thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh. She had once put two hundred dollars in a
+      mine&mdash;on paper&mdash;and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in
+      the lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more. When she read a
+      fatal telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty,
+      collapsing feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pausing for a moment, in which he sipped some milk, Crozier then
+      continued: &ldquo;At last my leader died, and the see-saw of fortune began for
+      me; and a good deal of my sound timber was sawed into logs and made into
+      lumber to build some one else&rsquo;s fortune. When things were balancing pretty
+      easily, I married. It wasn&rsquo;t a sordid business to restore my fortunes&mdash;I&rsquo;ll
+      say that for myself; but it wasn&rsquo;t the thing to do, for I wasn&rsquo;t secure in
+      my position. I might go on the rocks; but was there ever a gambler who
+      didn&rsquo;t believe that he&rsquo;d pull it off in a big way next time, and that the
+      turn of the wheel against him was only to tame his spirit? Was there ever
+      a gambler or sportsman of my class who didn&rsquo;t talk about the &lsquo;law of
+      chances,&rsquo; on the basis that if red, as it were, came up three times, black
+      stood a fair chance of coming up the fourth time? A silly enough
+      conclusion; for on the law of chances there&rsquo;s no reason why red shouldn&rsquo;t
+      come up three hundred times; and so I found that your run of bad luck may
+      be so long that you cannot have a chance to recover, and are out of it
+      before the wheel turns in your favour. I oughn&rsquo;t to have married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice had changed in tone, his look become most grave, there was
+      something very like reverence in his face, and deprecating submission in
+      his eyes. His fingers fussed with the rug that covered his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God help the man that&rsquo;s afraid of his own wife!&rdquo; remarked the Young
+      Doctor to himself, not erroneously reading the expression of Crozier&rsquo;s
+      face and the tone of his voice. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing so unnerving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I oughtn&rsquo;t to have done it,&rdquo; Crozier went on. &ldquo;But I will say again
+      it wasn&rsquo;t a sordid marriage, though she had great expectations, but not
+      immediate; and she was a girl of great character. She was able and
+      brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and she knew her own mind, and was
+      radiantly handsome.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty Tynan almost sniffed. Through a whole fortnight she had, with a
+      courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation
+      for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what his
+      wife was like. She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman,
+      delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw in
+      the picture-papers. She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat, with a
+      soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief crossed
+      on her breast, holding a basket of flowers, while a King Charles spaniel
+      gambolled at her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
+      Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
+      exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
+      afraid of stepping on her train. Was it strange she should think that? She
+      was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons according to
+      her kind and from what she knew of life. So she imagined Crozier&rsquo;s wife to
+      have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who swept up the dust of
+      the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at all to the children of
+      nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower than their ankles. She
+      almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a man like Crozier, who
+      had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in the witness-box as he did;
+      who took the bullet of the assassin with such courage; who broke a horse
+      like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech on a filly&rsquo;s flank, should
+      crumple up at the thought of a woman who, anyhow, couldn&rsquo;t be taller than
+      Crozier himself was, and hadn&rsquo;t a hand like a piece of steel and the skin
+      of an antelope. It was enough to make a cat laugh, or a woman cry with
+      rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly handsome!&rdquo;
+       There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing woman, in
+      velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and overbearing, like
+      grey poplin. Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the mirror-the
+      half-length mirror on the opposite wall&mdash;and she felt her hands
+      clench and her bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive calico
+      frock, a thing for Chloe, not for Juno.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
+      deprecating homage, that &ldquo;Hush-she-is-coming&rdquo; in his eyes. What a fool a
+      man was where a woman was concerned! Here she had been fighting herself
+      for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the world,
+      fit to command an array of giants; and she saw him now almost breathless
+      as he spoke of a great wild-cat of a woman who ought to be by his side
+      now. What sort of a woman was she anyhow, who could let him go into exile
+      as he had done and live apart from her all these years, while he &ldquo;slogged
+      away&rdquo;&mdash;that was the Western phrase which came to her mind&mdash;to
+      pull himself level with things again? Her feet shuffled unevenly on the
+      floor, and it would have been a joy to shake the in valid there with the
+      rapt look in his face. Unable to bear the situation without some
+      demonstration, she got to her feet and caught up the glass of brandy and
+      milk with a little exclamation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; she said, holding the glass to his lips, &ldquo;here, courage, soldier.
+      You don&rsquo;t need to be afraid at a six-thousand-mile range.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor started, for she had said what was in his own mind, but
+      what he would not have said for a thousand dollars. It was fortunate that
+      Crozier was scarcely conscious of what she was saying. His mind was far
+      away. Yet, when she took the glass from him again, he touched her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing is good enough for your friends, is it?&rdquo; he said gratefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That wouldn&rsquo;t be an excuse for not getting them the best there was at
+      hand,&rdquo; she answered with a little laugh, and at least the Young Doctor
+      read the meaning of her words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Crozier, with a sigh, continued: &ldquo;If I had done what my wife
+      wanted from the start, I shouldn&rsquo;t have been here. I&rsquo;d have saved what was
+      left of a fortune, and I&rsquo;d have had a home of my own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she earning her living too?&rdquo; asked Kitty softly, and Crozier did not
+      notice the irony under the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has a home of her own,&rdquo; answered Crozier almost sharply. &ldquo;Just before
+      the worst came to the worst she inherited her fortune&mdash;plenty of it,
+      as I got near the end of mine. One thing after another had gone. I was
+      mortgaged up to the eyes. I knew the money-lenders from Newry to Jewry and
+      Jewry to Jerusalem. Then it was I promised her I&rsquo;d bet no more&mdash;never
+      again: I&rsquo;d give up the turf; I&rsquo;d try and start again. Down in my soul I
+      knew I couldn&rsquo;t start again&mdash;not just then. But I wanted to please
+      her. She was remarkable in her way; she had one of the most imposing
+      intelligences I have ever known. So I promised. I promised I&rsquo;d bet no
+      more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor caught Kitty Tynan&rsquo;s eyes by accident, and there was the
+      same look of understanding in both. They both knew that here was the real
+      tragedy of Crozier&rsquo;s life. If he had had less reverence for his wife, less
+      of that obvious prostration of soul, he probably would never have come to
+      Askatoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I broke my promise,&rdquo; he murmured. &ldquo;It was a horse&mdash;well, never mind.
+      I was as sure of Flamingo as that the sun would rise by day and set by
+      night. It was a certainty; and it was a certainty. The horse could win, it
+      would win; I had it from a sure source. My judgment was right, too. I bet
+      heavily on Flamingo, intending it for my last fling, and, to save what I
+      had left, to get back what I had lost. I could get big odds on him. It was
+      good enough. From what I knew, it was like picking up a gold-mine. And I
+      was right, right as could be. There was no chance about it. It was being
+      out where the rain fell to get wet. It was just being present when they
+      called the roll of the good people that God wished to be kind to. It meant
+      so much to me. I couldn&rsquo;t bear to have nothing and my wife to have all. I
+      simply couldn&rsquo;t stand&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the Young Doctor met the glance of Kitty Tynan, and there was, once
+      more, a new and sudden look of comprehension in the eyes of both. They
+      began to see light where their man was concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment of struggle to control himself, Crozier proceeded: &ldquo;It
+      didn&rsquo;t seem like betting. Besides, I had planned it, that when I showed
+      her what I had won, she would shut her eyes to the broken promise, and I&rsquo;d
+      make another, and keep it ever after. I put on all the cash there was to
+      put on, all I could raise on what was left of my property.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused as though to get strength to continue. Then a look of intense
+      excitement suddenly possessed him, and there&mdash;passed over him a wave
+      of feeling which transformed him. The naturally grave mediaeval face
+      became fired, the eyes blazed, the skin shone, the mouth almost trembled
+      with agitation. He was the dreamer, the enthusiast, the fanatic almost,
+      with that look which the pioneer, the discoverer, the adventurer has when
+      he sees the end of his quest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice rose, vibrated. &ldquo;It was a day to make you thank Heaven the world
+      was made. Such days only come once in a while in England, but when they do
+      come, what price Arcady or Askatoon! Never had there been so big a Derby.
+      Everybody had the fever of the place at its worst. I was happy. I meant to
+      pouch my winnings and go straight to my wife and say, &lsquo;Peccavi,&rsquo; and I
+      should hear her say to me, &lsquo;Go and sin no more.&rsquo; Yes, I was happy. The
+      sky, the green of the fields, the still, home-like, comforting trees, the
+      mass of glorious colour, the hundreds of horses that weren&rsquo;t running and
+      the scores that were to run, sleek and long, and made like shining silk
+      and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to me&mdash;a horse-race heaven
+      on earth. There you have the state of my mind in those days, the kind of
+      man I was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom Downs
+      before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that bore him
+      down. He was terribly, exhaustingly alive. Something possessed him, and he
+      possessed his hearers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was just as I said and knew&mdash;my horse, Flamingo, stretched away
+      from the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
+      ahead. It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it to
+      be for me. The race was all Flamingo&rsquo;s own, and the mob was going wild,
+      when all of a sudden a woman&mdash;the widow of a racing-man gone suddenly
+      mad&mdash;rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle with a
+      shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey came, a
+      melee of crushed humanity. And that was how I lost my last two thousand
+      five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Oh!&rdquo; said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns, her
+      hands wringing. &ldquo;Oh, that was&mdash;oh, poor Flamingo!&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A strange smile shot into Crozier&rsquo;s face, and the dark passion of
+      reminiscence fled from his eyes. &ldquo;Yes, you are right, little friend,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;That was the real tragedy after all. There was the horse doing his
+      best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on him,
+      stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon, feeling
+      the psalm of success in his heart&mdash;yes, he knows, he knows what he
+      has done, none so well!&mdash;and out comes a black, hateful thing against
+      him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run. I felt exactly as
+      you do, and I felt that before everything else when it happened. Then I
+      felt for myself afterwards, and I felt it hard, as you can think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The break went from his voice, but it rang with reflective, remembered
+      misery. &ldquo;I was ruined. One thing was clear to me. I would not live on my
+      wife&rsquo;s money. I would not eat and drink what her money bought. No, I would
+      not live on my wife. Her brother, a good enough, impulsive lad, with a
+      tongue of his own and too small to thresh, came to me in London the night
+      of the race. He said his sister had been in the country-down at Epsom&mdash;and
+      that she bitterly resented my having broken my promise and lost all I had.
+      He said he had never seen her so angry, and he gave me a letter from her.
+      On her return to town she had been obliged to go away at once to see her
+      sister taken suddenly ill. He added, with an unfeeling jibe, that he
+      wouldn&rsquo;t like the reading of the letter himself. If he hadn&rsquo;t been such a
+      chipmunk of a fellow I&rsquo;d have wrung his neck. I put the letter her
+      letter-in my pocket, and next day gave my lawyer full instructions and a
+      power of attorney. Then I went straight to Glasgow, took steamer for
+      Canada, and here I am. That was near five years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the letter from your wife?&rdquo; asked Kitty Tynan demurely and slyly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor looked at Crozier, surprised at her temerity, but Crozier
+      only smiled gently. &ldquo;It is in the desk there. Bring it to me, please,&rdquo; he
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment Kitty was beside him with the letter. He took it, turned it
+      over, examined it carefully as though seeing it for the first time, and
+      laid it on his knee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never opened it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There it is, just as it was handed to
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know what is in it?&rdquo; asked Kitty in a shocked voice. &ldquo;Why, it
+      may be that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I know what is in it!&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;Her brother&rsquo;s confidences
+      were enough. I didn&rsquo;t want to read it. I can imagine it all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s pretty cowardly,&rdquo; remarked Kitty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I think not. It would only hurt, and the hurting could do no good. I
+      can hear what it says, and I don&rsquo;t want to see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held the letter up to his ear whimsically. Then he handed it back to
+      her, and she replaced it in the desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So, there it is, and there it is,&rdquo; he sighed. &ldquo;You have got my story, and
+      it&rsquo;s bad enough, but you can see it&rsquo;s not what Burlingame suggested.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Burlingame&mdash;but Burlingame&rsquo;s beneath notice,&rdquo; rejoined Kitty. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t
+      he, mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan nodded. Then, as though with sudden impulse, Kitty came forward
+      to Crozier and leaned over him. The look of a mother was in her eyes.
+      Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than this man with the
+      heart of a boy, who was afraid of his own wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s time for your beef-tea, and when you&rsquo;ve had it you must get your
+      sleep,&rdquo; she said, with a hovering solicitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to give him a threshing first, if you don&rsquo;t mind,&rdquo; said the
+      Young Doctor to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please let a little good advice satisfy you,&rdquo; Crozier remarked ruefully.
+      &ldquo;It will seem like old times,&rdquo; he added rather bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are too young to have had &lsquo;old times,&rsquo;&rdquo; said Kitty with gentle scorn.
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll like you better when you are older,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naughty jade,&rdquo; exclaimed the Young Doctor, &ldquo;you ought to be more
+      respectful to those older than yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, grandpapa!&rdquo; she retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII. A WOMAN&rsquo;S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The harvest was over. The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved like
+      a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose in
+      innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye. The ground appeared bare and
+      ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could take away
+      from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn sheep
+      invite the satisfied eye of the expert. The land now, all stubble, still
+      looked good for anything. If bare, it did not seem starved. It was naked
+      and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down after the
+      fight. Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it was clothed
+      with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed the fibre of its
+      being to no disadvantage. And overhead the joy of the prairie grew apace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and shrivelled
+      of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come into the
+      air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of nature
+      recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength, a battery
+      charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and energy.
+      Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must strive; noon
+      was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity; evening was
+      glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those colours which
+      Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his eyes. There was in
+      that evening light, somehow, just a touch of pensiveness&mdash;the triste
+      delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian summer soon to come, when
+      the air would make all sensitive souls turn to the past and forget that
+      to-morrow was all in all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other unduly in
+      this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than elsewhere.
+      Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself in the
+      delicate contentment of the sunset. There were many who took it all
+      without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something from it;
+      though there were many others who got nothing out of it at all, save the
+      health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose solicitous friend
+      is the sun. These heeded it little, even though a good number of them came
+      from the damp islands lying between the north Atlantic and the German
+      Ocean. From Erin and England and the land o&rsquo; cakes they came, had a few
+      days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity as to the permanency of such
+      conditions, and then settled down to take it as it was, endless days of
+      sunshine and stirring vivacious air&mdash;as though they had always known
+      it and had it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were exceptions, and these had joy in what they saw and felt
+      according to the measure of their temperament. Shiel Crozier saw and felt
+      much of it, and probably the Young Doctor saw more of it than any one;
+      stray people here and there who take no part in this veracious tale had it
+      in greater or less degree; fat Jesse Bulrush was so sensitive to it that
+      he, as he himself said, &ldquo;almost leaked sentimentality&rdquo; and Kitty Tynan
+      possessed it. She was pulsing with life, as a bird drunken with the air&rsquo;s
+      sweetness sings itself into an abandonment of motion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Crozier came she had enjoyed existence as existence, wondering
+      often why it was she wanted to spring up from the ground with the idea
+      that she could fly, if she chose to try. Once when she was quite a little
+      girl she had said to her mother, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to ile away,&rdquo; and her mother,
+      puzzled, asked her what she meant. Her reply was, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s in the hymn.&rdquo; Her
+      mother persisted in asking what hymn; and was told with something like
+      scorn that it was the hymn she herself had taught her only child&mdash;&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll
+      away, I&rsquo;ll away to the Promised Land.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty had thought that &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll away&rdquo; meant some delicious motion which was
+      to ile, and she had visions of something between floating and flying as
+      being that blessed means of transportation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the years grew, she still wanted to &ldquo;ile away&rdquo; whenever the spirit of
+      elation seized her, and it had increased greatly since Shiel Crozier came.
+      Out of her star as he was, she still felt near to him, and as though she
+      understood him and he comprehended her. He had almost at once become to
+      her an admired mystery, which, however, at first she did not dare wish to
+      solve. She had been content to be a kind of handmaiden to a generous and
+      adored master. She knew that where he had been she could in one sense
+      never go, and yet she wanted to be near him just the same. This was
+      intensified after the Logan Trial and the shooting of the man who somehow
+      seemed to have made her live in a new way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As long ago as she could recall she had, in a crude, untutored way, been
+      fond of the things that nature made beautiful; but now she seemed to see
+      them in a new light, but not because any one had deliberately taught her.
+      Indeed, it bored her almost to hear books read as Jesse Bulrush and Nurse
+      Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his operation, to
+      help him pass away the time. The only time she ever cared to listen&mdash;at
+      school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for the printed page&mdash;was
+      when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or recited. Then she would
+      listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but by the music of the lines,
+      by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying feeling; and she got something
+      out of it which had in one sense nothing to do with the verses themselves
+      or with the conception of the poet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read. He was a born
+      sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to Kitty
+      during Crozier&rsquo;s illness. Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse contrived
+      to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too; for he was a
+      picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and clean linen&mdash;he
+      always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and he had a taste in
+      ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought by the yard. He was, in
+      fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for material things, as he had
+      shown in the land proposal on which Shiel Crozier&rsquo;s fortunes hung, but
+      with no gift for carrying them out, having neither constructive ability
+      nor continuity of purpose. Yet he was an agreeable, humorous, sentimental
+      soul, who at fifty years of age found himself &ldquo;an old bach,&rdquo; as he called
+      himself, in love at last with a middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and
+      set figure, keen, intelligent eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and
+      soothing way with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
+      volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
+      the bedside of the wounded man. Jesse had been away so much in different
+      parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
+      had a real chance to make permanent impression. By accident, however, his
+      business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at the moment,
+      and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened to
+      his reading of poetry&mdash;Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville,
+      and Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly&mdash;with such absorbed interest. His
+      content was the greater because his lovely nurse&mdash;he did think she
+      was lovely, as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their
+      cordial, ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the
+      divine lines&mdash;because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy
+      voice rising and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse;
+      though it meant nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound
+      was using it on her behalf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty understood.
+      Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a mistress of his
+      heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did not talk. That, to
+      him, was the best thing of all. She was a superb listener, and he was a
+      prodigious talker&mdash;was it not all appropriate?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little
+      knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made a
+      pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point. He found her in her usual
+      place, with a look almost pensive on her face. He did not notice that, for
+      he was excited and elated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to read you something I&rsquo;ve written,&rdquo; he said, and he drew from his
+      pocket a paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it&rsquo;s another description of the timber-land you have for sale-please,
+      not to me,&rdquo; she answered provokingly, for she guessed well what he held in
+      his hand. She had seen him writing it. She had even seen some of the lines
+      scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing careful if not swift
+      and skillful manufacture. One of these crumpled-up bits of paper she had
+      in her pocket now, having recovered it that she might tease him by quoting
+      the lines at a provoking opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not that. It&rsquo;s some verses I&rsquo;ve written,&rdquo; he said, with a wave of
+      his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All your own?&rdquo; she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and he
+      did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of aloes
+      on her tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Yes. I&rsquo;ve always written verses more or less&mdash;I write a good
+      many advertisements in verse,&rdquo; he added cheerfully. &ldquo;They are very
+      popular. Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses
+      in commerce as in affairs of the heart. But if you&rsquo;d rather not, if it
+      makes you tired&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Courage, soldier, bear your burden,&rdquo; she said gaily. &ldquo;Mount your horse
+      and get galloping,&rdquo; she added, motioning him to sit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later he was pouring out his soul through a pleasing voice, from
+      fat lips, flanked by a high-coloured healthy cheek like a russet apple:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;Like jewels of the sky they gleam,
+        Your eyes of light, your eyes of fire;
+        In their dark depths behold the dream
+        Of Life&rsquo;s glad hope and Love&rsquo;s desire.
+
+       &ldquo;Above your quiet brow, endowed
+        With Grecian charm to crown your grace,
+        Your hair in one soft Titian cloud
+        Throws heavenly shadows on your face.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ve never had verses written to me before,&rdquo; Kitty remarked
+      demurely, when he had finished and sat looking at her questioningly. &ldquo;But
+      &lsquo;dark depths&rsquo;&mdash;that isn&rsquo;t the right thing to say of my eyes! And
+      Titian cloud of hair&mdash;is my hair Titian? I thought Titian hair was
+      bronzy-tawny was what Mr. Burlingame called it when he was spouting,&rdquo;&mdash;her
+      upper lip curled in contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t you, and you know it,&rdquo; he replied jerkily. She bridled. &ldquo;Do you
+      mean to say that you come and read to me without a word of explanation, so
+      that I shouldn&rsquo;t misunderstand, verses written for another? Am I to be
+      told now that my eyes aren&rsquo;t eyes of light and eyes of fire, that I
+      haven&rsquo;t got a Grecian brow? Do you dare to say those verses don&rsquo;t fit me&mdash;except
+      for the Titian hair and heavenly shadows? And that I&rsquo;ve got no right to
+      think they&rsquo;re meant for me? Is it so, that a man that&rsquo;s lived in my
+      mother&rsquo;s house for years, eating at the same table with the family, and
+      having his clothes mended free, with supper to suit him and no questions
+      asked&mdash;is it so, that he reads me poetry, four lines at a stretch,
+      and a rhyme every other line, and then announces it isn&rsquo;t for me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes flashed, her bosom palpitated, her hand made passionate gestures,
+      and she really seemed a young fury let loose. For a moment he was deceived
+      by her acting; he did not see the lurking grin in the depths of her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice shook with assumed passion. &ldquo;Because I didn&rsquo;t show what I felt
+      all these years, and only exposed my real feelings when you read those
+      verses to me, do you think any man who was a gentleman wouldn&rsquo;t in the
+      circumstances say, &lsquo;These verses are for you, Kitty Tynan&rsquo;? You betrayed
+      me into showing you what I felt, and then you tell me your verses are for
+      another girl!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Girl! Girl! Girl!&rdquo; he burst out. &ldquo;Nurse is thirty-seven&mdash;she told me
+      so herself, and how could I tell that you&mdash;why, it&rsquo;s absurd! I&rsquo;ve
+      only thought of you always as a baby in long skirts&rdquo;&mdash;she
+      spasmodically drew her skirts down over her pretty, shapely ankles, while
+      she kept her eyes covered with one hand&mdash;&ldquo;and you&rsquo;ve seen me makin&rsquo; 
+      up to her ever since Crozier got the bullet. Ever since he was operated
+      on, I&rsquo;ve&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes, that&rsquo;s right,&rdquo; she interrupted. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s manly! Put the blame on
+      him&mdash;him that couldn&rsquo;t help himself, struck by a horse-thief&rsquo;s bullet
+      in the dark; him that&rsquo;s no more to blame for your carryings on while death
+      was prowling about the door there&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Carryings on! Carryings on!&rdquo; Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and
+      indignant. The little devil, to put him in a hole like this! &ldquo;Carryings
+      on! I&rsquo;ve acted like a man all through&mdash;never anything else in your
+      house, and it&rsquo;s a shame that I&rsquo;ve got to listen to things that have never
+      been said of me in all my life. My mother was a good, true woman, and she
+      brought me up&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s it, put it on your mother now, poor woman! who isn&rsquo;t here to
+      stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two
+      girls so placed they couldn&rsquo;t help themselves&mdash;just doing kind acts
+      for a sick man.&rdquo; Suddenly she got to her feet. &ldquo;I tell you, Jesse Bulrush,
+      that you&rsquo;re a man&mdash;you&rsquo;re a man&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But she could keep it up no longer. She burst out laughing, and the false
+      tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: &ldquo;That you&rsquo;re a
+      man after my own heart. But you can&rsquo;t have it, even if you are after it,
+      and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in there!&rdquo; She
+      tossed a hand towards the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting. &ldquo;Well, you wicked
+      little rip&mdash;you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it
+      up like that! Why, never on the stage was there such&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the poetry made me do it. It inspired me,&rdquo; she gurgled. &ldquo;I felt&mdash;why,
+      I felt here&rdquo;&mdash;she pressed her hand to her heart &ldquo;all the pangs of
+      unrequited love&mdash;oh, go away, go back to the house and read that to
+      her! She&rsquo;s in the sitting-room, and my mother&rsquo;s away down-town. Now&rsquo;s your
+      chance, Claude Melnotte.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
+      towards the house. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re good enough for anybody, and if I wasn&rsquo;t so
+      young and daren&rsquo;t leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
+      I&rsquo;m thirty-seven&mdash;oh, oh, oh!&rdquo; She laughed till the tears came into
+      her eyes. &ldquo;This is as good as&mdash;as a play.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the best acted play I ever saw, from &lsquo;Ten Nights in a Bar-room&rsquo; to
+      &lsquo;Struck Oil,&rsquo;&rdquo; rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed yet
+      beaming. &ldquo;But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses worth
+      anything? Do you think she&rsquo;ll like them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read deepened
+      in her eyes. &ldquo;Nurse &lsquo;ll like them&mdash;of course she will,&rdquo; she said
+      gently. &ldquo;She&rsquo;ll like them because they are you. Read them to her as you
+      read them to me, and she&rsquo;ll only hear your voice, and she&rsquo;ll think them
+      clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh a thousand
+      pounds. It doesn&rsquo;t matter to a woman what a man&rsquo;s saying or doing, or
+      whether he&rsquo;s so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that under
+      everything he&rsquo;s saying, &lsquo;I love you.&rsquo; A man isn&rsquo;t that way, but a woman
+      is. Now go.&rdquo; Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!&rdquo; he said admiringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then be a father to me,&rdquo; she said teasingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t marry both your mother and nurse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps you can&rsquo;t marry either,&rdquo; she replied sarcastically, &ldquo;and I know
+      that in any case you&rsquo;ll never be any relative of mine by marriage. Get
+      going,&rdquo; she said almost impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll let you
+      hear some of my verses one day when you&rsquo;re more developed and can
+      understand them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet they beat mine,&rdquo; he called back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll win your bet,&rdquo; she answered, and stood leaning against a tree with
+      a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes. When he had disappeared,
+      sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper, unfolded it, and
+      laid it on her knee. &ldquo;It is better,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not good poetry, of
+      course, but it&rsquo;s truer, and it&rsquo;s not done according to a pattern like his.
+      Yes, it&rsquo;s real, real, real, and he&rsquo;ll never see it&mdash;never see it now,
+      for I&rsquo;ve fought it&rsquo; all out, and I&rsquo;ve won.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she slowly read the verses aloud:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;ve won,&rdquo; she said with determination. So many of her sex have said
+      things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their
+      decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never,
+      never, never do. Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a new
+      force awakened in her character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the
+      little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house. She was
+      thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom
+      in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social
+      pale. Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world beyond
+      this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the conscience of
+      a man or woman was the only law. She was not lawless in mind or spirit.
+      She was only rebelling against a situation in which she was bound hand and
+      foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive desire, if she wished
+      to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here was a man who was married, yet in a real sense who had no wife.
+      Suppose that man cared for her, what a tragedy it would be for them to be
+      kept apart! This man did not love her, and so there was no tragedy for
+      both. Still all was not over yet&mdash;yes, all was &ldquo;over and over and
+      over,&rdquo; she said to herself as she sprang to her feet with a sharp
+      exclamation of disgust&mdash;with herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mother was coming hurriedly towards her from the house. There was a
+      quickness in her walk suggesting excitement, yet from the look in her face
+      it was plain that the news she brought was not painful. &ldquo;He told me you
+      were here, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who told you I was here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Bulrush.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So it&rsquo;s all settled,&rdquo; she said, with a little quirk of her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he&rsquo;s asked her, and they&rsquo;re going to be married. It&rsquo;s enough to make
+      you die laughing to see the two middle-aged doves cooing in there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought perhaps it would be you. He said he would like to be a father
+      to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That would prevent me if nothing else would,&rdquo; answered the widow of
+      Tyndall Tynan. &ldquo;A stepfather to an unmarried girl, both eyeing each other
+      for a chance to find fault&mdash;if you please, no thank you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That means you won&rsquo;t get married till I&rsquo;m out of the way?&rdquo; asked Kitty,
+      with a look which was as much touched with myrrh as with mirth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means I wouldn&rsquo;t get married till you are married, anyway,&rdquo; was the
+      complacent answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there any one special that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t talk nonsense. Since your father died I&rsquo;ve only thought of his
+      child and mine, and I&rsquo;ve not looked where I might. Instead, I&rsquo;ve done my
+      best to prove that two women could live and succeed without a man to earn
+      for them; though of course without the pension it couldn&rsquo;t have been done
+      in the style we&rsquo;ve done it. We&rsquo;ve got our place!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a dignity attached to a pension which has an influence quite its
+      own, and in the most primitive communities it has an aristocratic
+      character which commands general respect. In Askatoon people gave Mrs.
+      Tynan a better place socially because of her pension than they would have
+      done if she had earned double the money which the pension brought her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody has called on us,&rdquo; she added with reflective pride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Principally since Mr. Crozier came,&rdquo; added Kitty. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s funny, isn&rsquo;t it,
+      how he made people respect him before they knew who he was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He would make Satan stand up and take off his hat, if he paid Hades a
+      visit,&rdquo; said Mrs. Tynan admiringly. &ldquo;Anybody&rsquo;d do anything for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty eyed her mother closely. There was a strange, far-away, brooding
+      look in Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s eyes, and she seemed for a moment lost in thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;re in love with him,&rdquo; said Kitty sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was, in a way,&rdquo; answered her mother frankly. &ldquo;I was, in a way, a kind
+      of way, till I knew he was married. But it didn&rsquo;t mean anything. I never
+      thought of it except as a thing that couldn&rsquo;t be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why couldn&rsquo;t it be?&rdquo; asked Kitty, smothering an agitation rising in her
+      breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I always knew he belonged to where we didn&rsquo;t, and because if he
+      was going to be in love himself, it would be with some girl like you. He&rsquo;s
+      young enough for that, and it&rsquo;s natural he should get as his profit the
+      years of youth that a young woman has yet to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As though it was a choice between you and me, for instance!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan started, but recovered herself. &ldquo;Yes. If there had been any
+      choosing, he&rsquo;d not have hesitated a minute. He&rsquo;d have taken you, of
+      course. But he never gave either of us a thought that way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought that till&mdash;till after he&rsquo;d told us his story,&rdquo; replied
+      Kitty boldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has happened since then?&rdquo; asked her mother, with sudden
+      apprehension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing has happened since. I don&rsquo;t understand it, but it&rsquo;s as though
+      he&rsquo;d been asleep for a long time and was awake again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan gravely regarded her daughter, and a look of fear came into her
+      face. &ldquo;I knew you kept thinking of him always,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;but you had
+      such sense, and he never showed any feeling for you; and young girls get
+      over things. Besides, you always showed you knew he wasn&rsquo;t a possibility.
+      But since he told us that day about his being married and all, has&mdash;has
+      he been different towards you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a thing, not a word,&rdquo; was the reply; &ldquo;but&mdash;but there&rsquo;s a
+      difference with him in a way. I feel it when I go in the room where he
+      is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to stop thinking of him,&rdquo; insisted the elder woman
+      querulously. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to stop it at once. It&rsquo;s no good. It&rsquo;s bad for
+      you. You&rsquo;ve too much sense to go on caring for a man that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to get married,&rdquo; said Kitty firmly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve made up my mind. If
+      you have to think about one person, you should stop thinking about
+      another; anyhow, you&rsquo;ve got to make yourself stop. So I&rsquo;m going to marry&mdash;and
+      stop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you going to marry, Kitty? You don&rsquo;t mean to say it&rsquo;s John
+      Sibley!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps. He keeps coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That gambling and racing fellow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He owns a big farm, and it pays, and he has got an interest in a mine,
+      and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you, you shan&rsquo;t,&rdquo; peevishly interjected Mrs. Tynan. &ldquo;You shan&rsquo;t.
+      He&rsquo;s vicious. He&rsquo;s&mdash;oh, you shan&rsquo;t! I&rsquo;d rather&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;d rather I threw myself away&mdash;on a married man?&rdquo; asked Kitty
+      covertly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My God&mdash;oh, Kitty!&rdquo; said the other, breaking down. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t mean
+      it&mdash;oh, you can&rsquo;t mean that you&rsquo;d&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got to work out my case in my own way,&rdquo; broke in Kitty calmly. &ldquo;I
+      know how I&rsquo;ve got to do it. I have to make my own medicine&mdash;and take
+      it. You say John Sibley is vicious. He has only got one vice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it enough? Gambling&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That isn&rsquo;t a vice; it&rsquo;s a sport. It&rsquo;s the same as Mr. Crozier had. Mr.
+      Crozier did it with horses only, the other does it with cards and horses.
+      The only vice John Sibley&rsquo;s got is me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is you?&rdquo; asked her mother bewilderedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, when you&rsquo;ve got an idea you can&rsquo;t control and it makes you its
+      slave, it&rsquo;s a vice. I&rsquo;m John&rsquo;s vice, and I&rsquo;m thinking of trying to cure
+      him of it&mdash;and cure myself too,&rdquo; Kitty added, folding and unfolding
+      the paper in her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here comes the Young Doctor,&rdquo; said her mother, turning towards the house.
+      &ldquo;I think you don&rsquo;t mean to marry Sibley, but if you do, make him give up
+      gambling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know that I want him to give it up,&rdquo; answered Kitty musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later she was alone with the Young Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII. ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s this you&rsquo;ve been doing?&rdquo; asked the Young Doctor, with a quizzical
+      smile. &ldquo;We never can tell where you&rsquo;ll break out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty Tynan&rsquo;s measles!&rdquo; she rejoined, swinging her hat by its ribbon.
+      &ldquo;Mine isn&rsquo;t a one-sided character, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know one of the sides quite well,&rdquo; returned the Young Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which, please, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor pretended to look wise. &ldquo;The outside. I read it like a
+      book. It fits the life in which it moves like the paper on the wall. But
+      I&rsquo;m not sure of the inside. In fact, I don&rsquo;t think I know that at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I couldn&rsquo;t call you in if my character was sick inside, could I?&rdquo; she
+      asked obliquely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might have an operation, and see what&rsquo;s wrong with it,&rdquo; he answered
+      playfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she shivered. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had enough of operations to last me awhile,&rdquo;
+       she rejoined. &ldquo;I thought I could stand anything, but your operation on Mr.
+      Crozier taught me a lesson. I&rsquo;d never be a doctor&rsquo;s wife if I had to help
+      him cut up human beings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll remember that,&rdquo; the Young Doctor replied mockingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if it would help put things on a right basis, I&rsquo;d make a bargain that
+      I wasn&rsquo;t to help do the carving,&rdquo; she rejoined wickedly. The Young Doctor
+      always incited her to say daring things. They understood each other well.
+      &ldquo;So don&rsquo;t let that stand in the way,&rdquo; she added slyly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man who marries you will be glad to get you without the anatomy,&rdquo; he
+      returned gallantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn&rsquo;t talking of a man; I was talking of a doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw up a hand and his eyebrows. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t a doctor a man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those I&rsquo;ve seen have been mostly fish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No feelings&mdash;eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked him in the eyes, and he felt a kind of shiver go through him.
+      &ldquo;Not enough to notice. I never observed you had any,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;If I
+      saw that you had, I&rsquo;d be so frightened I&rsquo;d fly. I&rsquo;ve seen pictures of an
+      excited whale turning a boat full of men over. No, I couldn&rsquo;t bear to see
+      you show any feeling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The dark eyes of the Young Doctor suddenly took on a look which was a
+      stranger to them. In his relations with women he was singularly
+      impersonal, but he was a man, and he was young enough to feel the Adam
+      stir in him. The hidden or controlled thing suddenly emerged. It was not
+      the look which would be in his eyes if he were speaking to the woman he
+      wanted to marry. Kitty saw it, and she did not understand it, for she had
+      at heart a feeling that she could go to him in any trouble of life and be
+      sure of healing. To her he seemed wonderful; but she thought of him as she
+      would have thought of her father, as a person of authority and knowledge&mdash;that
+      operation showed him a great man, she thought, so skillful and precise and
+      splendid; and the whole countryside had such confidence in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She regarded him as a being apart; but for a moment, an ominous moment, he
+      was almost one with that race of men who feed in strange pastures. She
+      only half saw the reddish glow which came swimming into his eyes, and she
+      did not realise it, for she did not expect to find it there. For an
+      instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of woman
+      life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material being,
+      the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence. It was the emergence
+      of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he had never
+      married and had never dallied! But in a moment it was gone again&mdash;driven
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a wicked little flirt you are!&rdquo; he said, with a shake of the head.
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll come to a bad end, if you don&rsquo;t change your ways.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what&rsquo;s the matter with
+      me,&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;Sometimes in operating for one disease we come on
+      another, and then there&rsquo;s a lot of thinking to be done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive
+      gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing. &ldquo;If you were going to
+      operate on me, what would it be for?&rdquo; she asked more flippantly than her
+      face showed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike
+      for the cancer love,&rdquo; he answered, with a direct look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She flushed and changed on the instant. &ldquo;Is love a cancer?&rdquo; she asked. All
+      at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something very like
+      anger quickened in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unrequited love is,&rdquo; he answered deliberately. &ldquo;How do you know it is
+      unrequited?&rdquo; she asked sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t know it,&rdquo; he answered, dismayed by the look in her face.
+      &ldquo;But I certainly hope I&rsquo;m right. I do, indeed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if you were right, what would you do&mdash;as a surgeon?&rdquo; she
+      questioned, with an undertone of meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would remove the cause of the disease.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She came close and looked him straight in the eyes. &ldquo;You mean that he
+      should go? You think that would cure the disease? Well, you are not going
+      to interfere. You are not going to manoeuvre anything to get him away&mdash;I
+      know doctors&rsquo; tricks. You&rsquo;d say he must go away east or west to the sea
+      for change of air to get well. That&rsquo;s nonsense, and it isn&rsquo;t necessary.
+      You are absolutely wrong in your diagnosis&mdash;if that&rsquo;s what you call
+      it. He is going to stay here. You aren&rsquo;t going to drive away one of our
+      boarders and take the bread out of our mouths. Anyhow, you&rsquo;re wrong. You
+      think because a girl worships a man&rsquo;s ability that she&rsquo;s in love with him.
+      I adore your ability, but I&rsquo;d as soon fall in love with a lobster&mdash;and
+      be boiled with the lobster in a black pot. Such conceit men have!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not convinced. He had a deep-seeing eye, and he saw that she was
+      boldly trying to divert his belief or suspicion. He respected her for it.
+      He might have said he loved her for it&mdash;with a kind of love which can
+      be spoken of without blushing or giving cause to blush, or reason for
+      jealousy, anger, or apprehension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled down into her gold-brown eyes, and he thought what a real woman
+      she was. He felt, too, that she would tell him something that would give
+      him further light if he spoke wisely now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to see some proof that you are right, if I am wrong,&rdquo; he
+      answered cautiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;m going to be married,&rdquo; she said, with an air of finality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He waved a hand deprecatingly. &ldquo;Impossible&mdash;there&rsquo;s no man worth it.
+      Who is the undeserving wretch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you to-morrow,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t know yet how happy
+      he&rsquo;s going to be. What did you come here for? Why did you want to see me?&rdquo;
+       she added. &ldquo;You had something you were going to tell me. Hadn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s quite right,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about Crozier. This is my last
+      visit to him professionally. He can go on now without my care. Yours will
+      be sufficient for him. It has been all along the very best care he could
+      have had. It did more for him than all the rest, it&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean that,&rdquo; she interrupted, with a flush and a bosom that
+      leaped under her pretty gown. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean that I was of more use than
+      the nurse&mdash;than the future Mrs. Jesse Bulrush?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean just that,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;Nearly every sick person, every sick
+      man, I should say, has his mascot, his ministering angel, as it were. It&rsquo;s
+      a kind of obsession, and it often means life or death, whether the mascot
+      can stand the strain of the situation. I knew an old man&mdash;down by
+      Dingley&rsquo;s Flat it was, and he wanted a boy&mdash;his grand-nephew-beside
+      him always. He was getting well, but the boy took sick and the old man
+      died the next day. The boy had been his medicine. Sometimes it&rsquo;s a
+      particular nurse that does the trick; but whoever it is, it&rsquo;s a great
+      vital fact. Well, that&rsquo;s the part you played to Mr. Shiel Crozier of
+      Lammis and Castlegarry aforetime. He owes you much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad of that,&rdquo; she said softly, her eyes on the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is in love with him in spite of what she says,&rdquo; remarked the Young
+      Doctor to himself. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he continued aloud, &ldquo;the fact is, Crozier&rsquo;s
+      almost well in a way, but his mind is in a state, and he is not going to
+      get wholly right as things are. Since things came out in court, since he
+      told us his whole story, he has been different. It&rsquo;s as though&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She interrupted him hastily and with suppressed emotion. &ldquo;Yes, yes, do you
+      think I&rsquo;ve not noticed that? He&rsquo;s been asleep in a way for five years, and
+      now he&rsquo;s awake again. He is not James Gathorne Kerry now; he is James
+      Shiel Gathorne Crozier, and&mdash;oh, you understand: he&rsquo;s back again
+      where he was before&mdash;before he left her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor nodded approvingly. &ldquo;What a little brazen wonder you are!
+      I declare you see more than&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet you won&rsquo;t have me?&rdquo; she asked mockingly. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re too clever for me,&rdquo;
+       he rejoined with spirit. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m too conceited. I must marry a girl that&rsquo;d
+      kneel to me and think me as wise as Socrates. But he&rsquo;s back again, as you
+      say, and, in my view, his wife ought to be back again also.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She ought to be here,&rdquo; was Kitty&rsquo;s swift reply, &ldquo;though I think mighty
+      little of her&mdash;mighty little, I can tell you. Stuckup, great tall
+      stork of a woman, that lords it over a man as though she was a goddess.
+      Wears diamonds in the middle of the day, I suppose, and cold-blooded as&mdash;as
+      a fish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She ought to have married me, according to your opinion of me. You said I
+      was a fish,&rdquo; remarked the Young Doctor, with a laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The whale and the catfish!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens, what spite!&rdquo; he rejoined. &ldquo;Catfish&mdash;what do you know about
+      Mrs. Crozier? You may be brutally unjust&mdash;waspishly unjust, I should
+      say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I look like a wasp?&rdquo; she asked half tearfully. She was in a strange
+      mood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look like a golden busy bee,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;But tell me, how did you
+      come to know enough about her to call her a cat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because, as you say, I was a busy golden bee,&rdquo; she retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That information doesn&rsquo;t get me much further,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I opened that letter,&rdquo; she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;That letter&rsquo;&mdash;you mean you opened the letter he showed us which he
+      had left sealed as it came to him five years ago?&rdquo; The Young Doctor&rsquo;s face
+      wore a look of dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I steamed the envelope open&mdash;how else could I have done it! I
+      steamed it open, saw what I wanted, and closed it up again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor&rsquo;s face was pale now. This was a terrible revelation. He
+      had a man&rsquo;s view of such conduct. He almost shrank from her, though she
+      stood there as inviting and innocent a specimen of girlhood as the eye
+      could wish to see. She did not look dishonourable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you realise what that means?&rdquo; he asked in a cold, hard tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, come, don&rsquo;t put on that look and don&rsquo;t talk like John the
+      Evangelist,&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;I did it, not out of curiosity, and not to do
+      any one harm, but to do her good&mdash;his wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was dishonourable&mdash;wicked and dishonourable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you talk like that, Mr. Piety, I&rsquo;m off,&rdquo; she rejoined, and she started
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait&mdash;wait,&rdquo; he said, laying firm fingers on her arm. &ldquo;Of course you
+      did it for a good purpose. I know. You cared enough for him for that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had said the right thing, and she halted and faced him. &ldquo;I cared enough
+      to do a good deal more than that if necessary. He has been like a second
+      father to me, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly a light of humour shot into the eyes of both. Sheil Crozier as a
+      &ldquo;father&rdquo; to her was too artificial not to provoke their sense of the
+      grotesque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to find out his wife&rsquo;s address to write to her and tell her to
+      come quick,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;It was when he was at the worst. And then,
+      too, I wanted to know the kind of woman she was before I wrote to her. So&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean to say you read that letter which he had kept unopened and
+      unread for five long years?&rdquo; The Young Doctor was certainly disturbed
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every word of it,&rdquo; Kitty answered shamelessly, &ldquo;and I&rsquo;m not sorry. It was
+      in a good cause. If he had said, &lsquo;Courage, soldier,&rsquo; and opened it five
+      years ago, it would have been good for him. Better to get things like that
+      over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was that kind of a letter, was it&mdash;a catfish letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty laughed a little scornfully. &ldquo;Yes, just like that, Mr. Easily
+      Shocked. Great, showy, purse-proud creature!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you wrote to her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;a letter that would make her come if anything would. Talk of
+      tact&mdash;I was as smooth as a billiard-ball. But she hasn&rsquo;t come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The day after the operation I cabled to her,&rdquo; said the Young Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you steamed the letter open and read it too?&rdquo; asked Kitty
+      sarcastically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not. Ladies first-and last,&rdquo; was the equally sarcastic answer.
+      &ldquo;I cabled to Castlegarry, his father&rsquo;s place, also to Lammis that he
+      mentioned when he told us his story. Crozier of Lammis, he was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I wrote to the London address in the letter,&rdquo; added Kitty. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+      think she&rsquo;ll come. I asked her to cable me, and she hasn&rsquo;t. I wrote such a
+      nice letter, too. I did it for his sake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor laid his hands on both her shoulders. &ldquo;Kitty Tynan, the
+      man who gets you will get what he doesn&rsquo;t deserve,&rdquo; he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That might mean anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means that Crozier owes you more than he can guess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes shone with a strange, soft glow. &ldquo;In spite of opening the
+      letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor nodded, then added humorously: &ldquo;That letter you wrote her&mdash;I&rsquo;m
+      not sure that my cable wouldn&rsquo;t have far more effect than your letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not. You tried to frighten her, but I tried to coax her, to
+      make her feel ashamed. I wrote as though I was fifty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor regarded her dubiously. &ldquo;What was the sort of thing you
+      said to her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For one thing, I said that he had every comfort and attention two loving
+      women and one fond nurse could give him; but that, of course, his
+      legitimate wife would naturally be glad to be beside him when he passed
+      away, and that if she made haste she might be here in time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor leaned against a tree shaking with laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you smiling at?&rdquo; Kitty asked ironically. &ldquo;Oh, she&rsquo;ll be sure to
+      come&mdash;nothing will keep her away after being coaxed like that!&rdquo; he
+      said, when he could get breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Laughing at me as though I was a clown in a circus!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+      &ldquo;Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she&mdash;the cat&mdash;wrote
+      that fiendish letter to is in trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a fiendish letter, was it?&rdquo; he asked, suddenly sobered again. &ldquo;No,
+      no, don&rsquo;t tell me,&rdquo; he added, with a protesting gesture. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want to
+      hear. I don&rsquo;t want to know. I oughtn&rsquo;t to know. Besides, if she comes, I
+      don&rsquo;t want to be prejudiced against her. He is troubled, poor fellow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course he is. There&rsquo;s the big land deal&mdash;his syndicate. He&rsquo;s got
+      a chance of making a fortune, and he can&rsquo;t do it because&mdash;but Jesse
+      Bulrush told me in confidence, so I can&rsquo;t explain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have an idea, a pretty good idea. Askatoon is small.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And mean sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me what you know. Perhaps I can help him,&rdquo; urged the Young Doctor.
+      &ldquo;I have helped more than one good man turn a sharp corner here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught his arm. &ldquo;You are as good as gold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are&mdash;impossible,&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They talked of Crozier&rsquo;s land deal and syndicate as they walked slowly
+      towards the house. Mrs. Tynan met them at the door, a look of excitement
+      in her face. &ldquo;A telegram for you Kitty,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me!&rdquo; exclaimed Kitty eagerly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a year since I had one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She tore open the yellow envelope. A light shot up in her face. She thrust
+      the telegram into the Young Doctor&rsquo;s hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s coming; his wife&rsquo;s coming. She&rsquo;s in Quebec now. It was my letter&mdash;my
+      letter, not your cable, that brought her,&rdquo; Kitty added triumphantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX. NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was as though Crozier had been told of the coming of his wife, for when
+      night came, on the day Kitty had received her telegram, he could not
+      sleep. He was the sport of a consuming restlessness. His brain would not
+      be still. He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and make
+      it vacuous. It would not relax. It seized with intentness on each thing in
+      turn, which was part of his life at the moment, and gave it an abnormal
+      significance. In vain he tried to shake himself free of the successive
+      obsessions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging him after
+      them, a slave lashed to the wheels of a chariot of flame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last it was the land deal and syndicate on which his future depended,
+      and the savage fate which seemed about to snatch his fortune away as it
+      had done so often before; as it had done on the day when Flamingo went
+      down near the post at the Derby with a madwoman dragging at the bridle. He
+      had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would have
+      enabled him to pass the crisis of his life. Wife, home, the old
+      fascinating, crowded life&mdash;they had all vanished because of that vile
+      trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the
+      wilderness through years that brought no fruit of his labours. Yet here
+      was his chance, his great chance, to get back what he had and was in the
+      old misspent days, with new purposes in life to follow and serve; and it
+      was all in cruel danger of being swept away when almost within his grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he could but achieve the big deal, he could return to wife and home, he
+      could be master in his own house, not a dependent on his wife&rsquo;s bounty.
+      That very evening Jesse Bulrush, elated by his own good fortune in
+      capturing Cupid, had told him as sadly as was possible, while his own
+      fortunes were, as he thought, soaring, that every avenue of credit seemed
+      closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan company, would
+      let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him to hold his place
+      in the syndicate; while each of the other members of the clique had flatly
+      and cheerfully refused, saying they were busy carrying their own loads.
+      Crozier had commanded Jesse not to approach them, but the fat idealist had
+      an idea that his tongue had a gift of wheedling, and he believed that he
+      could make them &ldquo;shell out,&rdquo; as he put it. He had failed, and he was
+      obliged to say so, when Crozier, suspecting, brought him to book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They mean to crowd you out&mdash;that&rsquo;s their game,&rdquo; Bulrush had said.
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;ve closed up all the ways to cash or credit. They&rsquo;re laying to do
+      you out of your share. Unless you put up the cash within the four days
+      left, they&rsquo;ll put it through without you. They told me to tell you that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Crozier had not even cursed them. He said to Jesse Bulrush that it was
+      an old game to get hold of a patent that made a fortune for a song while
+      the patentee died in the poor-house. Yet that four days was time enough
+      for a live man to do a &ldquo;flurry of work,&rdquo; and he was fit enough to walk up
+      their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when a man was
+      out for war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and
+      in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little and
+      big things to torture him&mdash;remembrances of incidents when debts and
+      disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the
+      elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman&rsquo;s face. It
+      was not his wife&rsquo;s face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but one
+      which had been part of his daily existence for over four years. It was the
+      first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the operation
+      which saved his life&mdash;the face of Kitty Tynan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face
+      had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence. Kitty had
+      said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after he had
+      told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was
+      startlingly true. It was as though, while he was living under an assumed
+      name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the
+      far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry. His wife and the
+      past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived out,
+      which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the present.
+      Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her had seemed
+      almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of his own name and
+      the telling if his story had produced a complete psychological change in
+      him mentally and bodily. The impersonal feeling which had marked his
+      relations with the two women of this household, and with all women, was
+      suddenly gone. He longed for the arms of a woman round his neck&mdash;it
+      was five years since any woman&rsquo;s arms had been there, since he had kissed
+      any woman&rsquo;s lips. Now, in the hour when his fortunes were again in the
+      fatal balance, when he would be started again for a fair race with the
+      wife from whom he had been so long parted, another face came between.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife was
+      living, came to him. He had never for an instant thought of her as dead,
+      but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him. If his wife was
+      living! Living? Her death had never been even a remote possibility to his
+      mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death. Beneath all
+      his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a romanticist to
+      whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible to sleep. He tossed from side to side. Once he got up in
+      the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought of
+      Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a
+      sudden impulse seized him. He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went to
+      the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out. With the feeling
+      that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he knew, ugly record
+      of their differences, and so clear her memory of any cruelty, of any act
+      of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of the candle when he
+      thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of his room gently
+      closing. Laying the letter down, he went to the door and opened it. There
+      was no one stirring. Yet he had a feeling as though some one was there in
+      the darkness. His lips framed the words,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is it? Is any one there?&rdquo; but he did not utter them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A kind of awe possessed him. He was Celtic; he had been fed on the
+      supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable
+      experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry,
+      and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical. It is hard to tell
+      what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness of the
+      other room-the living-room of the house. He was in a state of trance,
+      almost, a victim of the night. But as he closed the door softly the words
+      of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he found her
+      brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain. The last two verses
+      of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was swayed by
+      the superstition of bygone ancestors:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Whereaway goes my lad&mdash;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.
+
+     &ldquo;When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+     Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+     I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say&mdash;
+     &lsquo;Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?&rsquo;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He went to bed again, but sleep would not come. The verses of the lament
+      kept singing in his brain. He tossed from side to side, he sought to
+      control himself, but it was of no avail. Suddenly he remembered the bed of
+      boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her
+      meeting with the Young Doctor the previous day. Before he was shot he used
+      to sleep in the open in the summer-time. If he could get to sleep anywhere
+      it would be there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hastily dressing himself in flannel shirt and trousers, and dragging a
+      blanket from the bed, he found his way to the bedroom door, went into the
+      other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open into the
+      night. All at once he was conscious of another presence in the room, but
+      the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved himself for
+      succumbing to fantasy. Finding the front door in the dark, he opened it
+      and stepped outside. There was no moon, but there were millions of stars
+      in the blue vault above, and there was enough light for him to make his
+      way to the place where he had slept &ldquo;hereaway and oft.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew that the bed of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his,
+      and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet,
+      infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth. He
+      found the place and threw himself down. Why, here were green boughs under
+      him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there! Kitty&mdash;it was
+      Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing, thinking
+      that he might want to sleep in the open again after his illness. Kitty&mdash;it
+      was she who had so thoughtfully served him; Kitty, with the instinct of
+      strong, unselfish womanhood, with the gift of the outdoor life, with the
+      unpurchasable gift of friendship. What a girl she was! How rich she could
+      make the life of a man!
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and laid his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies
+     Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      How different she was, this child of the West, of Nature, from the woman
+      he had left behind in England, the sophisticated, well-appointed,
+      well-controlled girl; too well-controlled even in the first days of
+      married life; too well-controlled for him who had the rushing impulses of
+      a Celtic warrior of olden days. Delicate, refined, perfectly poised, and
+      Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope! Mona&mdash;Kitty,
+      the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life, each in her own
+      way, as none others had done, they floated before his eyes till sight and
+      feeling grew dim. With a last effort he strove to eject Kitty from his
+      thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the race of life, and he
+      must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly, even in exile from her,
+      run straight, even with that unopened, bitter, upbraiding letter in the&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He fell asleep, and soon and slowly and ever so dimly the opal light of
+      the prairie dawn crept shyly over the landscape. With it came stealing the
+      figure of a girl towards the group of trees where lay the man of Lammis on
+      the bed of green boughs which she had renewed for him. She had followed
+      him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through the night&mdash;near
+      him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him and the kind, holy
+      night before the morrow came which belonged to the other woman, who had
+      written to him as she never could have written to any man in whose arms
+      she ever had lain. And the pity and the tragedy of it was that he loved
+      his wife&mdash;the catfish wife. The sharp, pitiless instinct of love told
+      her that the stirring in his veins which had come of late to him, which
+      beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near him now, was only the
+      reflection of what he felt for his wife. She knew the unmerciful truth,
+      but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet what she must put away
+      from herself after to-morrow. Those verses she wrote&mdash;they were to
+      show that she had conquered herself. Yet, but a few hours after, here she
+      was kneeling outside his door at night, here she was pursuing him to the
+      place where he slept. The coming of the other woman&mdash;she knew well
+      that she was something to this man of men&mdash;had roused in her all she
+      had felt, had intensified it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She trembled, but she drew near, accompanied by the heavenly odours of the
+      freshened herbs and foliage and the cool tenderness of the river close by.
+      In her white dress and loosened hair she was like some spirit of a
+      new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home. It was all
+      so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the bushes and
+      the night. Noiselessly she stole over the grass and into the shadows of
+      the trees where he lay. Again and again she paused. What would she do if
+      he was awake and saw her? She did not know. The moment must take care of
+      itself. She longed to find him sleeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so. The hazy light showed his face upward to the skies, his breast
+      rising and falling in a heavy, luxurious sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew nearer and nearer till she was kneeling beside him. His face was
+      warm with colour even in the night air, warmer than she had ever seen it.
+      One hand lay across his chest and one was thrown back over his head with
+      the abandon of perfect rest. All the anxiety and restlessness which had
+      tortured him had fled, and his manhood showed bold and serene in the
+      brightening dusk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sob almost broke from her as she gazed her fill, then slowly she leaned
+      over and softly pressed her lips to his&mdash;the first time that ever in
+      love they had been given to any man. She had the impulse to throw her arms
+      round him, but she mastered herself. He stirred, but he did not wake. His
+      lips moved as she withdrew hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My darling!&rdquo; he said in the quick, broken way of the dreamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose swiftly and fled away among the trees towards the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What he had said in his sleep&mdash;was it in reality the words of
+      unconsciousness, or was it subconscious knowledge?&mdash;they kept ringing
+      in her ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My darling!&rdquo; he had said when she kissed him. There was a light of joy in
+      her eyes now, though she felt that the words were meant for another. Yet
+      it was her kiss, her own kiss, which had made him say it. If&mdash;but
+      with happy eyes she stole to her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X. &ldquo;S. O. S.&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <p>
+      At breakfast next morning Kitty did not appear. Had it been possible she
+      would have fled into the far prairie and set up a lonely tabernacle there;
+      for with the day came a reaction from the courage possessing her the night
+      before and in the opal wakening of the dawn. When broad daylight came she
+      felt as though her bones were water and her body a wisp of straw. She
+      could not bear to meet Shiel Crozier&rsquo;s eyes, and thus it was she had an
+      early breakfast on the plea that she had ironing to do. She was not,
+      however, prepared to see Jesse Bulrush drive up with a buggy after
+      breakfast and take Crozier away. When she did see them at the gate the
+      impulse came to cry out to Crozier; what to say she did not know, but
+      still to cry out. The cry on her lips was that which she had seen in the
+      newspaper the day before, the cry of the shipwrecked seafarers, the signal
+      of the wireless telegraphy, &ldquo;S. O. S.&rdquo;&mdash;the piteous call, &ldquo;Save Our
+      Souls!&rdquo; It sprang to her lips, but it got no farther except in an
+      unconscious whisper. On the instant she felt so weak and shaken and lonely
+      that she wanted to lean upon some one stronger than herself; as she used
+      to lean against her father, while he sat with one arm round her studying
+      his railway problems. She had been self-sufficient enough all her life,&mdash;&ldquo;an
+      independent little bird of freedom,&rdquo; as Crozier had called her; but she
+      was like a boat tossed on mountainous waves now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;S. O. S.!&mdash;Save Our Souls!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As though she really had made this poignant call Crozier turned round in
+      the buggy where he sat with Jesse Bulrush, pale but erect; and, with a
+      strange instinct, he looked straight to where she was. When he saw her his
+      face flushed, he could not have told why. Was it that there had passed to
+      him in his sleep the subconscious knowledge of the kiss which Kitty had
+      given him; and, after all, had he said &ldquo;My darling&rdquo; to her and not to the
+      wife far away across the seas, as he thought? A strange feeling, as of
+      secret intimacy, never felt before where Kitty was concerned, passed
+      through him now, and he was suddenly conscious that things were not as
+      they had ever been; that the old impersonal comradeship had vanished. It
+      disturbed, it almost shocked him. Whereupon he made a valiant effort to
+      recover the old ground, to get out of the new atmosphere into the old,
+      cheering air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come and say good-bye, won&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; he called to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;S. O. S.&mdash;S. O. S.&mdash;S. O. S.!&rdquo; was the cry in her heart, but
+      she called back to him from her lips, &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t. I&rsquo;m too busy. Come back
+      soon, soldier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a wave of the hand he was gone. &ldquo;Not a care in the world she has,&rdquo;
+       Crozier said to Jesse Bulrush. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s the sunniest creature Heaven ever
+      made.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too skittish for me,&rdquo; responded the other with a sidelong look, for he
+      had caught a note in Crozier&rsquo;s voice which gave him a sudden suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want the kind you can drive with an oatstraw and a chirp&mdash;eh, my
+      friend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ve got what I want,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;Neither of us &lsquo;ll kick over
+      the traces.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a lucky man,&rdquo; replied Crozier. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got a remarkably big prize
+      in the lottery. She is a fine woman, is Nurse Egan, and I owe her a great
+      deal. I only hope things turn out so well that I can give her a good fat
+      wedding-present. But I shan&rsquo;t be able to do anything that&rsquo;s close to my
+      heart if I can&rsquo;t get the cash for my share in the syndicate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Courage, soldier, as Kitty Tynan says,&rdquo; responded Jesse Bulrush cheerily.
+      &ldquo;You never know your luck. The cash is waiting for you somewhere, and
+      it&rsquo;ll turn up, be sure of that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not sure of that. I can see as plain as your nose how Bradley and his
+      clique have blocked me everywhere from getting credit, and I&rsquo;d give five
+      years of my life to beat them in their dirty game. If I fail to get it at
+      Aspen Vale I&rsquo;m done. But I&rsquo;ll have a try, a good big try. How far exactly
+      is it? I&rsquo;ve never gone by this trail.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bulrush shook his head reprovingly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s too long a journey for you to
+      take after your knock-out. You&rsquo;re not fit to travel yet. I don&rsquo;t like it a
+      bit. Lydia said this morning it was a crime against yourself, going off
+      like this, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lydia?&mdash;oh yes, pardonnez-moi, m&rsquo;sieu&rsquo;! I did not know her name was
+      Lydia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t either till after we were engaged.&rdquo; Crozier stared in blank
+      amazement. &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t know her name till after you were engaged? What did
+      you call her before that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I called her Nurse.&rdquo; answered the fat lover. &ldquo;We all called her
+      that, and it sounded comfortable and homelike and good for every day. It
+      had a sort of York-shilling confidence, and your life was in her hands&mdash;a
+      first-class you-and-me kind of feeling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you stick to it, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She doesn&rsquo;t want it. She says it sounds so old, and that I&rsquo;d be calling
+      her &lsquo;mother&rsquo; next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And won&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; asked Crozier slyly. &ldquo;Everything in season,&rdquo; beamed
+      Jesse, and he shone, and was at once happy and composed. Crozier relapsed
+      into silence, for he was thinking that the lost years had been barren of
+      children. He turned to look at the home they had left. It was some
+      distance away now, but he could see Kitty still at the corner of the house
+      with a small harvest of laundered linen in her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She made that fresh bed of boughs for me&mdash;ah, but I had a good sleep
+      last night!&rdquo; he added aloud. &ldquo;I feel fit for the fight before me.&rdquo; He drew
+      himself up and began to nod here and there to people who greeted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the house behind them at that moment Kitty was saying to her mother,
+      &ldquo;Where is he going, mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Aspen Vale,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;d been at breakfast you&rsquo;d have
+      heard. He&rsquo;ll be gone two days, perhaps three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Three days! She regretted now that she had not said to herself, &ldquo;Courage,
+      soldier,&rdquo; and gone to say good-bye to him when he called to her. Perhaps
+      she would not see him again till after the other woman&mdash;till after
+      the wife-came. Then&mdash;then the house would be empty; then the house
+      would be so still. And then John Sibley would come and&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI. IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Three days passed, but before they ended there came another telegram from
+      Mrs. Crozier stating the time of her expected arrival at Askatoon. It was
+      addressed to Kitty, and Kitty almost savagely tore it up into little
+      pieces and scattered it to the winds. She did not even wait to show it to
+      the Young Doctor; but he had a subtle instinct as to why she did not; and
+      he was rather more puzzled than usual at what was passing before his eyes.
+      In any case, the coming of the wife must alter all the relations existing
+      in the household of the widow Tynan. The old, unrestrained, careless
+      friendship could not continue. The newcomer would import an element of
+      caste and class which would freeze mother and daughter to the bones.
+      Crozier was the essence of democracy, which in its purest form is akin to
+      the most aristocratic element and is easily affiliated with it. He had no
+      fear of Crozier. Crozier would remain exactly the same; but would not
+      Crozier be whisked away out of Askatoon to a new fate, reconciled to being
+      a receiver of his wife&rsquo;s bounty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If his wife gets her arms round his neck, and if she wants to get them
+      there, she will, and once there he&rsquo;ll go with her like a gentleman,&rdquo; said
+      the Young Doctor sarcastically. Admiring Crozier as he did, he also had
+      underneath all his knowledge of life an unreasonable apprehension of man&rsquo;s
+      weakness where a woman was concerned. The man who would face a cannon&rsquo;s
+      mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could crumple with
+      one hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and Kitty
+      met the train. The local operator had not divulged to any one the contents
+      of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators on the
+      platform. As the great express stole in almost noiselessly, like a tired
+      serpent, Kitty watched its approach with outward cheerfulness. She had
+      braced herself to this moment, till she looked the most buoyant, joyous
+      thing in the world. It had not come easily. With desperation she had
+      fought a fight during these three lonely days, till at last she had
+      conquered, sleeping each night on Crozier&rsquo;s star-lit bed of boughs and
+      coming in with the silver-grey light of dawn. Now she leaned forward with
+      heart beating fast; but with smiling face and with eyes so bright that she
+      deceived the Young Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no sign of inward emotion, of hidden troubles, as she leaned
+      forward to see the great lady step from the train&mdash;great in every
+      sense was this lady in her mind; imposing in stature, a Juno, a tragedy
+      queen, a Zenobia, a daughter of the gods who would not stoop to conquer.
+      She looked in vain, however, for the Mrs. Crozier she had imagined made no
+      appearance from the train. She hastened down the platform still with keen
+      eyes scanning the passengers, who were mostly alighting to stretch their
+      legs and get a breath of air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s not here,&rdquo; she said at last darkly to the Young Doctor who had
+      followed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly she saw emerge from a little group at the steps of a car a
+      child in a long dress&mdash;so it seemed to her, the being was so small
+      and delicate&mdash;and come forward, having hastily said good-bye to her
+      fellow-passengers. As the Young Doctor said afterwards, &ldquo;She wasn&rsquo;t bigger
+      than a fly,&rdquo; and she certainly was as graceful and pretty and piquante as
+      a child-woman could be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently, with her alert, rather assertive blue eyes she saw Kitty, and
+      came forward. &ldquo;Miss Tynan?&rdquo; she asked, with an encompassing look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now Kitty was idiomatic in her speech at times, and she occasionally used
+      slang of the best brand, but she avoided those colloquialisms which were
+      of the vocabulary of the uneducated. Indeed, she had had no inclination to
+      use them, for her father had set her a good example, and she liked to hear
+      good English spoken. That was why Crozier&rsquo;s talk had been like music to
+      her; and she had been keen to distinguish between the rhetorical method of
+      Augustus Burlingame, who modelled himself on the orators of all the
+      continents, and was what might be called a synthetic elocutionist. Kitty
+      was as simple and natural as a girl could be, and as a rule had herself in
+      perfect command; but she was so stunned by the sight of this petite person
+      before her that, in reply to Mrs. Crozier&rsquo;s question, she only said
+      abruptly
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The same!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she came to herself and could have bitten her tongue out for that
+      plunge into the vernacular of the West; and forthwith a great prejudice
+      was set up in her mind against Mona Crozier, in whose eyes she caught a
+      look of quizzical criticism or, as she thought, contemptuous comment. That
+      for one instant she had been caught unawares and so had put herself at a
+      disadvantage angered her; but she had been embarrassed and confounded by
+      this miniature goddess, and her reply was a vague echo of talk she heard
+      around her every day. Also she could have choked the Young Doctor, whom
+      she caught looking at her with wondering humour, as though he was trying
+      to see &ldquo;what her game was,&rdquo; as he said to her afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was all due to the fact that from the day of the Logan Trial, and
+      particularly from the day when Shiel Crozier had told his life-story, she
+      had always imagined his wife as a stately Amazonian being with the
+      carriage of a Boadicea. She had looked for an empress in splendid
+      garments, and&mdash;and here was a humming-bird of a woman, scarcely
+      bigger, than a child, with the buzzing energy of a bee, but with a queer
+      sort of manfulness too; with a square, slightly-projecting chin, as Kitty
+      came to notice afterwards; together with some small lines about the mouth
+      and at the eyes, which came from trouble endured and suffering undergone.
+      Kitty did not notice that, but the Young Doctor took it in with his
+      embracing glance, as the wife saluted Kitty with her inward comment, which
+      was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So this is the chit who wrote to me like a mother!&rdquo; But Mona Crozier did
+      not underestimate Kitty for all that, and she wondered why it was that
+      Kitty had written as she did. One thing was quite clear: Kitty had had
+      good intentions, else why have written at all?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these thoughts had passed through the mind of each, with a good many
+      others, while they were shaking hands; and the Young Doctor summoned his
+      man to carry Mona&rsquo;s hand-luggage to the extra buggy he had brought to the
+      station. One of the many other thoughts that were passing through three
+      active minds was Kitty&rsquo;s unspoken satire:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just think; this is the woman he talked of as though she was a moving
+      mountain which would fall on you and crush you, if you didn&rsquo;t look out!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt Crozier would have repudiated this description of his talk, but
+      the fact was he had unconsciously spoken of Mona with a sort of hush in
+      his voice; for a woman to him was something outside real understanding. He
+      had a romantic mediaeval view, which translated weakness and beauty into a
+      miracle, and what psychologists call &ldquo;an inspired control.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s no bigger than&mdash;than a wasp,&rdquo; said Kitty to herself, after the
+      Young Doctor had assured Mrs. Crozier that her husband was almost well
+      again; that he had recovered more quickly than was expected, and had
+      gained strength wonderfully after the crisis was passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you,&rdquo; was Kitty&rsquo;s further
+      inward comment, &ldquo;and that&rsquo;s why he was always nervous when he spoke of
+      her.&rdquo; Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed the tiny
+      lines about the tiny mouth, and the fine-spun webs about the bird-bright
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward
+      suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward
+      fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more offensive
+      in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most, spotless thing she
+      had ever seen, at the end of a journey&mdash;and this, a journey across a
+      continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and fastidiousness,
+      tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold of her dress, in
+      the way everything she wore had been put on, in the decision of every step
+      and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and she said to herself,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo,&rdquo; and she instinctively felt the
+      little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she ever
+      wore, or had ever worn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sensible of her not to bring a maid,&rdquo; commented the Young Doctor
+      inwardly. &ldquo;That would have thrown Kitty into a fit. Yet how she manages to
+      look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is beyond me&mdash;and
+      Crozier so rather careless in his ways. Not what you would call two notes
+      in the same key, she and Crozier,&rdquo; he reflected as he told her she need
+      not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of the checks for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My husband&mdash;is&mdash;is he quite better now?&rdquo; Mrs. Crozier asked
+      with sharp anxiety, as the two-seated &ldquo;rig&rdquo; started away with the ladies
+      in the back seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, better, thanks to him,&rdquo; was Kitty&rsquo;s reply, nodding towards the Young
+      Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have told him I was coming?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wasn&rsquo;t it better to have a talk with you first?&rdquo; asked Kitty meaningly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried,
+      then she looked Kitty in the eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it,&rdquo; was her
+      enigmatical reply. &ldquo;And of course you will tell me. You did not let him
+      know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you got his cable?&rdquo; questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph in
+      her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor. It did reach him,
+      and he replied to the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country planned
+      his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did not,
+      unfortunately, take you into account.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little lady blushed, or flushed. &ldquo;May I ask how you know this to be
+      so, if it is so?&rdquo; she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in
+      her tone, as it seemed to Kitty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Logan Trial&mdash;I mentioned it in my letter to you,&rdquo; interposed
+      Kitty. &ldquo;He was shot for the evidence he gave at the trial. Well, at the
+      trial a great many questions were asked by a lawyer who wanted to hurt
+      him, and he answered them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did the lawyer want to hurt him?&rdquo; Mona Crozier asked quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just mean-hearted envy and spite and devilry,&rdquo; was Kitty&rsquo;s answer. &ldquo;They
+      were both handsome men, and perhaps that was it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never thought my husband handsome, though he was always distinguished
+      looking,&rdquo; was the quiet reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but you haven&rsquo;t seen him at all for so long!&rdquo; remarked Kitty, a
+      little spitefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know that?&rdquo; Mrs. Crozier was nettled, though she did not show
+      it; but Kitty felt it was so, and was glad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said so at the Logan Trial.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was that the kind of question asked at the trial?&rdquo; the wife quickly
+      interjected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, lots of that kind,&rdquo; returned Kitty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was the object?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To make him look not so distinguished&mdash;like nothing. If a man isn&rsquo;t
+      handsome, but only distinguished&rdquo;&mdash;Kitty&rsquo;s mood was dangerous&mdash;&ldquo;and
+      you make him look cheap, that&rsquo;s one advantage, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here the Young Doctor, having observed the rising tide of antagonism in
+      the tone of the voices behind him, gently interposed, and made it clear
+      that the purpose was to throw a shadow on the past of her husband in order
+      to discredit his evidence; to which Mrs. Crozier nodded her understanding.
+      She liked the Young Doctor, as who did not who came in contact with him,
+      except those who had fear of him, and who had an idea that he could read
+      their minds as he read their bodies. And even this girl at her side&mdash;Mona
+      Crozier realised that the part she had played was evidently an unselfish
+      one, though she felt with piercing intuition that whatever her husband
+      thought of the girl, the girl thought too much of her husband. Somehow,
+      all in a moment, it made her sorry for the girl&rsquo;s sake. The girl had meant
+      well by her husband in sending for his wife, that was certain; and she did
+      not look bad. She was too sedately and reservedly dressed, in spite of her
+      auriferous face and head and her burnished tone, to be bad; too fearless
+      in eye, too concentrated to be the rover in fields where she had no tenure
+      or right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and looked Kitty squarely in the eyes, and a new, softer look
+      came into her own, subduing what to Kitty was the challenging alertness
+      and selfish inquisitiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been very good to Shiel&mdash;you two kind people,&rdquo; she said,
+      and there came a sudden faint mist to her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was her lucky moment, and she spoke as she did just in time, for
+      Kitty was beginning to resent her deeply; to dislike her far more than was
+      reasonable, and certainly without any justice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty spoke up quickly. &ldquo;Well, you see, he was always kind and good to
+      other people, and that was why&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that Mr. Burlingame did not like him?&rdquo; The wife had a strange
+      intuition regarding Mr. Burlingame. She was sure that there was a woman in
+      the case&mdash;the girl beside her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was because Mr. Burlingame was not kind or good to other people,&rdquo;
+       was Kitty&rsquo;s sedate response. There was an undertone of reflection in the
+      voice which did not escape Mrs. Crozier&rsquo;s senses, and it also caught the
+      ear of the Young Doctor, to whom there came a sudden revelation of the
+      reason why Burlingame had left Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Crozier enigmatically. Presently, with suppressed
+      excitement as she saw the Young Doctor reining in the horses slowly, she
+      added: &ldquo;My husband&mdash;when have you arranged that I should see him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When he gets back&mdash;home,&rdquo; Kitty replied, with an accent on the last
+      word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Crozier started visibly. &ldquo;When he gets back home-back from where? He
+      is not here?&rdquo; she asked in a tone of chagrin. She had come a long way, and
+      she had pictured this meeting at the end of the journey with a hundred
+      variations, but never with this one&mdash;that she should not see Shiel at
+      once when the journey was over, if he was alive. Was it hurt pride or
+      disappointed love which spoke in her face, in her words? After all, it was
+      bad enough that her private life and affairs should be dragged out in a
+      court of law; that these two kind strangers, whom she had never seen till
+      a few minutes ago, should be in the inner circle of knowledge of the life
+      of her husband and herself, without her self-esteem being hurt like this.
+      She was very woman, and the look of the thing was not nice to her eyes,
+      while it must belittle her in theirs. Had this girl done it on purpose?
+      Yet why should she&mdash;she who had so appealed to her to come to him&mdash;have
+      sought to humiliate her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty was not quite sure what she ought to say. &ldquo;You see, we expected him
+      back before this. He is very exact!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very exact?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Crozier in astonishment. This was a new phase of
+      Shiel Crozier&rsquo;s character. He must, indeed, have changed since he had
+      caused her so much anxiety in days gone by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Usen&rsquo;t he to be so?&rdquo; asked Kitty, a little viciously. &ldquo;He is so very
+      exact now,&rdquo; she added. &ldquo;He expected to be back home before this&rdquo;&mdash;how
+      she loved to use that word home&mdash;&ldquo;and so we thought he would be here
+      when you arrived. But he has been detained at Aspen Vale. He had a big
+      business deal on&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A big business deal? Is he&mdash;is he in a large way of business?&rdquo; Mona
+      asked almost incredulously. Shiel Crozier in a large way of business, in a
+      big business deal? It did not seem possible. His had ever been the game of
+      chance. Business&mdash;business?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t talk himself, of course; that wouldn&rsquo;t be like him,&rdquo;&mdash;Kitty
+      had joy in giving this wife the character of her husband, &ldquo;but they say
+      that if he succeeds in what he&rsquo;s trying to do now he will make a great
+      deal of money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he has not made it yet?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Crozier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has always been able to pay his board regularly, with enough left for
+      a pew in church,&rdquo; answered Kitty with dry malice; for she mistook the
+      light in the other&rsquo;s eyes, and thought it was avarice; and the love of
+      money had no place in Kitty&rsquo;s make-up. She herself would never have been
+      influenced by money where a man was concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s the house,&rdquo; she quickly added; &ldquo;our home, where Mr. Crozier lives.
+      He has the best room, so yours won&rsquo;t be quite so good. It&rsquo;s mother&rsquo;s&mdash;she&rsquo;s
+      giving it up to you. With your trunks and things, you&rsquo;ll want a room to
+      yourself,&rdquo; Kitty added, not at all unconscious that she was putting a
+      phase of the problem of Crozier and his wife in a very commonplace way;
+      but she did not look into Mrs. Crozier&rsquo;s face as she said it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Crozier, however, was fully conscious of the poignancy of the remark,
+      and once again her face flushed slightly, though she kept outward
+      composure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother, mother, are you there?&rdquo; Kitty called, as she escorted the wife up
+      the garden walk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An instant later Mrs. Tynan cheerfully welcomed the disturber of the peace
+      of the home where Shiel Crozier had been the central figure for so long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII. AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you laughing at, Kitty? You cackle like a young hen with her
+      first egg.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;cackled&rdquo; as her mother had said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A person of real observation and astuteness, however, would have noticed
+      that Kitty&rsquo;s laughter told a story which was not joy and gladness&mdash;neither
+      good humour nor the abandonment of a luxurious nature. It was tinged with
+      bitterness and had the smart of the nettle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mother&rsquo;s question only made her laugh the more, and at last Mrs. Tynan
+      stooped over her and said, &ldquo;I could shake you, Kitty. You&rsquo;d make a snail
+      fidget, and I&rsquo;ve got enough to do to keep my senses steady with all the
+      house-work&mdash;and now her in there!&rdquo; She tossed a hand behind her
+      fretfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quick with love for her mother, as she always was, Kitty caught the
+      other&rsquo;s trembling hand. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve always had too much to do, mother; always
+      been slaving for others. You&rsquo;ve never had time to think whether you&rsquo;re
+      happy or not, or whether you&rsquo;ve got a problem&mdash;that&rsquo;s what people
+      call things, when they&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s mouth tightened and her brow clouded. &ldquo;I&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not &lsquo;like a mother overlays,&rsquo; but &lsquo;as a mother overlays,&rsquo;&rdquo; returned Kitty
+      with a queer note to her voice. &ldquo;That&rsquo;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&rdquo;&mdash;her fingers motioned towards
+      another room&mdash;&ldquo;came to-day. I don&rsquo;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&mdash;oh, so sweetly and kindly&mdash;&lsquo;You are Miss
+      Tynan?&rsquo; what do you think I replied? I said to her, &lsquo;The same&rsquo;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rather an acidly satisfied smile came to Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s lips. &ldquo;That was like
+      the Slatterly girls,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;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&rsquo;ve got his gift.
+      You always say the right thing, and I don&rsquo;t know why you made that break
+      with her&mdash;of all people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A meditative look came into Kitty&rsquo;s eyes. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t want to have any advantage over us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want Mrs. Crozier to have any advantage over you and me, I can
+      tell you that. Things&rsquo;ll never be the same here again, Kitty dear, and
+      we&rsquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, hush&mdash;will you hush, mother!&rdquo; interposed Kitty sharply. &ldquo;He&rsquo;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&rdquo;&mdash;she
+      nodded in the direction of the river outside&mdash;&ldquo;and they&rsquo;ll find a
+      little Moses and will treat it as their very own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty, how can you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty shrugged a shoulder. &ldquo;It would be ridiculous for that pair to have
+      one of their own. It&rsquo;s only the young mother with a new baby that looks
+      natural to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t talk that way, Kitty,&rdquo; rejoined her mother sharply. &ldquo;You aren&rsquo;t fit
+      to judge of such things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will be before long,&rdquo; said her daughter. &ldquo;Anyway, Mrs. Crozier isn&rsquo;t
+      any better able to talk than I am,&rdquo; she added irrelevantly. &ldquo;She never was
+      a mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t blame her,&rdquo; said Mrs. Tynan severely. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s God&rsquo;s business. I&rsquo;d
+      be sorry for her, so far as that was concerned, if I were you. It&rsquo;s not
+      her fault.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s an easy way of accounting for good undone,&rdquo; returned Kitty. &ldquo;P&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps
+      it was God&rsquo;s fault, and p&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps if she had loved him more&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s face flushed with sudden irritation and that fretful look
+      came to her eyes which accompanies a lack of comprehension. &ldquo;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&rsquo;d have believed that you&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty made a mocking face at her mother. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m more than a girl, I&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s so odd. You&rsquo;re such a mixture of fun and fancy, at least you always
+      have been; but there&rsquo;s something new in you these days. Kitty, you make me
+      afraid&mdash;yes, you make your mother afraid. After what you said the
+      other day about Mr. Crozier I&rsquo;ve had bad nights, and I get nervous
+      thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty suddenly got up, put her arm round her mother and kissed her. &ldquo;You
+      needn&rsquo;t be afraid of me, mother. If there&rsquo;d been any real danger, I
+      wouldn&rsquo;t have told you. Mr. Crozier&rsquo;s away, and when he comes back he&rsquo;ll
+      find his wife here, and there&rsquo;s the end of everything. If there&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan sat down weakly and fanned herself with her apron. &ldquo;Oh, oh, oh,
+      dear Lord!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not afraid to tell you anything I ever did,
+      mother,&rdquo; declared Kitty firmly; &ldquo;though I&rsquo;m not prepared to tell you
+      everything I&rsquo;ve felt. I kissed him as he slept. He didn&rsquo;t wake, he just
+      lay there sleeping&mdash;sleeping.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t want him to wake,&rdquo; she
+      continued. &ldquo;I asked God not to let him wake. If he&rsquo;d waked&mdash;oh, I&rsquo;d
+      have been ashamed enough till the day I died in one way! Still he&rsquo;d have
+      understood, and he&rsquo;d have thought no harm. But it wouldn&rsquo;t have been fair
+      to him&mdash;and there&rsquo;s his wife in there,&rdquo; she added, breaking off into
+      a different tone. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re a long way above us&mdash;up among the peaks,
+      and we&rsquo;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&rsquo;ve ever
+      seen! The difference!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the Young Doctor,&rdquo; said her mother reproachfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He-him! He&rsquo;s by himself, with something of every sort in him from the top
+      to the bottom. There&rsquo;s been a ditcher in his family, and there may have
+      been a duke. But Shiel Crozier&mdash;Shiel&rdquo;&mdash;she flushed as she said
+      the name like that, but a little touch of defiance came into her face too&mdash;&ldquo;he
+      is all of one kind. He&rsquo;s not a blend. And he&rsquo;s married to her in there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t speak in that tone about her. She&rsquo;s as fine as can be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s as fine as a bee,&rdquo; retorted Kitty. Again she laughed that almost
+      mirthless laugh for which her mother had called her to account a moment
+      before. &ldquo;You asked me a while ago what I was laughing at, mother,&rdquo; she
+      continued. &ldquo;Why, can&rsquo;t you guess? Mr. Crozier talked of her always as
+      though she was&mdash;well, like the pictures you&rsquo;ve seen of Britannia, all
+      swelling and spreading, with her hand on a shield and her face saying,
+      &lsquo;Look at me and be good,&rsquo; and her eyes saying, &lsquo;Son of man, get upon thy
+      knees!&rsquo; Why, I expected to see a sort of great&mdash;goodness&mdash;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&mdash;like that, when he mentioned her!&rdquo; She breathed in such
+      mock awe that her mother laughed with a little kindly malice too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even her letter,&rdquo; Kitty continued remorselessly, &ldquo;it was as though she&mdash;that
+      little sprite&mdash;wrote it with a rod of chastisement, as the Bible
+      says. It&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you know of the inside of that letter?&rdquo; asked her mother,
+      staring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the steam of the tea-kettle could let me see,&rdquo; responded Kitty
+      defiantly; and then, to her shocked mother, she told what she had done,
+      and what the nature of the letter was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to help him if I could, and I think I&rsquo;ll be able to do it&mdash;I&rsquo;ve
+      worked it all out,&rdquo; Kitty added eagerly, with a glint of steel in the gold
+      of her eyes and a fantastic kind of wisdom in her look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty,&rdquo; said her mother severely and anxiously, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s madness interfering
+      with other people&rsquo;s affairs&mdash;of that kind. It never was any use.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This will be the exception to the rule,&rdquo; returned Kitty. &ldquo;There she is&rdquo;&mdash;again
+      she flicked a hand towards the other room&mdash;&ldquo;after they&rsquo;ve been parted
+      five years. Well, she came after she read my letter to her, and after I&rsquo;d
+      read that unopened letter to him, which made me know how to put it all to
+      her. I&rsquo;ve got intuition&mdash;that&rsquo;s Celtic and mad,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got a plan, and I believe&mdash;I know&mdash;it will work,&rdquo; Kitty
+      continued. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been thinking and thinking, and if there&rsquo;s trouble
+      between them; if he says he isn&rsquo;t going on with her till he&rsquo;s made his
+      fortune; if he throws that unopened letter in her face, I&rsquo;ll bring in my
+      invention to deal with the problem, and then you&rsquo;ll see! But all this fuss
+      for a little tiny button of a thing like that in there&mdash;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&mdash;do you remember?
+      Wasn&rsquo;t it grand? Well, I am glad now that he&rsquo;s going&mdash;yes, whatever
+      trouble there may be, still he is going. I feel it in my heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Now
+      that he&rsquo;s going, I&rsquo;m glad we&rsquo;ve had the things he gave us, things that
+      can&rsquo;t be taken away from us. What you have enjoyed is yours for ever and
+      ever. It&rsquo;s memory; and for one moment or for one day or one year of those
+      things you loved, there&rsquo;s fifty years, perhaps, for memory. Don&rsquo;t you
+      remember the verses I cut out of the magazine:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         &ldquo;&lsquo;Time, the ruthless idol-breaker,
+          Smileless, cold iconoclast,
+          Though he rob us of our altars,
+          Cannot rob us of the past.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way your father used to talk,&rdquo; replied her mother. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a
+      lot of poetry in you, Kitty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More than there is in her?&rdquo; asked Kitty, again indicating the region
+      where Mrs. Crozier was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s as much poetry in her as there is in&mdash;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&rsquo;t a penny, she&rsquo;d set to and earn
+      it; and if her husband hadn&rsquo;t a penny, she&rsquo;d make his home comfortable
+      just the same somehow, for she&rsquo;s as capable as can be. She had her things
+      unpacked, her room in order herself&mdash;she didn&rsquo;t want your help or
+      mine&mdash;and herself with a fresh dress on before you could turn round.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty&rsquo;s eyes softened still more. &ldquo;Well, if she&rsquo;d been poor he would never
+      have left her, and then they wouldn&rsquo;t have lost five years&mdash;think of
+      it, five years of life with the man you love lost to you!&mdash;and there
+      wouldn&rsquo;t be this tough old knot to untie now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has suffered&mdash;that little sparrow has suffered, I tell you,
+      Kitty. She has a grip on herself like&mdash;like&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like Mr. Crozier with a broncho under his hand,&rdquo; interjected Kitty.
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s too neat, too eternally spick and span for me, mother. It&rsquo;s as
+      though the Being that made her said, &lsquo;Now I&rsquo;ll try and see if I can
+      produce a model of a grown-up, full-sized piece of my work.&rsquo; Mrs. Crozier
+      is an exhibition model, and Shiel Crozier&rsquo;s over six feet three, and loose
+      and free, and like a wapiti in his gait. If he was a wapiti he&rsquo;d carry the
+      finest pair of antlers ever was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty, you make me laugh,&rdquo; responded the puzzled woman. &ldquo;I declare,
+      you&rsquo;re the most whimsical creature, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment there came a tapping at the door behind them, and a small,
+      silvery voice said, &ldquo;May I come in?&rdquo; as the door opened and Mrs. Crozier,
+      very precisely yet prettily dressed, entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please make yourself at home&mdash;no need to rap,&rdquo; answered Mrs. Tynan.
+      &ldquo;Out in the West here we live in the open like. There&rsquo;s no room closed to
+      you, if you can put up with what there is, though it&rsquo;s not what you&rsquo;re
+      used to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For five months in the year during the past five years I&rsquo;ve lived in a
+      house about half as large as this,&rdquo; was Mrs. Crozier&rsquo;s reply. &ldquo;With my
+      husband away there wasn&rsquo;t the need of much room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he only has one room here,&rdquo; responded Mrs. Tynan. &ldquo;He never seemed
+      too crowded in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is it? Might I see it?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve been separated, Mrs. Crozier,&rdquo; answered the elder woman, &ldquo;and I&rsquo;ve
+      no right to let you into his room without his consent. You&rsquo;ve had no
+      correspondence at all for five years&mdash;isn&rsquo;t that so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he tell you that?&rdquo; the regal little lady asked composedly, but with
+      an underglow of anger in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He told the court that at the Logan Trial,&rdquo; was the reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the murder trial&mdash;he told that?&rdquo; Mrs. Crozier asked almost
+      mechanically, her face gone pale and a little haggard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was obliged to answer when that wolf, Gus Burlingame, was after him,&rdquo;
+       interposed Kitty with kindness in her tone, for, suddenly, she saw through
+      the outer walls of the little wife&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely he could have avoided answering that,&rdquo; urged Mona Crozier
+      bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only by telling a lie,&rdquo; Kitty quickly answered, &ldquo;and I don&rsquo;t believe he
+      ever told a lie in his life. Come,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;I will show you his room.
+      My mother needn&rsquo;t do it, and so she won&rsquo;t be responsible. You have your
+      rights as a wife until they&rsquo;re denied you. You mustn&rsquo;t come, mother,&rdquo; she
+      said to Mrs. Tynan, and she put a tender hand on her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This way,&rdquo; she added to the little person in the pale blue, which suited
+      well her very dark hair, blue eyes, and rose-touched cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII. KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A moment later they stood inside Shiel Crozier&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was none in the room, and an arid look came into her face. The
+      glance and its sequel did not escape Kitty&rsquo;s notice. She knew well&mdash;as
+      who would not?&mdash;what Mona Crozier was hoping to see, and she was
+      human enough to feel a kind of satisfaction in the wife&rsquo;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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, Kitty was sure beyond any doubt at all that Shiel Crozier&rsquo;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&mdash;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&rsquo;s punishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty&rsquo;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&mdash;though he may not have
+      admitted it to himself&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a nice room, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; asked Kitty when there had passed from Mona
+      Crozier&rsquo;s eyes the glaze or mist&mdash;not of tears, but stupefaction&mdash;which
+      had followed her inspection of the walls, the bureau, the table, and the
+      desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most comfortable, and so very clean&mdash;quite spotless,&rdquo; 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&mdash;a very
+      narrow bed, like a soldier&rsquo;s, a bed for himself alone&mdash;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&mdash;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, &ldquo;Courage, soldier!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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,&mdash;one interesting and
+      good and agreeable and good-looking, and the other almost a beauty,&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and not a word from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five years&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the place of secrets, I suppose?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t think it a place of secrets,&rdquo; Kitty answered after a moment.
+      &ldquo;He seldom locks it, and when he does I know where the key is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;it would do Mrs. Crozier good, she thought&mdash;in
+      saying, as she looked down on the humming-bird trying to be an eagle:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, of course,&rdquo; she returned cheerfully in response to Kitty&mdash;&ldquo;you
+      acted as a kind of clerk for him!&rdquo; There was a note in her voice which she
+      might better not have used. If she but knew it, she needed this girl&rsquo;s
+      friendship very badly. She ought to have remembered that she would not
+      have been here in her husband&rsquo;s room had it not been for the letter Kitty
+      had written&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reply was like a slap in the face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I acted for him in any way at all that he wished me to,&rdquo; Kitty answered,
+      with quiet boldness and shining, defiant face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;yes,
+      certainly prettier, she admitted to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is that kind of a man. What he asked for, any good woman could give
+      and not be sorry,&rdquo; Kitty convincingly added when the knife had gone deep
+      enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he was that kind of a man,&rdquo; responded the other gently now, and with
+      a great sigh of relief. Suddenly she came nearer and touched Kitty&rsquo;s arm.
+      &ldquo;And thank you for saying so,&rdquo; she added. &ldquo;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&mdash;as he is. If I said something sharp just now,
+      please forgive me. I am&mdash;indeed, I am grateful to you and your
+      mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+      &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t use him right or you&rsquo;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&rsquo;t stay with you because he wouldn&rsquo;t take your money to
+      live on. If you had been a real wife to him he wouldn&rsquo;t have seen that
+      he&rsquo;d be using your money; he&rsquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, for pity&rsquo;s sake, hush!&rdquo; interrupted the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going to see him again,&rdquo; Kitty persisted. &ldquo;Now, don&rsquo;t you think
+      it just as well to know what the real truth is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know what is the truth?&rdquo; asked the trembling little stranger
+      with a last attempt to hold her position, to conceal from herself the
+      actual facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;t bear to live on your money. It was
+      you made him feel that, though he didn&rsquo;t say so. All the time he told his
+      story he spoke of you as though you were some goddess, some great queen&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A look of hope, of wonder, of relief came into the tiny creature&rsquo;s eyes.
+      &ldquo;He spoke like that of me; he said&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said what no one else would have said, probably; but that&rsquo;s the way
+      with people in love&mdash;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&rdquo;&mdash;she was going to say
+      something that would have seemed unkind, and she stopped herself in time&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think very badly of me, then?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve only just begun. We&rsquo;re all his friends here, and we&rsquo;ll judge you
+      and think of you according to what happens between you and him. You wrote
+      him that letter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What letter did I write?&rdquo; There was real surprise and wonder in her tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That last letter you wrote to him&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know of that letter? He, my husband, told you what was in that
+      letter; he showed it to you?&rdquo; The voice was indignant, low, and almost
+      rough with anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, your husband showed me the letter&mdash;unopened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unopened&mdash;I do not understand.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know that?&rdquo; Kitty asked, and held it out for Mrs. Crozier to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two dark blue eyes stared confusedly at the letter&mdash;at her own
+      handwriting. Kitty turned it over. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has-kept it&mdash;five years&mdash;unopened,&rdquo; Mona said in broken
+      phrases scarce above a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has never opened it, as you see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give&mdash;give it to me,&rdquo; the wife said, stepping forward to stay
+      Kitty&rsquo;s hand as she opened the lid of the desk to replace the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not your letter&mdash;no, you shall not,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;or to any one else&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know what is in it?&rdquo; There was agony and challenge at once in
+      the other&rsquo;s voice. &ldquo;Because I read it&mdash;oh, don&rsquo;t look so shocked! I&rsquo;d
+      do it again. I knew just how to act when I&rsquo;d read it. I steamed it open
+      and closed it up again. Then I wrote to you. I&rsquo;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&rsquo;d know best what to do. Though he&rsquo;s so far above us
+      in birth and position, he seemed in one way like our own. That&rsquo;s the way
+      it is in new countries like this. We don&rsquo;t think of lots of things that
+      you finer people in the old countries do, and we don&rsquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;don&rsquo;t
+      you understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am trying hard to do so,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So, though it was wrong&mdash;wicked&mdash;in one way, I read the letter,
+      to do some good by it, if it could be done. If I hadn&rsquo;t read it you
+      wouldn&rsquo;t be here. Was it worth while?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;that
+      was her thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty read the look. &ldquo;No, it isn&rsquo;t Mr. Crozier. It&rsquo;s the Young Doctor. I
+      know his knock. Will you come and see him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He knows as much as you do?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Crozier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, the Young Doctor hasn&rsquo;t read the letter and I haven&rsquo;t told him what&rsquo;s
+      in it; but he knows that I read it, and what he doesn&rsquo;t know he guesses.
+      He is Mr. Crozier&rsquo;s honest, clever friend. I&rsquo;ve got an idea&mdash;an
+      invention to put this thing right. It&rsquo;s a good one. You&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later they were in the other room, with the Young Doctor smiling
+      down at &ldquo;the little spot of a woman,&rdquo; as he called Crozier&rsquo;s wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV. AWAITING THE VERDICT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look quite settled and at home,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both these people had an influence and authority in Mona Crozier&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Askatoon is a place where one feels at home quickly,&rdquo; added the
+      Young Doctor, as Mona did not at once respond to his first remark. &ldquo;Every
+      one who comes here always feels as though he&mdash;or she&mdash;owns the
+      place. It&rsquo;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 &lsquo;all and
+      sundry.&rsquo; Isn&rsquo;t that true, Miss Tynan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As true as most things you say,&rdquo; retorted Kitty, as she flicked the white
+      tablecloth. &ldquo;If mother and I hadn&rsquo;t such wonderful good health I suppose
+      you&rsquo;d come often enough here to give you real possession. Do you know,
+      Mrs. Crozier,&rdquo; she added, with her wistful eyes vainly trying to be merely
+      mischievous, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you were running round soon after,&rdquo; answered the Young Doctor. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve taken care never to dislocate my elbow since.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not your elbow,&rdquo; remarked the Young Doctor meaningly, and turned to
+      Mona, who had now regained her composure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I shan&rsquo;t call you in to reduce the dislocation&mdash;that&rsquo;s the
+      medical term, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; persisted Kitty, with fire in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the dislocation?&rdquo; asked Mona, with a subtle, inquiring look but a
+      manner which conveyed interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor smiled. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s only her way of saying that my mind is
+      unhinged and that I ought to be sent to a private hospital for two.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;only one,&rdquo; returned Kitty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marriage means common catastrophe, doesn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; he asked quizzically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Generally it means that one only is permanently injured,&rdquo; replied Kitty,
+      lifting a tumbler and looking through it at him as though to see if the
+      glass was properly polished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s history
+      was not known might there not have been&mdash;but no, it could not have
+      been so, for it was Kitty who had sent the letter which had brought her to
+      Askatoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you to be married&mdash;soon?&rdquo; she asked of Kitty, with a friendly
+      yet trembling smile, for her agitation was, despite appearances, troubling
+      every nerve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve thought of it quite lately,&rdquo; responded Kitty calmly, seating herself
+      now and looking straight into the eyes of the woman, who was suggesting
+      more truth than she knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I congratulate you? Am I justified on such slight acquaintance? I am
+      sure you have chosen wisely,&rdquo; was the smooth rejoinder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty did not shrink from looking Mona in the eyes. &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t quite time
+      for congratulations yet, and I&rsquo;m not sure I&rsquo;ve chosen wisely. My family
+      very strongly disapproves. I can&rsquo;t help that, of course, and I may have to
+      elope and take the consequences.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It takes two to elope,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;man in possession&rdquo; so far as her life was concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, he is waiting on the doorstep,&rdquo; replied Kitty boldly and referring
+      only to John Sibley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that instant a voice calling from the road arrested Crozier&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How goes it, patient?&rdquo; he said, standing in Crozier&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right enough in your sphere of operations,&rdquo; answered Crozier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And not so right in other fields, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve come back after a fruitless hunt. They&rsquo;ve got me, the thieves!&rdquo; 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 eyes which made his expression alive with
+      humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it wonderful, that just when a man feels he wants a rope to hang
+      himself with, the rope isn&rsquo;t to be had?&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;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&rsquo;d
+      think never could be assuaged. &lsquo;Oh, I fale so bad, I am so wake&mdash;oh,
+      I do fale so bad,&rsquo; she used to say. &lsquo;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&mdash;whether I would or no!&rsquo; 
+      Whether I would or no I have to drink the cup of self-denial,&rdquo; Crozier
+      continued, &ldquo;though Bradley and his gang have closed every door against me
+      here, and I&rsquo;ve come back without what I went for at Aspen Vale, for my men
+      were away. I&rsquo;ve come back without what I went for, but I must just grin
+      and bear it.&rdquo; He shrugged his shoulders and gave a great sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you&rsquo;ll find what you went for here,&rdquo; returned the Young Doctor
+      meaningly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a lot here&mdash;enough to make a man think life worth while&rdquo;&mdash;inside
+      the room the wife shrank at the words, for she could hear all&mdash;&ldquo;but
+      just the same I&rsquo;m not thinking the thing I went to look for is
+      hereabouts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You never know your luck,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;&lsquo;Ask and you shall find, knock
+      and it shall be opened unto you.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The long face blazed up with humour again. &ldquo;Do you mean that I haven&rsquo;t
+      asked you yet?&rdquo; Crozier remarked, with a quizzical look, which had still
+      that faint hope against hope which is a painful thing for a good man&rsquo;s
+      eyes to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor laid a hand on Crozier&rsquo;s arm. &ldquo;No, I didn&rsquo;t mean that,
+      patient. I&rsquo;m in that state when every penny I have is out to keep me from
+      getting a fall. I&rsquo;m in that Starwhon coal-mine down at Bethbridge, and
+      it&rsquo;s like a suction-pump. I couldn&rsquo;t borrow a thousand dollars myself now.
+      I can&rsquo;t do it, or I&rsquo;d stand in with you, Crozier. No, I can&rsquo;t help you a
+      bit; but step inside. There&rsquo;s a room in this house where you got back your
+      life by the help of a knife. There&rsquo;s another room in there where you may
+      get back your fortune by the help of a wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor found Kitty pumping water on a pail of potatoes and
+      stirring them with a broom-handle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A most unscientific way of cleaning potatoes,&rdquo; he said, as Kitty did not
+      look at him. &ldquo;If you put them in a trough where the water could run off,
+      the dirt would go with the water, and you would&rsquo;nt waste time and
+      intelligence, and your fingers would be cleaner in the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you never grow up?&rdquo; he exclaimed as he applied a handkerchief to his
+      ruddy face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like you so much better if you were younger&mdash;will you never be
+      young?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It makes a man old before his time to have to meet you day by day and
+      live near you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you try living with me?&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;Ah, then, you meant me
+      when you said to Mrs. Crozier that you were going to be married? Wasn&rsquo;t
+      that a bit &lsquo;momentary&rsquo;? as my mother&rsquo;s cook used to remark. I think we
+      haven&rsquo;t &lsquo;kept company&rsquo;&mdash;you and I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s true you haven&rsquo;t been a beau of mine, but I&rsquo;d rather marry you than
+      be obliged to live with you,&rdquo; was the paradoxical retort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have me this time,&rdquo; he said, trying in vain to solve her reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty tossed her head. &ldquo;No, I haven&rsquo;t got you this time, thank Heaven, and
+      I don&rsquo;t want you; but I&rsquo;d rather marry you than live with you, as I said.
+      Isn&rsquo;t it the custom for really nice-minded people to marry to get rid of
+      each other&mdash;for five years, or for ever and ever and ever?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a girl you are, Kitty Tynan!&rdquo; he said reprovingly. He saw that she
+      meant Crozier and his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty ceased her work for an instant and, looking away from him into the
+      distance, said: &ldquo;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&rsquo;ve said it a thousand years after; as with your inexpensive
+      education and slow mind you&rsquo;d be sure to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have an idea that Mrs. Crozier said the same to you also this very day.
+      Did she&mdash;come, did she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She didn&rsquo;t say, &lsquo;What a girl you are!&rsquo; but in her mind she probably did
+      say, &lsquo;What a vixen!&rdquo;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor nodded satirically. &ldquo;If you continued as you began when
+      coming from the station, I&rsquo;m sure she did; and also I&rsquo;m sure it wasn&rsquo;t
+      wrong of her to say it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted her to say it. That&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To cure her of what, miss?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of herself, doctor-man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor&rsquo;s look became graver. He wondered greatly at this young
+      girl&rsquo;s sage instinct and penetration. &ldquo;Of herself? Ah, yes, to think more
+      of some one else than herself! That is&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that is love,&rdquo; Kitty answered, her head bent over the pail and
+      stirring the potatoes hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose it is,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it is,&rdquo; she returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that why you are going to be married?&rdquo; he asked quizzically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will probably cure the man I marry of himself,&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;Oh,
+      neither of us know what we are talking about&mdash;let&rsquo;s change the
+      subject!&rdquo; she added impatiently now, with a change of mood, as she poured
+      the water off the potatoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment&rsquo;s silence in which they were both thinking of the same
+      thing. &ldquo;I wonder how it&rsquo;s all going inside there?&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;I hope
+      all right, but I have my doubts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t any doubt at all. It isn&rsquo;t going right,&rdquo; she answered ruefully;
+      &ldquo;but it has to be made go right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whom do you think can do that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;I can do it if they don&rsquo;t break away altogether at once. I helped her
+      more than you think. I told her I had opened that letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gasped. &ldquo;My dear girl&mdash;that letter&mdash;you told her you had done
+      such a thing, such&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t dear girl me, if you please. I know what I am doing. I told her
+      that and a great deal more. She won&rsquo;t leave this house the woman she was
+      yesterday. She is having a quick cure&mdash;a cure while you wait.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps he is cured of her,&rdquo; remarked the Young Doctor very gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, the disease might have got headway, but it didn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; Kitty
+      returned, her face turned away. &ldquo;He became a little better; but he was
+      never cured. That&rsquo;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&rsquo;t
+      the case with a woman. There&rsquo;s nothing so dead to a woman as a man when
+      she&rsquo;s cured of him. The woman is never dead to the man, no matter what
+      happens.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor regarded her with a strange, new interest and a puzzled
+      surprise. &ldquo;Sappho&mdash;Sappho, how did you come to know these things!&rdquo; he
+      exclaimed. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s scramble. You talk like an
+      ancient dame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty smiled, but her eyes had a slumbering look as if she was half
+      dreaming. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the mistake most of you make&mdash;men and women.
+      There&rsquo;s such a thing as instinct, and there&rsquo;s such a thing as keeping your
+      eyes open.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did Mrs. Crozier say when you told her about opening that
+      five-year-old letter? Did she hate you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty nodded with wistful whimsicality. &ldquo;For a minute she was like an
+      industrious hornet. Then I made her see she wouldn&rsquo;t have been here at all
+      if I hadn&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, look you, Saphira, prospective wife of Ananias, she didn&rsquo;t say that,
+      of course. Still, it doesn&rsquo;t matter, does it? The point is, suppose he
+      opens that letter now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he does, he&rsquo;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&rsquo;t then be grasping what his eyes saw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He hasn&rsquo;t got his land-deal through. He told me so just now before he saw
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it&rsquo;s ora pro nobis&mdash;it&rsquo;s pray for us hard,&rdquo; rejoined Kitty
+      sorrowfully. &ldquo;Poor man from Kerry!&rdquo; At that moment Mrs. Tynan came from
+      the house, her face flushed, her manner slightly agitated. &ldquo;John Sibley is
+      here, Kitty&mdash;with two saddle-horses.... He says you promised to ride
+      with him to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I probably did,&rdquo; responded Kitty calmly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a good day for riding too.
+      But John will have to wait. Please tell him to come back at six o&rsquo;clock.
+      There&rsquo;ll be plenty of time for an hour&rsquo;s ride before sundown.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you lame, dear child?&rdquo; asked her mother ironically. &ldquo;Because if
+      you&rsquo;re not, perhaps you&rsquo;ll be your own messenger. It&rsquo;s no way to treat a
+      friend&mdash;or whatever you like to call him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty smiled tenderly at her mother. &ldquo;Then would you mind telling him to
+      come here, mother darling? I&rsquo;m giving this doctor-man a prescription. Ah,
+      please do what I ask you, mother! It is true about the prescription. It&rsquo;s
+      not for himself; it&rsquo;s for the foreign people quarantined inside.&rdquo; She
+      nodded towards the room where Shiel Crozier and his wife were shaping
+      their fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;What is your prescription, Ma&rsquo;m&rsquo;selle Saphira? Suppose they
+      come out of quarantine with a clean bill of health?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If they do that you needn&rsquo;t make up the prescription. But if Aspen Vale
+      hasn&rsquo;t given him what he wanted, then Mr. Shiel Crozier will still be an
+      exile from home and the angel in the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the prescription? Out with your Sibylline leaves!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s in that unopened letter. When the letter is opened you&rsquo;ll see it
+      effervesce like a seidlitz powder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose I am not here when the letter is opened?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must be here-you must. You&rsquo;ll stay now, if you please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I can&rsquo;t. I have patients waiting.&rdquo; Kitty made an impetuous
+      gesture of command. &ldquo;There are two patients here who are at the crisis of
+      their disease. You may be wanted to save a life any minute now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought that with your prescription you were to be the AEsculapius.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I&rsquo;m only going to save the reputation of AEsculapius by giving him a
+      prescription got from a quack to give to a goose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, no names. You are incorrigible. I believe you&rsquo;d have your
+      joke on your death-bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should if you were there. I should die laughing,&rdquo; Kitty retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There will be no death-bed for you, miss. You&rsquo;ll be translated&mdash;no,
+      that&rsquo;s not right; no one could translate you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God might&mdash;or a man I loved well enough not to marry him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not sure that even He would be able to
+      translate you. You speak your own language, and it&rsquo;s surely original. I am
+      only just learning its alphabet. No one else speaks it. I have a fear that
+      you&rsquo;ll be terribly lonely as you travel along the trail, Kitty Tynan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A light of pleasure came into Kitty&rsquo;s eyes, though her face was a little
+      drawn. &ldquo;You really do think I&rsquo;m original&mdash;that I&rsquo;m myself and not
+      like anybody else?&rdquo; she asked him with a childlike eagerness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Almost more than any one I ever met,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;But you&rsquo;re
+      terribly lonely&mdash;and that&rsquo;s why: because you are the only one of your
+      kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, that&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;m not going to be lonely,&rdquo; she said, nodding towards the
+      corner of the house where John Sibley appeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, with a gesture of confidence and almost of affection, she laid a
+      hand on the Young Doctor&rsquo;s breast. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve left the trail, doctor-man. I&rsquo;m
+      cutting across the prairie. Perhaps I shall reach camp and perhaps I
+      shan&rsquo;t; but anyhow I&rsquo;ll know that I met one good man on the way. And I
+      also saw a resthouse that I&rsquo;d like to have stayed at, but the blinds were
+      drawn and the door was locked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&mdash;or not, as the mind of the observer
+      saw it; while subsequently his secretary had written verses to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you&rsquo;ve been gambling again&mdash;you&rsquo;ve broken your promise to me,&rdquo;
+       she said reprovingly to Sibley, but with that wonderful, wistful laughter
+      in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sibley looked at her in astonishment. &ldquo;Who told you?&rdquo; he asked. It had
+      only happened the night before, and it didn&rsquo;t seem possible she could
+      know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was quite right. It wasn&rsquo;t possible she could know, and she didn&rsquo;t
+      know. She only divined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew when you made the promise you couldn&rsquo;t keep it; that&rsquo;s why I
+      forgive you now,&rdquo; she added. &ldquo;Knowing what I did about you, I oughtn&rsquo;t to
+      have let you make it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s life
+      reproduced&mdash;and with what a different ending!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV. &ldquo;MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;nothing at all, at all,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;the white-haired boy of the
+      Tynan sanatorium,&rdquo; as Jesse Bulrush had called him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a strange timidity, and a fear not so strange, in Mona&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;Mrs. Tynan
+      had told her that&mdash;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&mdash;that had to be said for her&mdash;a
+      wife always and not a widow. She had not turned elsewhere, though there
+      had been temptation enough to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;his name only&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;you here!&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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. &ldquo;What should I be doing in the home of an angel!&rdquo; he had
+      exclaimed to himself in the old home at Lammis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&mdash;except his own wife.
+      &ldquo;There is no fear like that of one&rsquo;s own wife,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you come&mdash;why? How did you know?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is&mdash;is that all you have to say to me, Shiel?&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After abandoning me for five years, is that all you have to say to me,
+      Shiel? After I have suffered before the world&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw up his arms with a passionate gesture. &ldquo;The world!&rdquo; he exclaimed&mdash;&ldquo;the
+      devil take the world! I&rsquo;ve been out of it for five years, and well out of
+      it. What do I care for the world!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew herself up in a spirit of defence. &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t what you care for
+      the world, but I had to live in it&mdash;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&rdquo;&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A bitter smile came to his lips. &ldquo;A woman can endure a good deal when she
+      has all life&rsquo;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&rsquo;s charity, but&rdquo;&mdash;(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)&mdash;&ldquo;but do you think, no matter what
+      I&rsquo;ve done, broken a pledge or not, been in the wrong a thousand times as
+      much as I was, that I&rsquo;d be fed by the hand of one to whom I had given a
+      pledge and broken it? Do you think that I&rsquo;d give her the chance to say, or
+      not to say, but only think, &lsquo;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&rsquo;? Do you think&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face was flaming now. The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment and
+      pride and love&mdash;the love that tore itself in pieces because it had
+      not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money gives&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I live&mdash;I live like this,&rdquo; he continued, with a gesture that
+      embraced the room where they were, &ldquo;and I have one room to myself where I
+      have lived over four years&rdquo;&mdash;he pointed towards it. &ldquo;Do you think I
+      would choose this and all it means&mdash;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&mdash;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&rsquo;s why I left, and that&rsquo;s why I stay here, and that&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;m going to
+      stay here, Mona.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her firmly, though his face had that illumination which the
+      spirit in his eyes&mdash;the Celtic fire drawn through the veins of his
+      ancestors&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you stay, I am going to stay too,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t prevent that,&rdquo; he responded stubbornly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a quick, appealing motion of her hands. &ldquo;Would you prevent it?
+      Aren&rsquo;t you glad to see me? Don&rsquo;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&mdash;your betting on horses. You used to love
+      me&mdash;I was sure you did then. Don&rsquo;t you love me now, Shiel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A gloomy look passed over his face. Memory of other days was admonishing
+      him. &ldquo;What is the good of one loving when the other doesn&rsquo;t? And, anyhow,
+      I made up my mind five years ago that I would not live on my wife. I
+      haven&rsquo;t done so, and I don&rsquo;t mean to &lsquo;do so. I don&rsquo;t mean to take a penny
+      of your money. I should curse it to damnation if I was living on it. I&rsquo;m
+      not, and I don&rsquo;t mean to do so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll stay here and work too, without it,&rdquo; she urged, with a light in
+      her eyes which they had never known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed mirthlessly. &ldquo;What could you do&mdash;you never did a day&rsquo;s
+      work in your life!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could teach me how, Shiel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His jaw jerked in a way it had when he was incredulous. &ldquo;You used to say I
+      was only&mdash;mark you, only a dreamer and a sportsman. Well, I&rsquo;m no
+      longer a dreamer and a sportsman; I&rsquo;m a practical man. I&rsquo;ve done with
+      dreaming and sportsmanship. I can look at a situation as it is, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are dreaming&mdash;but yes, you are dreaming still,&rdquo; she interjected.
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;s only
+      a loaf of bread a day. I&mdash;I don&rsquo;t care about my money. I don&rsquo;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&rsquo;t you&mdash;won&rsquo;t you kiss me, Shiel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She came close to him-came round the table till she stood within a few
+      feet of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;what do you want?&rdquo; inquired Crozier quietly. &ldquo;A few words with
+      Mr. Crozier on business, if he is not too much occupied?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am acting for Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, &amp; Simmons.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cloud darkened on Crozier&rsquo;s face. His lips tightened, his face
+      hardened. &ldquo;I will see you in a moment&mdash;wait outside, please,&rdquo; he
+      added, as Burlingame made as though to step inside. &ldquo;Wait at the gate,&rdquo; he
+      added quietly, but with undisguised contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Burlingame had disappeared he turned to Mona. &ldquo;Who told you I was
+      here? Who wrote to you?&rdquo; he asked darkly. The light had died away from his
+      face. It was ascetic in its lonely gravity now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your doctor cabled to Castlegarry and Miss Tynan wrote to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint flush spread over Crozier&rsquo;s face. &ldquo;How did Miss Tynan know where
+      to write?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How should I know? It was enough for me to get her letter,&rdquo; she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At Castlegarry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What was there to do? She must keep faith with Kitty, who had given her
+      this sight of her husband again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forwarded from Lammis,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It reached me before the doctor&rsquo;s
+      cable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So it was Kitty&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wrote me a letter which drove me from home,&rdquo; he said heavily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;no&mdash;no,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;It was not that. I know it was not
+      that. It was my money&mdash;it was that which drove you away. You have
+      just said so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wrote me a hateful letter,&rdquo; he persisted. &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t want to see me.
+      You sent it to me by your sweet, young brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes flashed. &ldquo;My letter did not drive you away. It couldn&rsquo;t have. You
+      went because you did not love me. It was that and my money, not the
+      letter, not the letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I go now? You want to see that man outside. Shall I go, Shiel?&rdquo; She
+      was very pale, very quiet, steady and gentle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must hear what that fellow has to say. It is business&mdash;important,&rdquo;
+       he replied. &ldquo;It may mean anything&mdash;everything, or nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she left the room he had an impulse to call her back, but he conquered
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI. &ldquo;&lsquo;TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU SHALL GO BACK FOR
+      MINE&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He left the house. Burlingame was seated on the stump of a tree which had
+      been made into a seat. &ldquo;Come to my room if you have business with me,&rdquo;
+       Crozier said sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they went, Crozier swung aside from the front door towards the corner
+      of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The back way?&rdquo; asked Burlingame with a sneer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old familiar way to you,&rdquo; was the smarting reply. &ldquo;In any case, you
+      are not welcome in Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s part of the house. My room is my own,
+      however, and I should prefer you within four walls while doing business
+      with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Burlingame&rsquo;s face changed colour slightly, for the tone of Crozier&rsquo;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&mdash;Crozier&rsquo;s wife, he was certain&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;tokens of a woman&rsquo;s
+      presence. There was, however, no sign at all of that, though there were
+      signs of a woman&rsquo;s care and attention in a number of little things&mdash;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&rsquo;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
+      &ldquo;passages of sympathetic friendship and tokens of affinity.&rdquo; That was a
+      phrase he had frequently used when pursuing his own sort of happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His swift scrutiny showed that Crozier&rsquo;s wife had no habitation here, and
+      that gave him his cue for what the French call &ldquo;the reconstruction of the
+      crime.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you care to sit?&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s face was not that of a
+      man who had found and opened a casket of good fortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather dangerous that, in the bedroom of a family man,&rdquo; he said, picking
+      up the handkerchief and looking suggestively from the lettering in the
+      corner to Crozier. He laid it down again, smiling detestably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier calmly picked up the handkerchief, saw the lettering, then went
+      quietly to the door of the room and called Mrs. Tynan&rsquo;s name. Presently
+      she appeared. Crozier beckoned her into the room. When she entered, he
+      closed the door behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Tynan,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this fellow found your daughter&rsquo;s handkerchief on
+      my table, and he has said regarding it, &lsquo;Rather dangerous that, in the
+      bedroom of a family man.&rsquo; What would you like me to do with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Tynan walked up to Burlingame with the look of a woman of the Commune
+      and said: &ldquo;If I had a son I would disown him if he didn&rsquo;t mangle you till
+      your wife would never know you again, you loathesome thing. There isn&rsquo;t a
+      man or woman in Askatoon who&rsquo;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&mdash;now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier intervened quietly. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll turn the hose on him as he goes out, if you don&rsquo;t mind,&rdquo; the irate
+      mother exclaimed as she left the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier nodded. &ldquo;Well, that would be appropriate, Mrs. Tynan, but it
+      wouldn&rsquo;t cleanse him. He is the original leopard whose spots are there for
+      ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;brain-storms.&rdquo; 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&mdash;or
+      woman&mdash;in Askatoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You get a woman to do your fighting for you,&rdquo; he said hatefully. &ldquo;You
+      have to drag her in. It was you I meant to challenge, not the poor girl
+      young enough to be your daughter.&rdquo; His hand went to his waistcoat pocket.
+      Crozier saw and understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Crozier&rsquo;s eyes blazed. The abnormal in him&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None of your sickly melodrama here. Take out of your pocket the pistol
+      you carry and give it to me,&rdquo; Crozier growled. &ldquo;You are not to be trusted.
+      The habit of thinking you would shoot somebody some time&mdash;somebody
+      you had injured&mdash;might become too much for you to-day, and then I
+      should have to kill you, and for your wife&rsquo;s sake I don&rsquo;t want to do that.
+      I always feel sorry for a woman with a husband like you. You could never
+      shoot me. You couldn&rsquo;t be quick enough, but you might try. Then I should
+      end you, and there&rsquo;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&mdash;the pistol!&rdquo; he added,
+      standing menacingly over the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put it in my hand,&rdquo; insisted Crozier, his eyes on the other&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The flabby hand laid the weapon in Crozier&rsquo;s lean and strenuous fingers.
+      Crozier calmly withdrew the cartridges and then tossed the weapon back on
+      the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now we have equality of opportunity,&rdquo; he remarked quietly. &ldquo;If you think
+      you would like to repeat any slander that&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to get to business,&rdquo; said Burlingame sullenly, as he took from his
+      pocket a paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier nodded. &ldquo;I can imagine your haste,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;You need all the
+      fees you can get to pay Belle Bingley&rsquo;s bills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Burlingame did not wince. He made no reply to the challenge that he was
+      the chief supporter of a certain wanton thereabouts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The time for your option to take ten thousand dollars&rsquo; worth of shares in
+      the syndicate is up,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;and I am instructed to inform you that
+      Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, &amp; Simmons propose to take over
+      your unpaid shares and to complete the transaction without you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who informed Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, &amp; Simmons that I am
+      not prepared to pay for my shares?&rdquo; asked Crozier sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The time is up,&rdquo; surlily replied Burlingame. &ldquo;It is assumed you can&rsquo;t
+      take up your shares, and that you don&rsquo;t want to do so. The time us up,&rdquo; he
+      added emphatically, and he tapped the paper spread before him on the
+      table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier&rsquo;s eyes half closed in an access of stubbornness and hatred. &ldquo;You
+      are not to assume anything whatever,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Examine the dates,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;At twelve o&rsquo;clock tonight Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter,
+      &amp; 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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It meets the case,&rdquo; said Burlingame in a morose voice, rising. &ldquo;If you
+      can produce the money before the stroke of midnight, why can&rsquo;t you produce
+      it now? What&rsquo;s the use of bluffing! It can&rsquo;t do any good in the end. Your
+      credit&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My credit has been stopped by your friends,&rdquo; interrupted Crozier, &ldquo;but my
+      resources are current.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Midnight is not far off,&rdquo; viciously remarked Burlingame as he made for
+      the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crozier intercepted him. &ldquo;One word with you on another business before you
+      go,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk of that after midnight,&rdquo; sneered Burlingame desperately as the door
+      was opened for him by Crozier. &ldquo;Better not go out by the front gate,&rdquo;
+       remarked Crozier scornfully. &ldquo;Mrs. Tynan is a woman of her word, and the
+      hose is handy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later, with contemptuous satisfaction, he saw Burlingame climb
+      the picket-fence at the side of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning back into the room, he threw up his arms. &ldquo;Midnight&mdash;midnight&mdash;my
+      God, where am I to get the money! I must&mdash;I must have it... It&rsquo;s the
+      only way back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting down at the table, he dropped his head into his hands and shut his
+      eyes in utter dejection. &ldquo;Mona&mdash;by Heaven, no, I&rsquo;ll never take it
+      from her!&rdquo; he said once, and clenched his hands at his temples and sat on
+      and on unmoving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If&mdash;if&mdash;why had he never thought of Garnett? Garnett could help
+      him, and he would do so. He would let Garnett stand in with him&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he remembered&mdash;saw&mdash;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, &ldquo;When was zero up last?&rdquo; The croupier answered,
+      &ldquo;Not for an hour.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;mad Inglesi,&rdquo; 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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got it all,
+      Zero-good-night! Goodnight, Zero!&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s cry of &ldquo;Zero!&rdquo; fell upon his ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With cheerful nonchalance he had come back to the table and picked up the
+      many louis he had won&mdash;won by his last throw and with his last
+      available coin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll back my hand till the last throw.&rdquo; Then it was,
+      as his eyes gazed in front of him dreamily, he saw the card on his mirror
+      bearing the words, &ldquo;Courage, soldier!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty&mdash;Kitty, how great you are!&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;What a hand to hold in the dark&mdash;the
+      dark of life!&rdquo; he said aloud. &ldquo;Courage, soldier!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the dining-room Kitty had watched him go. &ldquo;Courage, soldier!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With an effort she conquered herself, wiped away the tears, and said
+      aloud, with a whimsical but none the less pitiful self-reproach,
+      &ldquo;Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a fool you are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Crozier, I have here the letter your husband received from you five
+      years ago in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s
+      remark now she inclined her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you have told us that you and your husband haven&rsquo;t made it up. That
+      is so, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; Kitty continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you wish to put it that way,&rdquo; answered Mona, stiffening a little in
+      spite of herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps I don&rsquo;t put it very well, but it is the stony fact, isn&rsquo;t it,
+      Mrs. Crozier?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona hesitated a moment, then answered: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t quite know what quixotic means,&rdquo; rejoined Kitty dryly. &ldquo;If it
+      wasn&rsquo;t understood while you lived together that what was one&rsquo;s was the
+      other&rsquo;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&rsquo;t see how you could expect
+      him, after your five years&rsquo; desertion, to take money from you now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My five years&rsquo; desertion!&rdquo; exclaimed Mona. Surely this girl was more than
+      reckless in her talk. Kitty was not to be put down. &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t mind
+      plain speaking, he was always with you, but you weren&rsquo;t always with him in
+      those days. This letter showed that.&rdquo; She tapped it on her thumb-nail. &ldquo;It
+      was only when he had gone and you saw what you had lost, that you came
+      back to him&mdash;in heart, I mean. Well, if you didn&rsquo;t go away with him
+      when he went, and you wouldn&rsquo;t have gone unless he had ordered you to go&mdash;and
+      he wouldn&rsquo;t do that&mdash;it&rsquo;s clear you deserted him, since you did that
+      which drove him from home, and you stayed there instead of going with him.
+      I&rsquo;ve worked it out, and it is certain you deserted him five years ago.
+      Desertion doesn&rsquo;t mean a sea of water between, it means an ocean of
+      self-will and love-me-first between. If you hadn&rsquo;t deserted him, as this
+      letter shows, he wouldn&rsquo;t have been here. I expect he told you so; and if
+      he did, what did you say to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor&rsquo;s eyes were full of decorous mirth and apprehension, for
+      such logic and such impudence as Kitty&rsquo;s was like none he had ever heard.
+      Yet it was commanding too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty caught the look in his eyes and blazed up. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t what I said
+      correct? Isn&rsquo;t it all true and logical? And if it is, why do you sit there
+      looking so superior?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor made a gesture of deprecating apology. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all true,
+      and it&rsquo;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&rsquo;ve taken
+      the thing in hand to set it right, it is up to you now. We can only hold
+      hard and wait.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a shrug of her graceful shoulders Kitty turned again to Mrs. Crozier,
+      who intervened hastily, saying, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They all call him &lsquo;Gus&rsquo; Burlingame. He doesn&rsquo;t get the civility of Mr.
+      here in Askatoon,&rdquo; interposed Kitty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona made an impatient gesture. &ldquo;If you will listen, I want to tell you
+      about Mr. Crozier&rsquo;s money. He thinks he has no money, but he has. He has a
+      good deal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused, and the Young Doctor and Kitty leaned forward eagerly. &ldquo;Well,
+      but go on,&rdquo; said Kitty. &ldquo;If he has money he must have it to-day, and now.
+      Certainly he doesn&rsquo;t know of it. He thinks he is broke,&mdash;dead broke,&mdash;and
+      there&rsquo;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&rsquo;t hide it from him
+      any longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona got to her feet in anger. &ldquo;If you would give me a chance to explain,
+      I would do so,&rdquo; she said, her lips trembling. &ldquo;Unfortunately, I am in your
+      hands, but please give me credit for some intelligence&mdash;and some
+      heart. In any case I shall not be bullied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Young Doctor almost laughed outright, despite the danger of the
+      situation. He was not prepared for Kitty&rsquo;s reply and the impulsive act
+      that marched with it. In an instant Kitty had caught Mona Crozier&rsquo;s hand
+      and pressed it warmly. &ldquo;I was only doing what I&rsquo;ve seen lawyers do,&rdquo; she
+      said eagerly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got something that I want you to do, and I&rsquo;ve been
+      trying to work up to it. That&rsquo;s all. I&rsquo;m not as mean and bad mannered as
+      you think me. I really do care what happens to him&mdash;to you both,&rdquo; she
+      hastened to add.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Struggling to keep back her tears, and in a low voice, Mona rejoined: &ldquo;I
+      meant to have told him what I&rsquo;m going to tell you now. I couldn&rsquo;t say
+      anything about the money belonging to him till I had told him how it came
+      to be his.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment&rsquo; pause she continued: &ldquo;He told you all about the race which
+      Flamingo lost, and about that letter.&rdquo; She pointed to the letter which
+      Kitty still carried in her hand. &ldquo;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&mdash;of his&mdash;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&rsquo;t matter. I thought it was treating me lightly&mdash;to
+      do it so soon after the pledge was given. I was indignant. I felt we
+      weren&rsquo;t as we might be, and I felt, too, that I must be at fault; but I
+      was so proud that I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t been the success it might
+      have been, and I think I was a little mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not the monopoly of only one of your sex,&rdquo; interposed the Young
+      Doctor dryly. &ldquo;If I were you I wouldn&rsquo;t apologise for it. You speak to a
+      sister in like distress.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty&rsquo;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. &ldquo;Yes, yes&mdash;please go on,&rdquo; she urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I wrote that letter I had forgotten what I had done the day before
+      the race. I had gone into my husband&rsquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused a moment, and the room became very still. Both her listeners
+      were sure that they were nearing a thing of deep importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a lower voice Mona continued: &ldquo;I don&rsquo;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: &lsquo;I am going to the
+      Derby. I will take the fifty pounds, and I&rsquo;ll put it on a horse for
+      Shiel.&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t win, well, he didn&rsquo;t know the money existed&mdash;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&rsquo;t think I was quite sane. Most women are like that at times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I said,&rdquo; remarked the Young Doctor, his face mirthfully alive. Here
+      was a situation indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I wrote him that letter,&rdquo; Mona went on. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s
+      fifty pounds was not paid to me till after Shiel had gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much was it?&rdquo; asked Kitty breathlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Four thousand pounds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty exclaimed so loudly that she smothered her mouth with a hand. &ldquo;Why,
+      he only needs for the syndicate two thousand pounds&mdash;ten thousand
+      dollars,&rdquo; she said excitedly. &ldquo;But what&rsquo;s the good of it, if he can&rsquo;t lay
+      his hand on it by midnight to-night!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He can do so,&rdquo; was Mona&rsquo;s quick reply. &ldquo;I was going to tell him that, but
+      the lawyer came, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty sprang up and down in excitement. &ldquo;I had a plan. It might have
+      worked without this. It was the only way then. But this makes it sure&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona took from her pocket an envelope, and out of it she drew four Bank of
+      England notes. &ldquo;Here it is&mdash;here are four one-thousand-pound notes. I
+      had it paid to me that way five years ago, and here&mdash;here it is,&rdquo; she
+      added, with almost a touch of hysteria in her voice, for the excitement of
+      it all acted on her like an electric storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;ll get to work at once,&rdquo; declared Kitty, looking at the notes
+      admiringly, then taking them from Mona and smoothing them out with tender
+      firmness. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just the luck of the wide world, as my father used to say.
+      It actually is. Now you see,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s like this. That letter
+      you wrote him&rdquo;&mdash;she addressed herself to Mona&mdash;&ldquo;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&mdash;oh, I wonder if you will do it
+      exactly right!&rdquo; she added dubiously to Mona. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t play your game
+      very well, and it&rsquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing Mona&rsquo;s agitation changing to choler, the Young Doctor intervened.
+      He did not know Kitty was purposely stinging Crozier&rsquo;s unhappy little
+      consort, so that she should be put upon her mettle to do the thing without
+      bungling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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,&rdquo;
+       he remarked inquiringly to Kitty, and with admonishment in tone and
+      emphasis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I do not understand quite&mdash;will you explain?&rdquo; interposed Mona
+      with inner resentment at being managed, but feeling that she could not do
+      without Kitty even if she would.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I said,&rdquo; continued Kitty, &ldquo;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&rsquo;ll
+      get down on his knees, and you will be happy ever after.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it will be a fraud, and dishonest and dishonourable,&rdquo; protested Mona.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty almost sniffed, but she was too agitated to be scornful. &ldquo;Just leave
+      that to me, please. It won&rsquo;t make me a bit more dishonourable to open the
+      letter again&mdash;I&rsquo;ve opened it once, and I don&rsquo;t feel any the worse for
+      it. I have no conscience, and things don&rsquo;t weigh on my mind at all. I&rsquo;m a
+      light-minded person.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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,&rdquo; urged Mona. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want to
+      deceive him, to appear a bit better than I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;d rather lose him!&rdquo; said Kitty almost savagely. &ldquo;Knowing how hard
+      it is to keep a man under the best circumstances, you&rsquo;d willingly make the
+      circumstances as bad as they can be&mdash;is that it? Besides, weren&rsquo;t you
+      sorry afterwards that you wrote that letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes, desperately sorry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you wished often that your real self had written on Derby Day and not
+      the scratch-cat you were then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona flushed, but answered bravely, &ldquo;Yes, a thousand times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What business had you to show him your cat-self, your unreal, not your
+      real self on Derby Day five years ago? Wasn&rsquo;t it your duty to show him
+      your real self?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona nodded helplessly. &ldquo;Yes, I know it was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then isn&rsquo;t it your duty to see that your real self speaks in that letter
+      now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want him to know me exactly as I am, and then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty made a passionate gesture. Was ever such an uncomprehending woman as
+      this diamond-button of a wife?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t the truth at
+      all, because I suppose women don&rsquo;t know how to tell the exact truth; and
+      they can be just as unfair to themselves as they are to others. Besides,
+      haven&rsquo;t you any sense of humour, Mrs. Crozier? It&rsquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;or was it the cunning the wild things know?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty left the room, but in a moment afterwards returned with the letter
+      open. &ldquo;The kettle on the hob is the friend of the family,&rdquo; she said gaily.
+      &ldquo;Here it is all ready for what there is to do. You go and keep watch for
+      Mr. Crozier,&rdquo; she added to the Young Doctor. &ldquo;He won&rsquo;t be gone long, I
+      should think, and we don&rsquo;t want him bursting in on us before I&rsquo;ve got that
+      letter safe back into his desk. If he comes, you keep him busy for a
+      moment. When we&rsquo;re quite ready I&rsquo;ll come to the front door, and then you
+      will know it is all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m to go while you make up your prescription&mdash;all right!&rdquo; said the
+      Young Doctor, and with a wave of the hand he left the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instantly Kitty brought a lead pencil and paper. &ldquo;Now sit down and write
+      to him, Mrs. Crozier,&rdquo; she said briskly. &ldquo;Use discretion; don&rsquo;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&mdash;twenty thousand dollars&mdash;my,
+      what a lot of money, and all got in one day! Tell him that it was all won
+      by his own cash. It&rsquo;s as easy as can be, and it will be a certainty now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, she lit a match. &ldquo;You&mdash;hold this wicked old catfish letter
+      into the flame, please, Mrs. Crozier, and keep praying all the time, and
+      please remember that &lsquo;our little hands were never made to tear each
+      other&rsquo;s eyes.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona&rsquo;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&rsquo;s face now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What isn&rsquo;t never was to those that never knew,&rdquo; said Kitty briskly, and
+      pushed a chair up to the table. &ldquo;Now sit down and write, please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona sat down. Taking up a sheet of notepaper she looked at it dubiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, what a fool I am!&rdquo; said Kitty, understanding the look. &ldquo;And that&rsquo;s
+      what every criminal does&mdash;he forgets something. I forgot the
+      notepaper. Of course you can&rsquo;t use that notepaper. Of course not. He&rsquo;d
+      know it in a minute. Besides, the sheet we burned had an engraved address
+      on it. I never thought of that&mdash;good gracious!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait&mdash;wait,&rdquo; said Mona, her face lighting. &ldquo;I may have some sheets
+      in my writing-case. It&rsquo;s only a chance, but there were some loose sheets
+      in it when I left home. I&rsquo;ll go and see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s notice&mdash;a reverie as complete as though she was subtracted
+      from life&rsquo;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:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got it&mdash;just two sheets, two solitary sheets,&rdquo; said Mona in
+      triumph. &ldquo;How long they have been in my case I don&rsquo;t know. It is almost
+      uncanny they should be there just when they&rsquo;re most needed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Providential, we should say out here,&rdquo; was Kitty&rsquo;s response. &ldquo;Begin,
+      please. Be sure you have the right date. It was&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona had already written the date, and she interrupted Kitty with the
+      words, &ldquo;As though I could forget it!&rdquo; All at once Kitty put a restraining
+      hand on her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait&mdash;wait, you mustn&rsquo;t write on that paper yet. Suppose you didn&rsquo;t
+      write the real wise thing&mdash;and only two sheets of paper and so much
+      to say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How right you always are!&rdquo; said Mona, and took up one of the blank sheets
+      which Kitty had just brought her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she began to write. For a minute she wrote swiftly, nervously, and
+      had nearly finished a page when Kitty said to her, &ldquo;I think I had better
+      see what you have written. I don&rsquo;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,&rdquo; she added, as
+      she saw Mona shrink. It was like hurting a child, and she loved children&mdash;so
+      much. She had always a vision of children at her knee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Silently Mrs. Crozier pushed the sheets towards her. Kitty read the page
+      with a strange, eager look in her eyes. &ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s right as far as it
+      goes,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t gush. It&rsquo;s natural. It&rsquo;s you as you are now,
+      not as you were then, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;No,
+      no, no, that won&rsquo;t do,&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;That won&rsquo;t do at all. It isn&rsquo;t in
+      the way that will accomplish what we want. You&rsquo;ve gone quite, quite wrong.
+      I&rsquo;ll do it. I&rsquo;ll dictate it to you. I know exactly what to say, and we
+      mustn&rsquo;t make any mistake. Write, please&mdash;you must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona scratched out what had been written without a word. &ldquo;I am waiting,&rdquo;
+       she said submissively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. Now we go on. Write. I&rsquo;ll dictate.&rdquo; &ldquo;&lsquo;And look here,
+      dearest,&rsquo;&rdquo; she began, but Mona stopped her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We do not say &lsquo;look here&rsquo; in England. I would have said &lsquo;and see.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;And see-dearest,&rsquo;&rdquo; corrected Kitty, with an accent on the last word,
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;while I was mad at you for the moment for breaking your promise&mdash;&lsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In England we don&rsquo;t say &lsquo;mad&rsquo; in that connection,&rdquo; Mona again
+      interrupted. &ldquo;We say &lsquo;angry&rsquo; or &lsquo;annoyed&rsquo; or &lsquo;vexed.&rsquo;&rdquo; There was real
+      distress in her tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now I&rsquo;ll tell you what to do,&rdquo; said Kitty cheerfully. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll speak it, and
+      you write it my way of thinking, and then when we&rsquo;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 &lsquo;look here&rsquo; or &lsquo;mad,&rsquo; and he speaks better than any one I ever heard.
+      Now, we certainly must get on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After an instant she began again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For several minutes, with greater deliberation than was usual with her,
+      Kitty dictated, and at the end of the letter she said, &ldquo;I am, dearest,
+      your&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Mona sharply interrupted her. &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t mind I will say that
+      myself in my own way,&rdquo; she said, flushing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I forgot for the moment that I was speaking for you!&rdquo; responded
+      Kitty, with a lurking, undermeaning in her voice. &ldquo;I threw myself into it
+      so. Do you think I&rsquo;ve done the thing right?&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a direct, honest friendliness Mona looked into Kitty eyes. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty nodded. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t lose a minute in copying it. We must get the letter
+      back in his desk as soon as possible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;My darling!&rdquo;
+       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&mdash;oh, then life would be so much easier in the future! If&mdash;if
+      she could only kiss him again and he would wake and say&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I almost thought I heard a step in the other room,&rdquo; she said in
+      explanation to Mona. Going to the door of Crozier&rsquo;s room, she appeared to
+      listen for a moment, and then she opened it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it is all right,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In another few minutes Mona had finished the letter. &ldquo;Do you wish to read
+      it again?&rdquo; she asked Kitty, but not handing it to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I leave the words to you. It was the right meaning I wanted in it,&rdquo;
+       she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Mona came to her and laid a hand on her arm. &ldquo;You are wonderful&mdash;a
+      wonderful, wise, beloved girl,&rdquo; she said, and there were tears in her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty gave the tiny fingers a spasmodic clasp, and said: &ldquo;Quick, we must
+      get them in!&rdquo; She put the banknotes inside the sheets of paper, then
+      hastily placed both in the envelope and sealed the envelope again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just a tiny bit damp with the steam yet, but it will be all right in
+      five minutes. How soiled the envelope is!&rdquo; Kitty added. &ldquo;Five years in and
+      out of the desk, in and out of his pocket&mdash;but all so nice and
+      unsoiled and sweet and bonny inside,&rdquo; she added. &ldquo;To say nothing of the
+      bawbees, as Mr. Crozier calls money. Well, we are ready. It all depends on
+      you now, Mrs. Crozier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He used to be afraid of you; now you are afraid of him,&rdquo; said Kitty, as
+      though stating a commonplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s life;
+      and, more than all, a new feeling altogether&mdash;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 &ldquo;bossiness.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;a humble and a contrite heart,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they stood silent there was a click at the gate. Kitty ran into
+      Crozier&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shiel half turned away, not sullen, not morose, but with a strange apathy
+      settled on him. He had once heard a man say, &ldquo;I feel as though I wanted to
+      crawl into a hole and die.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona&rsquo;s voice stopped him. &ldquo;Do not go, Shiel,&rdquo; she urged gently. &ldquo;No, you
+      must not go&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew himself up. Not to be a sportsman, not to play the game&mdash;to
+      accuse him of this would have brought him back from the edge of the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not fit to-day. Let it be to-morrow, Mona,&rdquo; was his hesitating reply;
+      but he did not leave the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head and made a swift little childlike gesture towards him.
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us do to-day the thing that belongs to to-day,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;For the
+      night cometh when no man can work,&rdquo; 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&mdash;play it as Crozier of
+      Lammis would have played it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stepped inside the room. &ldquo;Let it be to-day,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We may be interrupted here,&rdquo; she replied. Courage came to her. &ldquo;Let us
+      talk in your own room,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was like her old self to take the initiative, but she did it now in so
+      different a way&mdash;without masterfulness or assumption. It was rather
+      like saying, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shut the door behind them and motioned her to a chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I will not sit,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;That is too formal. You ask any stranger
+      to sit. I am at home here, Shiel, and I will stand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was it you wanted to say, Mona?&rdquo; he asked, scarcely looking at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to think that there was something you wished to hear,&rdquo; she
+      replied. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you want to know all that has happened since you left us&mdash;about
+      me, about your brother, about your friends, about Lammis? I bought Lammis
+      at the sale you ordered; it is still ours.&rdquo; She gave emphasis to &ldquo;ours.&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His head came up sharply and his voice became a little hard. &ldquo;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&mdash;just enough to
+      bring me here. But I&rsquo;ve earned my own living since.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Penniless&mdash;just enough to bring you out here!&rdquo; Her voice had a sound
+      of honest amazement. &ldquo;How can you say such a thing! You had my letter&mdash;you
+      said you had my letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I had your letter,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind what he said to you, Shiel. It was what I said that mattered.&rdquo;
+       She was getting bolder every minute. The comedy was playing into her
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wrote in your letter the things he said to me,&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her protest sounded indignantly real. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s
+      income of a cabinet minister?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; he returned helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk as though you had never read my letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never have read your letter,&rdquo; he replied in bewilderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face had the flush of honest anger. &ldquo;You do not dare to tell me you
+      destroyed my letter without reading it&mdash;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&rdquo;&mdash;the comedy of the situation gained much from the mock
+      indignation&mdash;she no longer had any compunctions&mdash;&ldquo;to say that
+      you destroyed my letter and what it contained&mdash;a small fortune it
+      would be out here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not destroy your letter, Mona,&rdquo; was the embarrassed response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what did you do with it? Gave it to some one else to read&mdash;to
+      some other woman, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was really shocked and greatly pained. &ldquo;Hush! You shall not say that
+      kind of thing, Mona. I&rsquo;ve never had anything to do with any woman but my
+      wife since I married her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what did you do with the letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s there,&rdquo; he said, pointing to the high desk with the green baize top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you say you have never read it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her head with dainty haughtiness. &ldquo;Then if you have still the
+      same sense of honour that made you keep faith with the bookmakers&mdash;you
+      didn&rsquo;t run away from them!&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment he was again near her with the letter in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s it&mdash;that&rsquo;s the letter,&rdquo; she said, with wondering and
+      reproachful eyes. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t live with&mdash;kept as a
+      warning never to think of her except to say, &lsquo;I hate you, Mona, because
+      you are rich and heartless, and not bigger than a pinch of snuff.&rsquo; That
+      was the kind way you used to speak of her even when you were first married
+      to her&mdash;contemptuously always in your heart, no matter what you said
+      out loud. And the end showed it&mdash;the end showed it; you deserted
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;t matter, that she must bluster in
+      her tiny teacup if she wanted to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open the letter at once,&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t, I will.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Four thousand pounds!&rdquo; he exclaimed, examining them. &ldquo;What does it mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Read,&rdquo; she commanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;the burning bush.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mona&mdash;Mona&mdash;heaven above and all the gods of hell and Hellas,
+      what a fool, what a fool I&rsquo;ve been!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Mona&mdash;Mona, can
+      you forgive your idiot husband? I didn&rsquo;t read this letter because I
+      thought it was going to slash me on the raw&mdash;on the raw flesh of my
+      own lacerating. I simply couldn&rsquo;t bear to read what your brother said was
+      in the letter. Yet I couldn&rsquo;t destroy it, either. It was you. I had to
+      keep it. Mona, am I too big a fool to be your husband?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held out his arms with a passionate exclamation. &ldquo;I asked you to kiss
+      me yesterday, and you wouldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;I tried to make you love
+      me yesterday, and you wouldn&rsquo;t. When a woman gets a rebuff like that, when&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not bear it any longer. With a cry of joy she was in his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment he said, &ldquo;The best of all was, that you&mdash;you vixen,
+      you bet on that Derby and won, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With your money, remember, Shiel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With my money!&rdquo; he cried exultingly. &ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s the best of it&mdash;the
+      next best of it. It was your betting that was the best of all&mdash;the
+      best thing you ever did since we married, except your coming here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s in time to help you, too&mdash;with your own money, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at his watch. &ldquo;Hours&mdash;I&rsquo;m hours to the good. That crowd&mdash;that
+      gang of thieves&mdash;that bunch of highwaymen! I&rsquo;ve got them&mdash;got
+      them, and got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, too, to start again at
+      home, at Lammis, Mona, back on the&mdash;but no, I&rsquo;m not sure that I can
+      live there now after this big life out here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not so sure, either,&rdquo; Mona replied, with a light of larger
+      understanding in her eyes. &ldquo;But we&rsquo;ll have to go back and stop the world
+      talking, and put things in shape before we come here to stay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To stay here&mdash;do you mean that?&rdquo; he asked eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somewhere in this big land,&rdquo; she replied softly; &ldquo;anyhow, to stay here
+      till I&rsquo;ve grown up a little. I wasn&rsquo;t only small in body in the old days,
+      I was small in mind, Shiel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anyhow, I&rsquo;ve done with betting and racing, Mona. I&rsquo;ve just got time left&mdash;I&rsquo;m
+      only thirty-nine&mdash;to start and really do something with myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, start now, dear man of Lammis. What is it you have to do before
+      twelve o&rsquo;clock to-night?&rdquo; &ldquo;What is it? Why, I have to pay over two
+      thousand of this,&rdquo;&mdash;he flourished the banknotes&mdash;&ldquo;and even then
+      I&rsquo;ll still have two thousand left. But wait&mdash;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?&rdquo; His voice was
+      gay with raillery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She could look him in the face now and prevaricate without any shame or
+      compunction at all. &ldquo;That fifty pounds&mdash;that! Why, I used it to buy
+      my ticket for Canada. My husband ought to pay my expenses out to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed greatly. All Ireland was rioting in his veins now. He had no
+      logic or reasoning left. &ldquo;Well, that&rsquo;s the way to get into your old man&rsquo;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&rsquo;d make a pot out of it, but I thought I had lost it all when
+      Flamingo went down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You never know your luck&mdash;you used to say that, Shiel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say it again. Come, we must tell our friends&mdash;Kitty, her mother,
+      and the Young Doctor. You don&rsquo;t know what good friends they have been to
+      me, mavourneen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think I do,&rdquo; said Mona, opening the door to the outer room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Crozier called with a great, cheery voice&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where&rsquo;s Kitty?&rdquo; asked Crozier, almost boisterously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has gone for a ride with John Sibley,&rdquo; answered Mrs. Tynan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look, there she is!&rdquo; said Mona, laying a hand on Crozier&rsquo;s arm, and
+      pointing with the other out over the prairie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s riding the horse you won that race with years ago when you first
+      came here, Mr. Crozier,&rdquo; said Mrs. Tynan. &ldquo;John Sibley bought it from Mr.
+      Brennan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mona did not see the look which came into Crozier&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at that moment the Young Doctor entered the room, and he distracted
+      Mona&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would like to kiss your daughter too, Mrs. Tynan,&rdquo; Mona said.... &ldquo;What
+      are you looking at so hard, Shiel?&rdquo; she presently added to her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not turn to her. His eyes were still shaded by his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That horse goes well yet,&rdquo; he said in a low voice. &ldquo;As good as ever&mdash;as
+      good as ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He loves horses so,&rdquo; remarked Mona, as though she could tell Mrs. Tynan
+      and the Young Doctor anything about Shiel Crozier which they did not know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kitty rides well, doesn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Tynan of Crozier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a pair&mdash;girl and horse!&rdquo; Crozier exclaimed. &ldquo;Thoroughbred&mdash;absolutely
+      thoroughbred!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty had ridden away with her heart&rsquo;s secret, her very own, as she
+      thought: but Shiel Crozier knew&mdash;the man that mattered knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_EPIL" id="link2H_EPIL">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      EPILOGUE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;for it was July&mdash;a haymaker sharpened his scythe, and the
+      sound came singing through the air radiant and stirring with life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he did not go alone, and I have not made my grave,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear bully, bulbous being&mdash;how that word &lsquo;bully&rsquo; would have, made
+      her cringe!&rdquo; she said as the man ambled nearer. He could not go as fast as
+      his mind urged him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got news&mdash;news, news!&rdquo; he exclaimed, wading through his own
+      perspiration to where she sat. &ldquo;I can guess what it is,&rdquo; the girl remarked
+      smilingly, as she reached out a hand to him, but remained seated. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a
+      real, live baby born to Lydia, wife of Methuselah, the woman also being of
+      goodly years. It is, isn&rsquo;t it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fattest, finest, most &lsquo;scrumpshus&rsquo; son of all the ages that ever&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty laughed happily and very whimsically. &ldquo;Like none since Moses was
+      found among the bulrushes! Where was this one found, and what do you
+      intend to call him&mdash;Jesse, after his &lsquo;pa&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;nothing so common. He&rsquo;s to be called Shiel&mdash;Shiel Crozier
+      Bulrush, that&rsquo;s to be his name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The face of the girl became a shade pensive now. &ldquo;Oh! And do you think you
+      can guarantee that he will be worth the name? Do you never think what his
+      father is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m starting him right with that name. I can do so much, anyway,&rdquo; laughed
+      the imperturbable one. &ldquo;And Mrs. Bulrush, after her great effort&mdash;how
+      is she?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Flying&mdash;simply flying. Earth not good enough for her. Simply flying.
+      But here&mdash;here is more news. Guess what&mdash;it&rsquo;s for you. I&rsquo;ve just
+      come from the post office, and they said there was an English letter for
+      you, so I brought it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He handed it over. She laid it in her lap and waited as though for him to
+      go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t I hear how he is? He&rsquo;s the best man that ever crossed my path,&rdquo; he
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It happens to be in his wife&rsquo;s, not his, handwriting&mdash;did ever such
+      a scrap of a woman write so sprawling a hand!&rdquo; she replied, holding the
+      letter up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she&rsquo;ll let us know in the letter how Crozier is, won&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jesse Bulrush picked it up. &ldquo;That looks nice,&rdquo; he said, and he whistled in
+      surprise. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a money-draft on a bank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty, whose eyes were fixed on the big, important handwriting, answered
+      calmly and without apparently looking, as she took the paper from his
+      hand: &ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s a wedding present&mdash;five hundred dollars to buy what
+      I like best for my home. So she says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Crozier, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that&rsquo;s magnificent. What will you do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty rose and held out her hand. &ldquo;Go back to your flying partner, happy
+      man, and ask her what she would do with five hundred dollars if she had
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;d buy her lord and master a present with it, of course,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, Mr. Rolypoly,&rdquo; she responded, laughing. &ldquo;You always could think
+      of things for other people to do; and have never done anything yourself
+      until now. Good-bye, father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;&lsquo;A token
+      of affection from both!&rsquo;&rdquo; she exclaimed, quoting from the letter. &ldquo;One
+      lone leaf of Irish shamrock from him would&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped. &ldquo;But he will send a message of his own,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;He
+      will&mdash;he will. Even if he doesn&rsquo;t, I&rsquo;ll know that he remembers just
+      the same. He does&mdash;he does remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew herself up with an effort, and, as it were, shook herself free
+      from the memories which dimmed her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not far away a man was riding towards the clump of trees where she was.
+      She saw, and hastened to her horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I told John all I feel he&rsquo;d understand. I believe he always has
+      understood,&rdquo; she added with a far-off look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The draft was still crushed in her hand when she mounted the beloved
+      horse, whose name now was Shiel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she smoothed out the crumpled paper. &ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;ll take it; I&rsquo;ll
+      put it by,&rdquo; she murmured. &ldquo;John will keep on betting. He&rsquo;ll be broke some
+      day and he&rsquo;ll need it, maybe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later she was riding hard to meet the man who, before the
+      wheat-harvest came, would call her wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     ETEXT EDITOR&rsquo;S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     And I was very lucky&mdash;worse luck!
+     Any man as is a man has to have one vice
+     God help the man that&rsquo;s afraid of his own wife!
+     He saw what he wished to see, which is the way of man
+     Her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios
+     Law&rsquo;s delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed
+     Searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
+     Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+     She looked too gay to be good
+     Telling the unnecessary truth
+     They had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler
+     What isn&rsquo;t never was to those that never knew
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of You Never Know Your Luck, Complete
+by Gilbert Parker
+
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+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's You Never Know Your Luck, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: You Never Know Your Luck, Complete
+       Being The Story Of A Matrimonial Deserter
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Last Updated: March 14, 2009
+Release Date: October 18, 2006 [EBook #6288]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+  Volume 1.
+  PROEM
+  I.     "PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"
+  II.    CLOSING THE DOORS
+  III.   THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
+  IV.    "STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE"
+  V.     A STORY TO BE TOLD
+
+  Volume 2.
+  VI.    "HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
+  VII.   A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+  VIII.  ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+  IX.    NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+  X.    "S. O. S."
+  XI.    IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+  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
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+This volume contains two novels dealing with the life of prairie people
+in the town of Askatoon in the far West. 'The World for Sale' and the
+latter portion of 'The Money Master' deal with the same life, and 'The
+Money Master' contained some of the characters to be found in 'Wild
+Youth'. 'The World for Sale' also was a picture of prairie country with
+strife between a modern Anglo-Canadian town and a French-Canadian town
+in the West. These books are of the same people; but 'You Never
+Know Your Luck' and 'Wild Youth' have several characters which move
+prominently through both.
+
+In the introduction to 'The World for Sale' in this series, I drew a
+description of prairie life, and I need not repeat what was said there.
+'In You Never Know Your Luck' there is a Proem which describes briefly
+the look of the prairie and suggests characteristics of the life of
+the people. The basis of the book has a letter written by a wife to her
+husband at a critical time in his career when he had broken his promise
+to her. One or two critics said the situation is impossible, because no
+man would carry a letter unopened for a long number of years. My reply
+is: that it is exactly what I myself did. I have still a letter written
+to me which was delivered at my door sixteen years ago. I have never
+read it, and my reason for not reading it was that I realised, as I
+think, what its contents were. I knew that the letter would annoy, and
+there it lies. The writer of the letter who was then my enemy is now my
+friend. The chief character in the book, Crozier, was an Irishman, with
+all the Irishman's cleverness, sensitiveness, audacity, and timidity;
+for both those latter qualities are characteristic of the Irish race,
+and as I am half Irish I can understand why I suppressed a letter and
+why Crozier did. Crozier is the type of man that comes occasionally to
+the Dominion of Canada; and Kitty Tynan is the sort of girl that the
+great West breeds. She did an immoral thing in opening the letter that
+Crozier had suppressed, but she did it in a good cause--for Crozier's
+sake; she made his wife write another letter, and she placed it again
+in the envelope for Crozier to open and see. Whatever lack of morality
+there was in her act was balanced by the good end to the story, though
+it meant the sacrifice of Kitty's love for Crozier, and the making of
+his wife happy once more.
+
+As for 'Wild Youth' I make no apology for it. It is still fresh in the
+minds of the American public, and it is true to the life. Some critics
+frankly called it melodramatic. I do not object to the term. I know
+nothing more melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare's
+plays. Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic;
+Balzac was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and
+Sir Walter Scott. The charge of melodrama is not one that should disturb
+a writer of fiction. The question is, are the characters melodramatic.
+Will anyone suggest to me the marriage of a girl of seventeen with a man
+over sixty is melodramatic. It may be, but I think it tragical, and so
+it was in this case. As for Orlando Guise, I describe the man as I knew
+him, and he is still alive. Some comments upon the story suggested that
+it was impossible for a man to spend the night on the prairie with a
+woman whom he loved without causing her to forget her marriage vows. It
+is not sentimental to say that is nonsense. It is a prurient mind that
+only sees evil in a situation of the sort. Why it should be desirable to
+make a young man and woman commit a misdemeanor to secure the praise of
+a critic is beyond imagination. It would be easy enough to do. I did it
+in The Right of Way. I did it in others of my books. What happens to one
+man and one woman does not necessarily happen to another. There are men
+who, for love of a woman, would not take advantage of her insecurity.
+There are others who would. In my books I have made both classes do
+their will, and both are true to life. It does not matter what one book
+is or is not, but it does matter that an author writes his book with a
+sense of the fitting and the true.
+
+Both these books were written to present that side of life in Canada
+which is not wintry and forbidding. There is warmth of summer in both
+tales, and thrilling air and the beauty of the wild countryside. As for
+the cold, it is severe in most parts of Canada, but the air is dry, and
+the sharpness is not felt as it is in this damper climate of England.
+Canadians feel the cold of a March or November day in London far more
+than the cold of a day in Winnipeg, with the thermometer many degrees
+below zero. Both these books present the summer side of Canada, which is
+as delightful as that of any climate in the world; both show the modern
+western life which is greatly changed since the days when Pierre
+roamed the very fields where these tales take place. It should never
+be forgotten that British Columbia has a climate like that of England,
+where, on the Coast, it is never colder than here, and where there is
+rain instead of snow in winter.
+
+There is much humour and good nature in the West, and this also I tried
+to bring out in these two books; and Askatoon is as cosmopolitan as
+London. Canada in the West has all races, and it was consistent of me to
+give a Chinaman of noble birth a part to play in the tragicomedy. I
+have a great respect for the Chinaman, and he is a good servant and a
+faithful friend. Such a Chinaman as Li Choo I knew in British Columbia,
+and all I did was to throw him on the Eastern side of the Rockies, a few
+miles from the border of the farthest Western province. The Chinaman's
+death was faithful in its detail, and it was true to his nature. He had
+to die, and with the old pagan philosophy, still practised in China
+and Japan, he chose the better way, to his mind. Princes still destroy
+themselves in old Japan, as recent history proves.
+
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+
+
+
+PROEM
+
+Have you ever seen it in reaping-time? A sea of gold it is, with gentle
+billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
+salute the reaper and say, "All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
+the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall." The countless million
+heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles
+them to the hour of harvest. The air-like the tingle of water from a
+mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
+the dust of the world flushed away.
+
+Arcady? Look closely. Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are
+houses--sometimes in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
+domesticity or naked industry in the workfield. Also rising here and
+there in the expanse, clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a
+powdery mist. They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
+Sacrifice it is. The vast steam-threshers are mightily devouring what
+their servants, the monster steam-reapers, have gleaned for them. Soon,
+when September comes, all that waving sea will be still. What was gold
+will still be a rusted gold, but near to the earth-the stubble of the
+corn now lying in vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
+east and west and south and across the seas.
+
+Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
+whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
+chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature's travail which
+is not pain. Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
+white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun
+will be a soft--sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
+wool. Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the
+threshers, will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home.
+There the farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought
+that while he waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding;
+and as in April, the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it
+will push upward and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with
+the "What cheer, partner!" of a mate in the scheme of nature.
+
+Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here--bright, singing
+birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the
+wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth,
+the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
+plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash
+of the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the
+mallard from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by
+its joy in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very
+good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. "PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"
+
+If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
+pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
+have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
+possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the "field of
+the cloth of gold," which your eye has already been invited to see.
+With the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
+joyously at twenty-two. This morning singer was just that age; and if
+you had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of
+miles, before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in
+tone with the scene. She was a symphony in gold--nothing less. Her hair,
+her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all gold.
+Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might have
+had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal, and
+the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion. The eyelashes were so
+long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
+cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
+painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
+other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
+was so very busy, a keynote.
+
+Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
+not; but it is a libel. She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and
+is never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There was,
+however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl's
+presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her
+quite apart from her place in this nature-scheme. She was not wholly
+aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which
+would have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so
+black. Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it
+may be a matter of parentage.
+
+Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted. Her father had
+been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West.
+His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to
+maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
+daughter was now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the origin
+of the girl's slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of
+selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial
+decision. The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his
+daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul
+as ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little
+sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter's sake at least, keeping
+herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked
+temptations. She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample
+but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers. The girl
+was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who
+can say? Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish
+coast long since? Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her
+father's. You would have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have
+thought that nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so
+pointedly designed to express the ancient dame's colour-scheme, even to
+the delicate auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud
+look of her faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a
+purse and scarcely needed one. In any case she had an ample pocket in
+her dress.
+
+This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
+important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
+have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
+herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
+chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story.
+As a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
+deserter. Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
+had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean
+and low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
+matrimony without its status.
+
+As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
+misleading. A man had once said to her that "she looked too gay to be
+good," but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
+rather better. Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
+getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
+knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
+turned from her wiser if not better men. Because they had pursued the
+old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan
+had exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional
+and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for
+their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
+themselves well. She scored in any contest--in spite of her rather small
+brain, large heart, and ardent appearance. A very clever, shiftless
+Irish husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy
+watching and fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and
+fend herself to the same extent as she would have done had she been free
+and childless and thirty. The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw
+none of those things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time
+and look into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or
+the grey-blue foothills. She never sang--she had never sung a note in
+her life; but this girl of hers, with a man's coat in her hand, and eyes
+on the joyous scene before her, was for ever humming or singing. She
+had even sung in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer,
+because strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not
+so vain as people of her colouring sometimes are. It was just as bad,
+however, when she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang,
+people stared at her. So it was that she seldom went to church at all;
+but it was not because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were
+quite individual and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial
+deserter will show.
+
+This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom
+to the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when
+he was in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair
+proportion of the time. It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy
+and the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as
+a child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the
+alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular
+man whose coat she now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust
+upon it. This was the song she sang:
+
+     "Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
+     Hereaway I waited him, hereaway and oft;
+     When I sang my song to him, bright his eyes began to shine--
+     Hereaway I loved him well, for my heart was soft.
+
+     "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies--
+     'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"
+
+     "Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
+     Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
+     Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown--
+     Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
+
+     "When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+     Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+     I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
+     'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"
+
+There was a plaintive quality in the voice of this russet maiden in
+perfect keeping with the music and the words; and though her lips
+smiled, there was a deep, wistful look in her eyes more in harmony with
+the coming autumn than with this gorgeous harvest-time.
+
+For a moment after she had finished singing she stood motionless,
+absorbed by the far horizon; then suddenly she gave a little shake of
+the body and said in a brisk, playfully chiding way:
+
+"Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" There was no one near,
+so far as eye could see, so it was clear that the words were addressed
+to herself. She was expressing that wonder which so many people feel
+at discovering in themselves long-concealed characteristics, or find
+themselves doing things out of their natural orbit, as they think. If
+any one had told Kitty Tynan that she had rare imagination, she would
+have wondered what was meant. If anyone had said to her, "What are you
+dreaming about, Kitty?" she would have understood, however, for she had
+had fits of dreaming ever since she was a child, and they had increased
+during the past few years--since the man came to live with them whose
+coat she was brushing. Perhaps this was only imitation, because the
+man had a habit of standing or sitting still and looking into space for
+minutes--and on Sundays for hours--at a time; and often she had watched
+him as he lay on his back in the long grass, head on a hillock, hat
+down over his eyes, while the smoke from his pipe came curling up from
+beneath the rim. Also she had seen him more than once sitting with a
+letter before him and gazing at it for many minutes together. She had
+also noted that it was the same letter on each occasion; that it was a
+closed letter, and also that it was unstamped. She knew that, because
+she had seen it in his desk--the desk once belonging to her father, a
+sloping thing with a green-baize top. Sometimes he kept it locked, but
+very often he did not; and more than once, when he had asked her to get
+him something from the desk, not out of meanness, but chiefly because
+her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios, she
+had examined the envelope curiously. The envelope bore a woman's
+handwriting, and the name on it was not that of the man who owned the
+coat--and the letter. The name on the envelope was Shiel Crozier, but
+the name of the man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry--James Gathorne
+Kerry, so he said.
+
+Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
+mystery. She wondered greatly what it all meant. Never in anything else
+had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but
+she felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up
+fifty stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who
+for over four years had lived in her mother's house. He had become part
+of her life, perhaps just because he was a man,--and what home is a
+real home without a man?--perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet,
+confidential word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness;
+indeed, he showed in his manner occasionally almost a boisterous
+hilarity. He undoubtedly was what her mother called "a queer dick," but
+also "a pippin with a perfect core," which was her way of saying that
+he was a man to be trusted with herself and with her daughter; one who
+would stand loyally by a friend or a woman. He had stood by them both
+when Augustus Burlingame, the lawyer, who had boarded with them when
+J. G. Kerry first came, coarsely exceeded the bounds of liberal
+friendliness which marked the household, and by furtive attempts at
+intimacy began to make life impossible for both mother and daughter.
+Burlingame took it into his head, when he received notice that his rooms
+were needed for another boarder, that J. G. Kerry was the cause of it.
+Perhaps this was not without reason, since Kerry had seen Kitty Tynan
+angrily unclasping Burlingame's arm from around her waist, and had used
+cutting and decisive words to the sensualist afterwards.
+
+There had taken the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent--Jesse
+Bulrush--who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three
+days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous
+fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and
+adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient
+for harmless deceit. He was fifty, and no gallant save in words; and,
+as a wary bachelor of many years' standing, it was a long time before
+he showed a tendency to blandish a good-looking middle-aged nurse named
+Egan who also lodged with Mrs. Tynan; though even a plain-faced nurse
+in uniform has an advantage over a handsome unprofessional woman. Jesse
+Bulrush and J. G. Kerry were friends--became indeed such confidential
+friends to all appearance, though their social origin was evidently
+so different, that Kitty Tynan, when she wished to have a pleasant
+conversation which gave her a glow for hours afterwards, talked to the
+fat man of his lean and aristocratic-looking friend.
+
+"Got his head where it ought to be--on his shoulders; and it ain't
+for playing football with," was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush
+concerning Mr. Kerry. This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she
+could not have told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a
+long history of the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and
+whom even the inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to "discover" when
+he lived in the same house. But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing
+as a canary, and relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and
+becoming means, with her good contralto voice. She was indeed a creature
+of contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice
+it was she. She looked a soprano.
+
+What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry's coat in her hand
+it would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the
+detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no
+consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her,
+for there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the
+house, the words of the lyric singing themselves over in her brain:
+
+     "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the hearth, heaven stood there in the skies'
+     Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"'
+
+She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of
+laying his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had
+said aloud to herself, "Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"
+Perhaps--and perhaps not.
+
+As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the
+house, and she quickened her footsteps. The blood in her face, the look
+in her eye quickened also. And now a figure appeared in the doorway--a
+figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.
+
+"Villain'!" he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient
+moods--after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush. "Hither with my coat; my
+spotless coat in a spotted world,--the unbelievable anomaly--
+
+         "'For the earth of a dusty to-day
+          Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.'"
+
+When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought
+it was clever beyond thinking--a heavenly jumble. "If it wasn't for me
+you'd be carted for rubbish," she replied joyously as she helped him on
+with his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.
+
+"I heard you singing--what was it?" he asked cheerily, while it could
+be seen that his mind was preoccupied. The song she had sung, floating
+through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
+engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long
+time, with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or
+rear-guard or what you will:
+
+    "'Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
+     Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft--'"
+
+she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
+saddened her, she knew not why. At the words the flaming exhilaration of
+the man's face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant look.
+
+"That--oh, that!" he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a
+clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.
+
+"Your hat!" she called after him, and ran inside the house. An instant
+later she gave it to him. Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
+kindly at her.
+
+"'Whereaway, hereaway' is a wonderful song," he said. "We used to sing
+it when I was a boy--and after, and after. It's an old song--old as the
+hills. Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan. What a girl you are--to be so kind to
+a fellow like--me!"
+
+"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"--these were the very words she had
+used about herself a little while before. The song--why did it make
+Mr. Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it? Kitty
+watched him striding down the street into the town.
+
+Now a voice--a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:
+
+"Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat," it said.
+
+Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
+struggle, into his coat.
+
+"Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly," she answered cheerily as she entered.
+
+"Of course I'm not the star boarder--nothing for me!" he said in
+affected protest.
+
+"A little more to starboard and you'll get it on," she retorted with
+a glint of her late father's raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch
+which put it right on the ample shoulders.
+
+"Bully! bully!" he cried. "I'll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup."
+
+"I'm a Christian. I hate horse-racers and gamblers," she returned
+mockingly.
+
+"I'll turn Christian--I want to be loved," he bleated from the doorway.
+
+"Roll on, proud porpoise!" she rejoined, which shows that her
+conversation was not quite aristocratic at all times.
+
+"Golly, but she's a gold dollar in a gold bank," remarked Jesse Bulrush
+warmly as he lurched into the street.
+
+The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down the
+way the two men had gone.
+
+The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her. She heard the dizzy din
+of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of
+the solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing,
+machine-like sound. This particular sound went on and on.
+
+She opened the door of the next room. Her mother sat at a sewing-machine
+intent upon some work, the needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.
+
+"What are you making, mother?" Kitty asked. "New blinds for Mr. Kerry's
+bedroom-he likes this green colour," the widow added with a slight
+flush, due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.
+
+"Everybody does everything for him," remarked the girl almost pettishly.
+
+"That's a nice spirit, I must say!" replied her mother reprovingly, the
+machine almost stopping.
+
+"If I said it in a different way it would be all right," the other
+returned with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft
+inflection, like a born actress.
+
+"Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" declared her mother, and she
+bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring
+way. Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes. A look
+of pleasure stole over the girl's face, and her bosom rose and fell with
+a happy sigh. Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. CLOSING THE DOORS
+
+There are many people who, in some subtle psychological way, are very
+like their names; as though some one had whispered to "the parents of
+this child" the name designed for it from the beginning of time. So it
+was with Shiel Crozier. Does not the name suggest a man lean and flat,
+sinewy, angular and isolated like a figure in one of El Greco's pictures
+in the Prado at Madrid? Does not the name suggest a figure of elongated
+humanity with a touch of ancient mysticism and yet also of the
+fantastical humour of Don Quixote?
+
+In outward appearance Shiel Crozier, otherwise J. G. Kerry, of Askatoon,
+was like his name for the greater part of the time. Take him in
+repose, and he looked a lank ascetic who dreamed of a happy land where
+flagellation was a joy and pain a panacea. In action, however, as when
+Kitty Tynan helped him on with his coat, he was a pure improvisation
+of nature. He had a face with a Cromwellian mole, which broke out in
+emotion like an April day, with eyes changing from a blue-grey to the
+deepest ultramarine that ever delighted the soul and made the reputation
+of an Old Master. Even in the prairie town of Askatoon, where every man
+is so busy that he scarcely knows his own children when he meets them,
+and almost requires an introduction to his wife when the door closes on
+them at bedtime, people took a second look at him when he passed. Many
+who came in much direct contact with him, as Augustus Burlingame the
+lawyer had done, tried to draw from him all there was to tell about
+himself; which is a friendly custom of the far West. The native-born
+greatly desire to tell about themselves. They wear their hearts on their
+sleeves, and are childlike in the frank recitals of all they were and
+are and hope to be. This covers up also a good deal of business acumen,
+shrewdness, and secretiveness which is not so childlike and bland.
+
+In this they are in sharp contrast to those not native-born. These
+come from many places on the earth, and they are seldom garrulously
+historical. Some of them go to the prairie country to forget they ever
+lived before, and to begin the world again, having been hurt in life
+undeservingly; some go to bury their mistakes or worse in pioneer work
+and adventure; some flee from a wrath that would devour them--the law,
+society, or a woman.
+
+This much must be said at once for Crozier, that he had no crime to
+hide. It was not because of crime that "He buckles up his talk like the
+bellyband on a broncho," as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said
+of him; and Deely was a man of "horse-sense," no doubt because he was a
+horse-doctor--"a veterenny surgeon," as his friends called him when they
+wished to flatter him. Deely supplemented this chaste remark about the
+broncho with the observation that, "Same as the broncho, you buckle him
+tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush." And he
+added further, "'Tis a woman that's put the mumplaster on his tongue,
+Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it's another man's wife."
+
+Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of
+his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law,
+or with another man's wife, nor yet with any single maid--not yet;
+though there was now Kitty Tynan in his path. Yet he had had trouble.
+There was hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more
+than all else in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived
+his life for over four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer,
+and stud-manager for Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire. In the
+opinion of the West, "big-bugs" did not come down to this kind of
+occupation unless they had been roughly handled by fate or fortune.
+
+"Talk? Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame," said
+Malachi Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling
+young farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and
+farming.
+
+"Words to him are like nuts to a monkey. He's an artist, that man is.
+Been in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the music
+smells--fairly smells like parfumery," responded Sibley. "I'd like to
+get at the bottom of him. There's a real good story under his asbestos
+vest--something that'd make a man call for the oh-be-joyful, same as I
+do now."
+
+After they had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler Deely
+continued the gossip. "Watch me now, been a friend of dukes in
+England--and Ireland, that Mr. James Gathorne Kerry, as any one can see;
+and there he is feelin' the hocks of a filly or openin' the jaws of a
+stud horse, age-hunting! Why, you needn't tell me--I've had my mind made
+up ever since the day he broke the temper of Terry Brennan's Inniskillen
+chestnut, and won the gold cup with her afterwards. He just sort of
+appeared out of the mist of the marnin', there bein' a divil's lot of
+excursions and conferences and holy gatherin's in Askatoon that time
+back, ostensible for the business which their names denote, like the
+Dioceesan Conference and the Pure White Water Society. That was their
+bluff; but they'd come herealong for one good pure white dioceesan thing
+before all, and that was to see the dandiest horse-racing which ever
+infested the West. Come--he come like that!"--Deely made a motion like
+a swoop of an aeroplane to earth--"and here he is buckin' about like a
+rough-neck same as you and me; but yet a gent, a swell, a cream della
+cream, that's turned his back on a lady--a lady not his own wife, that's
+my sure and sacred belief."
+
+"You certainly have got women on the brain," retorted Sibley. "I ain't
+ever seen such a man as you. There never was a woman crossing the street
+on a muddy day that you didn't sprint to get a look at her ankles.
+Behind everything you see a woman. Horses is your profession, but woman
+is your practice."
+
+"There ain't but one thing worth livin' for, and that's a woman,"
+remarked Deely.
+
+"Do you tell Mrs. Deely that?" asked Sibley.
+
+"Watch me now, she knows. What woman is there don't know when her
+husband is what he is! And it's how I know that the trouble with James
+Gathorne Kerry is a woman. I know the signs. Divils me own, he's got 'em
+in his face."
+
+"He's got in his face what don't belong here and what you don't know
+much about--never having kept company with that sort," rejoined Sibley.
+
+"The way he lives and talks--'No, thank you, I don't care for any
+thing,' says he, when you're standin' at the door of a friendly saloon,
+which is established by law to bespeak peace and goodwill towards men,
+and you ask him pleasant to step inside. He don't seem to have a single
+vice. Haven't we tried him? There was Belle Bingley, all frizzy hair and
+a kicker; we put her on to him. But he give her ten dollars to buy a hat
+on condition she behaved like a lady in the future--smilin' at her, the
+divil! And Belle, with temper like dinnemite, took it kneelin' as it
+were, and smiled back at him--her! Drink, women--nothin' seems to have a
+hold on him. What's his vice? Sure, then, that's what I say, what's his
+vice? He's got to have one; any man as is a man has to have one vice."
+
+"Bosh! Look at me," rejoined Sibley. "Drink women--nit! Not for me! I've
+got no vice. I don't even smoke."
+
+"No vice? Begobs, yours has got you like a tire on a wheel! Vice--what
+do you call gamblin'? It's the biggest vice ever tuk grip of a man. It's
+like a fever, and it's got you, John, like the nail on your finger."
+
+"Well, p'r'aps, he's got that vice too. P'r'aps J. G. Kerry's got that
+vice same as me."
+
+"Anyhow, we'll get to know all we want when he goes into the witness
+box at the Logan murder trial next week. That's what I'm waitin' for,"
+Deely returned, with a grin of anticipation. "That drug-eating Gus
+Burlingame's got a grudge against him somehow, and when a lawyer's got
+a grudge against you it's just as well to look where y' are goin'.
+Burlingame don't care what he does to get his way in court. What set him
+against Kerry I ain't sure, but, bedad, I think it's looks. Burlingame
+goes in for lookin' like a picture in a frame--gold seals hangin' beyant
+his vestpocket, broad silk cord to his eye-glass, loose flowin' tie,
+and long hair-makes him look pretentuous and showy. But your 'Mr. Kerry,
+sir,' he don't have any tricks to make him look like a doge from Veenis
+and all the eyes of the females battin' where'er he goes. Jealousy, John
+Sibley, me boy, is a cruil thing."
+
+"Why is it you ain't jealous of him? There's plenty of women that
+watch you go down-town--you got a name for it, anyway," remarked Sibley
+maliciously.
+
+Deely nodded sagely. "Watch me now, that's right, me boy. I got a name
+for it, but I want the game without the name, and that's why I ain't
+puttin' on any airs--none at all. I depend on me tongue, not on me
+looks, which goes against me. I like Mr. J. G. Kerry. I've plenty
+dealin's with him, naturally, both of us being in the horse business,
+and I say he's right as a minted dollar as he goes now. Also, and
+behold, I'd take my oath he never done anything to blush for. His
+touble's been a woman--wayward woman what stoops to folly! I give up
+tryin' to pump him just as soon as I made up my mind it was a woman.
+That shuts a man's mouth like a poor-box.
+
+"Next week's fixed for the Logan killin' case, is it?"
+
+"Monday comin', for sure. I wouldn't like to be in Mr. Kerry's shoes.
+Watch me now, if he gives the evidence they say he can give--the
+prasecution say it--that M'Mahon Gang behind Logan 'll get him sure as
+guns, one way or another."
+
+"Some one ought to give Mr. Kerry the tip to get out and not give
+evidence," remarked Sibley sagely. Deely shook his head vigorously.
+"Begobs, he's had the tip all right, but he's not goin'. He's got as
+much fear as a canary has whiskers. He doesn't want to give evidence,
+he says, but he wants to see the law do its work. Burlingame 'll try to
+make it out manslaughter; but there's a widow with children to suffer
+for the manslaughter, just as much as though it was murder, and there
+isn't a man that doesn't think murder was the game, and the grand joory
+had that idea too.
+
+"Between Gus Burlingame and that M'Mahon bunch of horse-thieves,
+the stranger in a strange land 'll have to keep his eyes open, I'm
+thinkin'."
+
+"Divils me darlin', his eyes are open all right," returned Deely.
+
+"Still, I'd like to jog his elbow," Sibley answered reflectively. "It
+couldn't do any harm, and it might do good."
+
+Deely nodded good-naturedly. "If you want to so bad as that, John,
+you've got the chance, for he's up at the Sovereign Bank now. I seen
+him leave the Great Overland Railway Bureau ten minutes ago and get away
+quick to the bank."
+
+"What's he got on at the bank and the railway?"
+
+"Some big deal, I guess. I've seen him with Studd Bradley."
+
+"The Great North Trust Company boss?"
+
+"On it, my boy, on it--the other day as thick as thieves. Studd Bradley
+doesn't knit up with an outsider from the old country unless there's
+reason for it--good gold-currency reasons."
+
+"A land deal, eh?" ventured Sibley. "What did I say--speculation,
+that's his vice, same as mine! P'r'aps that's what ruined him. Cards,
+speculation, what's the difference? And he's got a quiet look, same as
+me."
+
+Deely laughed loudly. "And bursts out same as you! Quiet one hour like
+a mill-pond or a well, and then--swhish, he's blazin'! He's a volcano in
+harness, that spalpeen."
+
+"He's a volcano that doesn't erupt when there's danger," responded
+Sibley. "It's when there's just fun on that his volcano gets loose. I'll
+go wait for him at the bank. I got a fellow-feeling for Mr. Kerry. I'd
+like to whisper in his ear that he'd better be lookin' sharp for the
+M'Mahon Gang, and that if he's a man of peace he'd best take a holiday
+till after next week, or get smallpox or something."
+
+The two friends lounged slowly up the street, and presently parted near
+the door of the bank. As Sibley waited, his attention was drawn to a
+window on the opposite side of the street at an angle from themselves.
+The light was such that the room was revealed to its farthest corners,
+and Sibley noted that three men were evidently carefully watching the
+bank, and that one of the men was Studd Bradley, the so-called boss. The
+others were local men of some position commercially and financially in
+the town. Sibley did not give any sign that he noticed the three men,
+but he watched carefully from under the rim of his hat. His imagination,
+however, read a story of consequence in the secretive vigilance of the
+three, who evidently thought that, standing far back in the room, they
+could not be seen.
+
+Presently the door of the bank opened, and Sibley saw Studd Bradley lean
+forward eagerly, then draw back and speak hurriedly to his companions,
+using a gesture of satisfaction.
+
+"Something damn funny there!" Sibley said to himself, and stepped
+forward to Crozier with a friendly exclamation. Crozier turned rather
+impatiently, for his face was aflame with some exciting reflection. At
+this moment his eyes were the deepest blue that could be imagined--an
+almost impossible colour, like that of the Mediterranean when it
+reflects the perfect sapphire of the sky. There was something almost
+wonderful in their expression. A woman once said as she looked at a
+picture of Herschel, whose eyes had the unworldly gaze of the great
+dreamer looking beyond this sphere, "The stars startled him." Such a
+look was in Crozier's eyes now, as though he was seeing the bright end
+of a long road, the desire of his soul.
+
+That, indeed, was what he saw. After two years of secret negotiation
+he had (inspired by information dropped by Jesse Bulrush, his
+fellow-boarder) made definite arrangements for a big land-deal in
+connection with the route of a new railway and a town-site, which would
+mean more to him than any one could know. If it went through, he would,
+for an investment of ten thousand dollars, have a hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars; and that would solve an everlasting problem for him.
+
+He had reached a critical point in his enterprise. All that was wanted
+now was ten thousand dollars in cash to enable him to close the great
+bargain and make his hundred and fifty thousand. But to want ten
+thousand dollars and to get it in a given space of time, when you have
+neither securities, cash, nor real estate, is enough to keep you awake
+at night. Crozier had been so busy with the delicate and difficult
+negotiations that he had not deeply concerned himself with the absence
+of the necessary ten thousand dollars. He thought he could get the
+money at any time, so good was the proposition; and it was best to defer
+raising it to the last moment lest some one learning the secret should
+forestall him. He must first have the stake to be played for before
+he moved to get the cash with which to make the throw. This is not
+generally thought a good way, but it was his way, and it had yet to be
+tested.
+
+There was no cloud of apprehension, however, in Crozier's eyes as they
+met those of Sibley. He liked Sibley. At this point it is not necessary
+to say why. The reason will appear in due time. Sibley's face had always
+something of that immobility and gravity which Crozier's face had part
+of the time-paler, less intelligent, with dark lines and secret
+shadows absent from Crozier's face; but still with some of the El Greco
+characteristics which marked so powerfully that of the man who passed as
+J. G. Kerry.
+
+"Ah, Sibley," he said, "glad to see you! Anything I can do for you?"
+
+"It's the other way if there's any doing at all," was the quick
+response.
+
+"Well, let's walk along together," remarked Crozier a little
+abstractedly, for he was thinking hard about his great enterprise.
+
+"We might be seen," said Sibley, with an obvious undermeaning meant to
+provoke a question.
+
+Crozier caught the undertone of suggestion. "Being about to burgle the
+bank, it's well not to be seen together--eh?"
+
+"No, I'm not in on that business, Mr. Kerry. I'm for breaking banks, not
+burgling 'em," was the cheerful reply.
+
+They laughed, but Crozier knew that the observant gambling farmer was
+not talking at haphazard. They had met on the highway, as it were, many
+times since Crozier had come to Askatoon, and Crozier knew his man.
+
+"Well, what are we going to do, and who will see us if we do it?"
+Crozier asked briskly.
+
+"Studd Bradley and his secret-service corps have got their eyes on this
+street--and on you," returned Sibley dryly.
+
+Crozier's face sobered and his eyes became less emotional. "I don't see
+them anywhere," he answered, but looking nowhere.
+
+"They're in Gus Burlingame's office. They had you under observation
+while you were in the bank."
+
+"I couldn't run off with the land, could I?" Crozier remarked dryly, yet
+suggestively, in his desire to see how much Sibley knew.
+
+"Well, you said it was a bank. I've no more idea what it is you're
+tryin' to run off with than I know what an ace is goin' to do when
+there's a joker in the pack," remarked Sibley; "but I thought I'd tell
+you that Bradley and his lot are watchin' you gettin' ready to run."
+Then he hastily told what he had seen.
+
+Crozier was reassured. It was natural that Bradley & Co. should take an
+interest in his movements. They would make a pile of money if he pulled
+off the deal-far more than he would. It was not strange that they should
+watch his invasion of the bank. They knew he wanted money, and a bank
+was the place to get it. That was the way he viewed the matter on the
+instant. He replied to Sibley cheerfully. "A hundred to one is a lot
+when you win it," he said enigmatically.
+
+"It depends on how much you have on," was Sibley's quiet reply--"a
+dollar or a thousand dollars.
+
+"If you've got a big thing on, and you've got an outsider that you think
+is goin' to win and beat the favourite, it's just as well to run no
+risks. Believe me, Mr. Kerry, if you've got anything on that asks for
+your attention, it'd be sense and saving if you didn't give evidence at
+the Logan Trial next week. It's pretty well-guessed what you're goin' to
+say and what you know, and you take it from me, the M'Mahon mob that's
+behind Logan 'll have it in for you. They're terrors when they get
+goin', and if your evidence puts one of that lot away, ther'll be
+trouble for you. I wouldn't do it--honest, I wouldn't. I've been out
+West here a good many years, and I know the place and the people. It's
+a good place, and there's lots of first-class people here, but there's
+a few offscourings that hang like wolves on the edge of the sheepfold,
+ready to murder and git."
+
+"That was what you wanted to see me about, wasn't it?" Crozier asked
+quietly.
+
+"Yes; the other was just a shot on the chance. I don't like to see men
+sneakin' about and watching. If they do, you can bet there's something
+wrong. But the other thing, the Logan Trial business, is a dead
+certainty. You're only a new-comer, in a kind of way, and you don't
+need to have the same responsibility as the rest. The Law'll get what it
+wants whether you chip in or not. Let it alone. What's the Law ever done
+for you that you should run risks for it? It's straight talk, Mr. Kerry.
+Have a cancer in the bowels next week or go off to see a dyin' brother,
+but don't give evidence at the Logan Trial--don't do it. I got a
+feeling--I'm superstitious--all sportsmen are. By following my instincts
+I've saved myself a whole lot in my time."
+
+"Yes; all men that run chances have their superstitions, and they're
+not to be sneered at," replied Crozier thoughtfully. "If you see black,
+don't play white; if you see a chestnut crumpled up, put your money
+on the bay even when the chestnut is a favourite. Of course you're
+superstitious, Sibley. The tan and the green baize are covered with
+ghosts that want to help you, if you'll let them."
+
+Sibley's mouth opened in amazement. Crozier was speaking with the look
+of the man who hypnotises himself, who "sees things," who dreams as only
+the gambler and the plunger on the turf do dream, not even excepting the
+latter-day Irish poets.
+
+"Say, I was right what I said to Deely--I was right," remarked Sibley
+almost huskily, for it seemed to him as though he had found a long-lost
+brother. No man except one who had staked all he had again and again
+could have looked or spoken like that.
+
+Crozier looked at the other thoughtfully for a moment, then he said:
+
+"I don't know what you said to Deely, but I do know that I'm going to
+the Logan Trial in spite of the M'Mahon mob. I don't feel about it as
+you do. I've got a different feeling, Sibley. I'll play the game out.
+I shall not hedge. I shall not play for safety. It's everything on the
+favourite this time."
+
+"You'll excuse me, but Gus Burlingame is for the defence, and he's got
+his knife into you," returned Sibley.
+
+"Not yet." Crozier smiled sardonically.
+
+"Well, I apologise, but what I've said, Mr. Kerry, is said as man to
+man. You're ridin' game in a tough place, as any man has to do who
+starts with only his pants and his head on. That's the way you begun
+here, I guess; and I don't want to see your horse tumble because some
+one throws a fence-rail at its legs. Your class has enemies always in a
+new country--jealousy, envy."
+
+The lean, aristocratic, angular Crozier, with a musing look on his long
+face, grown ascetic again, as he held out his hand and gripped that of
+the other, said warmly: "I'm just as much obliged to you as though I
+took your advice, Sibley. I am not taking it, but I am taking a pledge
+to return the compliment to you if ever I get the chance."
+
+"Well, most men get chances of that kind," was the gratified reply of
+the gambling farmer, and then Crozier turned quickly and entered the
+doorway of the British Bank, the rival of that from which he had turned
+in brave disappointment a little while before.
+
+Left alone in the street, Sibley looked back with the instinct of the
+hunter. As he expected, he saw a head thrust out from the window where
+Studd Bradley and his friends had been. There was an hotel opposite the
+British Bank. He entered and waited. Bradley and one of his companions
+presently came in and seated themselves far back in the shadow, where
+they could watch the doorway of the bank.
+
+It was quite a half-hour before Shiel Crozier emerged from the bank. His
+face was set and pale. For an instant he stood as though wondering which
+way to go, then he moved up the street the way he had come.
+
+Sibley heard a low, poisonous laugh of triumph rankle through the
+hotel office. He turned round. Bradley, the over-fed, over-confident,
+over-estimated financier, laid a hand on the shoulder of his companion
+as they moved towards the door.
+
+"That's another gate shut," he said. "I guess we can close 'em all with
+a little care. It's working all right. He's got no chance of raising the
+cash," he added, as the two passed the chair where Sibley sat--with his
+hat over his eyes, chewing an unlighted cigar.
+
+"I don't know what it is, but it's dirt--and muck at that," John Sibley
+remarked as he rose from his chair and followed the two into the street.
+
+Bradley and his friends were trying steadily to close up the avenues of
+credit to the man to whom the success of his enterprise meant so much.
+To crowd him out would mean an extra hundred and fifty thousand dollars
+for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
+
+What the case was in which Shiel Crozier was to give evidence is not
+important; what came from the giving of his testimony is all that
+matters; and this story would never have been written if he had not
+entered the witness-box.
+
+A court-room at any time seems a little warmer than any other spot
+to all except the prisoner; but on a July day it is likely to be a
+punishment for both innocent and guilty. A man had been killed by one
+of the group of toughs called locally the M'Mahon Gang, and against the
+charge of murder that of manslaughter had been set up in defence; and
+manslaughter might mean jail for a year or two or no jail at all. Any
+evidence which justified the charge of murder would mean not jail, but
+the rope in due course; for this was not Montana or Idaho, where the
+law's delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed.
+
+The court-room of Askatoon was crowded to suffocation, for the M'Mahons
+were detested, and the murdered man had a good reputation in the
+district. Besides, a widow and three children mourned their loss, and
+the widow was in court. Also Crozier's evidence was expected to be
+sensational, and to prove the swivel on which the fate of the accused
+man would hang. Among those on the inside it was also known that the
+clever but dissipated Augustus Burlingame, the counsel for the prisoner,
+had a grudge against Crozier,--no one quite knew why except Kitty Tynan
+and her mother, and that cross-examination would be pressed mercilessly
+when Crozier entered the witness-box. As Burlingame came into the
+court-room he said to the Young Doctor--he was always spoken of as the
+Young Doctor in Askatoon, though he had been there a good many years
+and he was no longer as young as he looked--who was also called as a
+witness, "We'll know more about Mr. J. G. Kerry when this trial is over
+than will suit his book." It did not occur to Augustus Burlingame that
+in Crozier, who knew why he had fled the house of the showy but virtuous
+Mrs. Tynan, he might find a witness of a mental and moral calibre with
+baffling qualities and some gift of riposte.
+
+Crozier entered the witness-box at a stage when excitement was at fever
+height; for the M'Mahon Gang had given evidence which every one believed
+to be perjured; and the widow of the slain man was weeping bitterly in
+her seat because of noxious falsehoods sworn against her honest husband.
+
+There was certainly something credible and prepossessing in the look of
+Crozier. He might be this or that, but he carried no evil or vice of
+character in his face. He was in his grave mood this summer afternoon.
+There he stood with his long face and the very heavy eyebrows,
+clean-shaven, hard-bitten, as though by wind and weather, composed
+and forceful, the mole on his chin a kind of challenge to the
+vertical dimple in his cheek, his high forehead more benevolent than
+intellectual, his brown hair faintly sprinkled with grey and a bit
+unmanageable, his fathomless eyes shining. "No man ought to have such
+eyes," remarked a woman present to the Young Doctor, who abstractedly
+nodded assent, for, like Malachi Deely and John Sibley, he himself had a
+theory about Crozier; and he had a fear of what the savage enmity of the
+morally diseased Burlingame might do. He had made up his mind that so
+intense a scrupulousness as Crozier had shown since coming to Askatoon
+had behind it not only character, but the rigidity of a set purpose; and
+that view was supported by the stern economy of Crozier's daily life,
+broken only by sudden bursts of generosity for those in need.
+
+In the box Crozier kept his eye on the crown attorney, who prosecuted,
+and on the judge. He appeared not to see any one in the court-room,
+though Kitty Tynan had so placed herself that he must see her if he
+looked at the audience at all. Kitty thought him magnificent as he told
+his story with a simple parsimony but a careful choice of words which
+made every syllable poignant with effect. She liked him in his grave
+mood even better than when he was aflame with an internal fire of his
+own creation, when he was almost wildly vivid with life.
+
+"He's two men," she had often said to herself; and she said it now
+as she looked at him in the witness-box, measuring out his words and
+measuring off at the same time the span of a murderer's life; for
+when the crown attorney said to the judge that he had concluded his
+examination there was no one in the room--not even the graceless
+Burlingame--who did not think the prisoner guilty.
+
+"That is all," the crown attorney said to Crozier as he sank into his
+chair, greatly pleased with one of the best witnesses who had ever been
+through his hands--lucid, concentrated, exact, knowing just where he
+was going and reaching his goal without meandering. Crozier was about to
+step down when Burlingame rose.
+
+"I wish to ask a few questions," he said.
+
+Crozier bowed and turned, again grasping the rail of the witness-box
+with one hand, while with an air of cogitation and suspense he stroked
+his chin with the long fingers of the other hand.
+
+"What is your name?" asked Burlingame in a tone a little louder than
+he had used hitherto in the trial, indeed even louder than lawyers
+generally use when they want to bully a witness. In this case it was as
+though he wished to summon the attention of the court.
+
+For a second Crozier's fingers caught his chin almost spasmodically. The
+real meaning of the question, what lay behind it, flashed to his mind.
+He saw in lightning illumination the course Burlingame meant to pursue.
+For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, and he turned slightly
+pale, but the blue of his eyes took on a new steely look--a look also
+of striking watchfulness, as of an animal conscious of its danger, yet
+conscious too of its power when at bay.
+
+"What is your name?" Burlingame asked again in a somewhat louder tone,
+and turned to look at the jury, as if bidding them note the hesitation
+of the witness; though, indeed, the waiting was so slight that none but
+a trickster like Burlingame would have taken advantage of it, and only
+then when there was much behind.
+
+For a moment longer Crozier remained silent, getting strength, as it
+were, and saying to himself, "What does he know?" and then, with a
+composed look of inquiry at the judge, who appeared to take no notice,
+he said: "I have already, in evidence, given my name to the court."
+
+"Witness, what is your name?" again almost shouted the lawyer, with a
+note of indignation in his voice, as though here was a dangerous fellow
+committing a misdemeanour in their very presence. He spread out his
+hands to the jury, as though bidding them observe, if they would, this
+witness hesitating in answer to a simple, primary question--a witness
+who had just sworn a man's life away!
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"James Gathorne Kerry, as I have already given it to the court," was the
+calm reply.
+
+"Where do you live?"
+
+"In Askatoon, as I have already said in evidence; and if it is necessary
+to give my domicile, I live at the house of Mrs. Tyndall Tynan, Pearl
+Street--as you know so well."
+
+The tone in which he uttered the last few words was such that even the
+judge pricked up his ears.
+
+A look of hatred came into the decadent but able lawyer's face.
+
+"Where do you live when you are at home?"
+
+"Mrs. Tynan's house is the only home I have at present."
+
+He was outwitting the pursuer so far, but it only gained him time, as he
+knew; and he knew also that no suggestive hint concerning the episode at
+Mrs. Tynan's, when Burlingame was asked to leave her house, would be of
+any avail now.
+
+"Where were you born?"
+
+"In Ireland."
+
+"What part of Ireland?"
+
+"County Kerry."
+
+"What place--what town or city or village in County Kerry?"
+
+"In neither."
+
+"What house, then--what estate?" Burlingame was more than nettled; and
+he sharpened his sword.
+
+"The estate of Castlegarry."
+
+"What was your name in Ireland?"
+
+In the short silence that followed, the quick-drawn breath of many
+excited and some agitated people could be heard. Among the latter were
+Mrs. Tynan and her daughter and Malachi Deely; among those who held
+their breath in suspense were John Sibley, Studd Bradley the financier,
+and the Young Doctor. The swish of a skirt seemed ridiculously loud
+in the hush, and the scratching of the judge's quill pen was noisily
+irritating.
+
+"My name in Ireland was James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, commonly called
+Shiel Crozier," came the even reply from the witness-box.
+
+"James Shiel Gathorne Crozier in Ireland, but James Gathorne Kerry
+here!" Burlingame turned to the jury significantly. "What other name
+have you been known by in or out of Ireland?" he added sharply to
+Crozier. "No other name so far as I know."
+
+"No other name so far as you know," repeated the lawyer in a sarcastic
+tone intended to impress the court.
+
+"Who was your father?"
+
+"John Gathorne Crozier."
+
+"Any title?"
+
+"He was a baronet."
+
+"What was his business?"
+
+"He had no profession, though he had business, of course."
+
+"Ah, he lived by his wits?"
+
+"No, he was not a lawyer! I have said he had no profession. He lived on
+his money on his estate."
+
+The judge waved down the laughter at Burlingame's expense.
+
+"In official documents what was his description?" snarled Burlingame.
+
+"'Gentleman' was his designation in official documents."
+
+"You, then, were the son of a gentleman?" There was a hateful suggestion
+in the tone.
+
+"I was."
+
+"A legitimate son?"
+
+Nothing in Crozier's face showed what he felt, except his eyes, and they
+had a look in them which might well have made his questioner shrink. He
+turned calmly to the judge.
+
+"Your honour, does this bear upon the case? Must I answer this legal
+libertine?"
+
+At the word libertine, the judge, the whole court, and the audience
+started; but it was presently clear the witness meant that the
+questioner was abusing his legal privileges, though the people present
+interpreted it another way, and quite rightly.
+
+The reply of the judge was in favour of the lawyer. "I do not quite see
+the full significance of the line of defence, but I think I must allow
+the question," was the judge's gentle and reluctant reply, for he
+was greatly impressed by this witness, by his transparent honesty and
+straightforwardness.
+
+"Were you a legitimate son of John Gathorne Crozier and his wife?" asked
+Burlingame.
+
+"Yes, a legitimate son," answered Crozier in an even voice.
+
+"Is John Gathorne Crozier still living?"
+
+"I said that gentleman was his designation in official documents. I
+supposed that would convey the fact that he was not living, but I see
+you do not quickly grasp a point."
+
+Burlingame was stung by the laughter in the court and ventured a
+riposte.
+
+"But is once a gentleman always a gentleman an infallible rule?"
+
+"I suppose not; I did not mean to convey that; but once a rogue always a
+bad lawyer holds good in every country," was Crozier's comment in a low,
+quiet voice which stirred and amused the audience again.
+
+"I must ask counsel to put questions which have some relevance even to
+his own line of defence," remarked the judge sternly. "This is not a
+corner grocery."
+
+Burlingame bowed. He had had a facer, but he had also shown the witness
+to have been living under an assumed name. That was a good start.
+He hoped to add to the discredit. He had absolutely no knowledge of
+Crozier's origin and past; but he was in a position to find it out if
+Crozier told the truth on oath, and he was sure he would.
+
+"Where was your domicile in the old country?" Burlingame asked.
+
+"In County Kerry--with a flat in London."
+
+"An estate in County Kerry?"
+
+"A house and two thousand acres."
+
+"Is it your property still?"
+
+"It is not."
+
+"You sold it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"If you did not sell, how is it that you do not own it?"
+
+"It was sold for me--in spite of me."
+
+The judge smiled, the people smiled, the jury smiled. Truly, though a
+life-history was being exposed with incredible slowness--"like pulling
+teeth," as the Young Doctor said--it was being touched off with
+laughter.
+
+"You were in debt?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"How did you get into debt?"
+
+"By spending more than my income."
+
+If Askatoon had been proud of its legal talent in the past it had now
+reason for revising its opinion. Burlingame was frittering away the
+effect of his inquiry by elaboration of details. What he gained by the
+main startling fact he lost in the details by which the witness scored.
+He asked another main question.
+
+"Why did you leave Ireland?"
+
+"To make money."
+
+"You couldn't do it there?"
+
+"They were too many for me over there, so I thought I'd come here,"
+slyly answered Crozier, and with a grave face; at which the solemn scene
+of a prisoner being tried for his life was shaken by a broad smiling,
+which in some cases became laughter haughtily suppressed by the court
+attendant.
+
+"Have you made money here?"
+
+"A little--with expectations."
+
+"What was your income in Ireland?"
+
+"It began with three thousand pounds--"
+
+"Fifteen thousand dollars about?"
+
+"About that--about a lawyer's fee for one whisper to a client less than
+that. It began with that and ended with nothing."
+
+"Then you escaped?"
+
+"From creditors, lawyers, and other such? No, I found you here."
+
+The judge intervened again almost harshly on the laughter of the court,
+with the remark that a man was being tried for his life; that ribaldry
+was out of place; and that, unless the course pursued by the counsel
+was to discredit the reliability of the character of the witness, the
+examination was in excess of the privilege of counsel.
+
+"Your honour has rightly apprehended what my purpose is," Burlingame
+said deprecatingly. He then turned to Crozier again, and his voice
+rose as it did when he began the examination. It was as though he was
+starting all over again.
+
+"What was it compelled" (he was boldly venturing) "you to leave Ireland
+at last? What was the incident which drove you out from the land where
+you were born--from being the owner of two thousand acres"--
+
+"Partly bog," interposed Crozier.
+
+"--From being the owner of two thousand acres to becoming a kind of
+head-groom on a ranch? What was the cause of your flight?"
+
+"Flight! I came in one of the steamers of the Company for which your
+firm are the agents. Eleven days it took to come from Glasgow to
+Quebec."
+
+Again the court rippled, again the attendant intervened.
+
+Burlingame was nonplussed this time, but he gathered himself together.
+
+"What was the process of law which forced you to leave your own land?"
+
+"None at all."
+
+"What were your debts when you left?"
+
+"None at all."
+
+"How much was the last debt you paid?"
+
+"Two thousand five hundred pounds."
+
+"What was its nature?"
+
+"It was a debt of honour--do you understand?" The subtle challenge of
+the voice, the sarcasm, was not lost. Again there was a struggle on the
+part of the audience not to laugh outright, and so be driven from the
+court as had been threatened.
+
+The judge interposed again with the remark, not very severe in tone,
+that the witness was not in the box to ask questions, but to answer
+them. At the same time he must remind counsel that the examination must
+discontinue unless something more relevant immediately appeared in the
+evidence.
+
+There was silence again for a moment, and even Crozier himself seemed to
+steel himself for a question he felt was coming.
+
+"Are you married or single?" asked Burlingame, and he did not need to
+raise his voice to summon the interest of the court.
+
+"I was married."
+
+One person in the audience nearly cried out. It was Kitty Tynan. She
+had never allowed herself to think of that, but even if she had, what
+difference could it make whether he was married or single, since he was
+out of her star?
+
+"Are you not married now?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"You mean you do not know if you have been divorced?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You mean your wife is dead?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What do you mean? That you do not know whether your wife is living or
+dead?"
+
+"Quite so."
+
+"Have you heard from her since you saw her last?"
+
+"I had one letter."
+
+Kitty Tynan thought of the unopened letter in a woman's handwriting in
+the green baize desk in her mother's house.
+
+"No more?"
+
+"No more."
+
+"Are we to understand that you do not know whether your wife is living
+or dead?"
+
+"I have no information that she is dead."
+
+"Why did you leave her?"
+
+"I have not said that I left her. Primarily I left Ireland."
+
+"Assuming that she is alive, your wife will not live with you?"
+
+"Ah, what information have you to that effect?" The judge informed
+Crozier that he must not ask questions of counsel.
+
+"Why is she not with you here?"
+
+"As you said, I am only picking up a living here, and even the passage
+by your own second-class steamship line is expensive."
+
+The judge suppressed a smile. He greatly liked the witness.
+
+"Do you deny that you parted from your wife in anger?"
+
+"When I am asked that question I will try to answer it. Meanwhile, I do
+not deny what has not been put before me in the usual way."
+
+Here the judge sternly rebuked the counsel, who ventured upon one last
+question.
+
+"Have you any children?"
+
+"None."
+
+"Has your brother, who inherited, any children?"
+
+"None that I know of."
+
+"Are you the heir-presumptive to the baronetcy?"
+
+"I am."
+
+"Yet your wife will not live with you?"
+
+"Call Mrs. Crozier as a witness and see. Meanwhile, I am not upon my
+trial."
+
+He turned to the judge, who promptly called upon Burlingame to conclude
+his examination.
+
+Burlingame asked two questions more.
+
+"Why did you change your name when you came here?"
+
+"I wanted to obliterate myself."
+
+"I put it to you, that what you want is to avoid the outraged law of
+your own country."
+
+"No--I want to avoid the outrageous lawyers of yours."
+
+Again there was a pause in the proceedings, and on a protest from the
+crown attorney the judge put an end to the cross-examination with the
+solemn reminder that a man was being tried for his life, and that the
+present proceedings were a lamentable reflection on the levity of human
+nature--in Askatoon. Turning with friendly scrutiny to Crozier, he said:
+
+"In the early stage of his examination the witness informed the court
+that he had made a heavy loss through a debt of honour immediately
+before leaving England. Will he say in what way he incurred the
+obligation? Are we to assume that it was through gambling-card-playing,
+or other games of chance?"
+
+"Through backing the wrong horse," was Crozier's instant reply.
+
+"That phrase is often applied to mining or other unreal flights for
+fortune," said the judge, with a dry smile.
+
+"This was a real horse on a real flight to the winning-post," added
+Crozier, with a quirk at the corner of his mouth.
+
+"Honest contest with man or horse is no crime, but it is tragedy to
+stake all on the contest and lose," was the judge's grave and pedagogic
+comment. "We shall now hear from the counsel for defence his reason for
+conducting his cross-examination on such unusual lines. Latitude of this
+kind is only permissible if it opens up any weakness in the case against
+the prisoner."
+
+The judge thus did Burlingame a good turn as well as Crozier, by
+creating an atmosphere of gravity, even of tragedy, in which Burlingame
+could make his speech in defence of the prisoner.
+
+Burlingame started hesitatingly, got into his stride, assembled the
+points of his defence with the skill of which he really was capable. He
+made a strong appeal for acquittal, but if not acquittal, then a verdict
+of manslaughter. He showed that the only real evidence which could
+convict his man of murder was that of the witness Crozier. If he had
+been content to discredit evidence of the witness by an adroit but
+guarded misuse of the facts he had brought out regarding Crozier's past,
+to emphasise the fact that he was living under an assumed name and that
+his bona fides was doubtful, he might have impressed the jury to some
+slight degree. He could not, however, control the malice he felt, and he
+was smarting from Crozier's retorts. He had a vanity easily lacerated,
+and he was now too savage to abate the ferocity of his forensic attack.
+He sat down, however, with a sure sense of failure. Every orator
+knows when he is beating the air, even when his audience is quiet and
+apparently attentive.
+
+The crown attorney was a man of the serenest method and of cold,
+unforensic logic. He had a deadly precision of speech, a very remarkable
+memory, and a great power of organising and assembling his facts. There
+was little left of Burlingame's appeal when he sat down. He declared
+that to discredit Crozier's evidence because he chose to use another
+name than his own, because he was parted from his wife, because he left
+England practically penniless to earn an honest living--no one had
+shown it was not--was the last resort of legal desperation. It was
+an indefensible thing to endeavour to create prejudice against a man
+because of his own evidence given with great frankness. Not one single
+word of evidence had the defence brought to discredit Crozier, save by
+Crozier's own word of mouth; and if Crozier had cared to commit perjury,
+the defence could not have proved him guilty of it. Even if Crozier had
+not told the truth as it was, counsel for the defence would have found
+it impossible to convict him of falsehood. But even if Crozier was a
+perjurer, justice demanded that his evidence should be weighed as truth
+from its own inherent probability and supported by surrounding facts.
+In a long experience he had never seen animus against a witness so
+recklessly exhibited as by counsel in this case.
+
+The judge was not quite so severe in his summing up, but he did say of
+Crozier that his direct replies to Burlingame's questions, intended
+to prejudice him in the eyes of the community into which he had come a
+stranger, bore undoubted evidence of truth; for if he had chosen to say
+what might have saved him from the suspicions, ill or well founded, of
+his present fellow-citizens, he might have done so with impunity, save
+for the reproach of his own conscience. On the whole, the judge summed
+up powerfully against the prisoner Logan, with the result that the jury
+were not out for more than a half-hour. Their verdict was, guilty of
+murder.
+
+In the scene which followed, Crozier dropped his head into his hand and
+sat immovable as the judge put on the black cap and delivered sentence.
+When the prisoner left the dock, and the crowd began to disperse,
+satisfied that justice had been done--save in that small circle where
+the M'Mahons were supreme--Crozier rose with other witnesses to leave.
+As he looked ahead of him the first face he saw was that of Kitty Tynan,
+and something in it startled him. Where had he seen that look before?
+Yes, he remembered. It was when he was twenty-one and had been sent away
+to Algiers because he was falling in love with a farmer's daughter. As
+he drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those
+long years ago, he had seen the girl's face looking at him from the
+window of a labourer's cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied
+desolation haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married
+and gone to live in Scotland--that place of torment for an Irish soul.
+
+The look in Kitty Tynan's face reminded him of that farmer's lass in his
+boyhood's history. He was to blame then--was he to blame now? Certainly
+not consciously, not by any intended word or act. Now he met her eyes
+and smiled at her, not gaily, not gravely, but with a kind of whimsical
+helplessness; for she was the first to remind him that he was leaving
+the court-room in a different position (if not a different man) from
+that in which he entered it. He had entered the court-room as James
+Gathorne Kerry, and he was leaving it as Shiel Crozier; and somehow
+James Gathorne Kerry had always been to himself a different man
+from Shiel Crozier, with different views, different feelings, if not
+different characteristics.
+
+He saw faces turned to him, a few with intense curiosity, fewer
+still with a little furtiveness, some with amusement, and many with
+unmistakable approval; for one thing was clear, if his own evidence
+was correct: he was the son of a baronet, he was heir-presumptive to
+a baronetcy, and he had scored off Augustus Burlingame in a way which
+delighted a naturally humorous people. He noted, however, that the nod
+which Studd Bradley, the financier, gave him had in it an enigmatic
+something which puzzled him. Surely Bradley could not be prejudiced
+against him because of the evidence he had given. There was nothing
+criminal in living under an assumed name, which, anyhow, was his own
+name in three-fourths of it, and in the other part was the name of the
+county where he was born.
+
+"Divils me own, I told you he was up among the dukes," said Malachi
+Deely to John Sibley as they came out. "And he's from me own county, and
+I know the name well enough; an' a damn good name it is. The bulls of
+Castlegarry was famous in the south of Ireland."
+
+"I've a warm spot for him. I was right, you see. Backing horses ruined
+him," said Sibley in reply; and he looked at Crozier admiringly.
+
+There is the communion of saints, but nearer and dearer is the communion
+of sinners; for a common danger is their bond, and that is even more
+than a common hope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. "STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE"
+
+On the evening of the day of the trial, Mrs. Tynan, having fixed the
+new blind to the window of Shiel Crozier's room, which was on the
+ground-floor front, was lowering and raising it to see if it worked
+properly, when out in the moonlit street she saw a wagon approaching her
+house surrounded and followed by obviously excited men. Once before she
+had seen just such a group nearing her door. That was when her husband
+was brought home to die in her arms. She had a sudden conviction, as,
+holding the blind in her hand, she looked out into the night, that again
+tragedy was to cross her threshold. Standing for an instant under
+the fascination of terror, she recovered herself with a shiver, and,
+stepping down from the chair where she had been fixing the blind, with
+the instinct of real woman, she ran to the bed of the room where she
+was, and made it ready. Why did she feel that it was Shiel Crozier's bed
+which should be made ready? Or did she not feel it? Was it only a dazed,
+automatic act, not connected with the person who was to lie in the bed?
+Was she then a fatalist? Were trouble and sorrow so much her portion
+that to her mind this tragedy, whatever it was, must touch the man
+nearest to her--and certainly Shiel Crozier was far nearer than Jesse
+Bulrush. Quite apart from wealth or position, personality plays a part
+more powerful than all else in the eyes of every woman who has a soul
+which has substance enough to exist at all. Such men as Crozier have
+compensations for "whate'er they lack." It never occurred to Mrs. Tynan
+to go to Jesse Bulrush's room or the room of middle-aged, comely Nurse
+Egan. She did the instinctive thing, as did the woman who sent a man a
+rope as a gift, on the ground that the fortune in his hand said that he
+was born not to be drowned.
+
+Mrs. Tynan's instinct was right. By the time she had put the bed into
+shape, got a bowl of water ready, lighted a lamp, and drawn the bed out
+from the wall, there was a knocking at the door. In a moment she had
+opened it, and was faced by John Sibley, whose hat was off as though
+he were in the presence of death. This gave her a shock, and her eyes
+strove painfully to see the figure which was being borne feet foremost
+over her threshold.
+
+"It's Mr. Crozier?" she asked.
+
+"He was shot coming home here--by the M'Mahon mob, I guess," returned
+Sibley huskily.
+
+"Is--is he dead?" she asked tremblingly. "No. Hurt bad."
+
+"The kindest man--it'd break Kitty's heart--and mine," she added
+hastily, for she might be misunderstood; and John Sibley had shown signs
+of interest in her daughter.
+
+"Where's the Young Doctor?" she asked, catching sight of Crozier's face
+as they laid him on the bed. "He's done the first aid, and he's off
+getting what's needed for the operation. He'll be here in a minute or
+so," said a banker who, a few days before, had refused Crozier credit.
+
+"Gently, gently--don't do it that way," said Mrs. Tynan in sharp reproof
+as they began to take off Crozier's clothes.
+
+"Are you going to stay while we do it?" asked a maker of mineral waters,
+who whined at the prayer meetings of a soul saved and roared at his
+employees like a soul damned.
+
+"Oh, don't be a fool!" was the impatient reply. "I've a grown-up girl
+and I've had a husband. Don't pull at his vest like that. Go away. You
+don't know how. I've had experience--my husband... There, wait till
+I cut it away with the scissors. Cover him with the quilt. Now, then,
+catch hold of his trousers under the quilt, and draw them off slowly....
+There you are--and nothing to shock the modesty of a grown-up woman or
+any other when a life's at stake. What does the Young Doctor say?"
+
+"Hush! He's coming to," interposed the banker. It was as though the
+quiet that followed the removal of his clothes and the touch of Mrs.
+Tynan's hand on his head had called Crozier back from unconsciousness.
+
+The first face he saw was that of the banker. In spite of the loss of
+blood and his pitiable condition, a whimsical expression came to his
+eyes. "Lucky for you you didn't lend me the money," he said feebly.
+
+The banker shook his head. "I'm not thinking of that, Mr. Crozier. God
+knows, I'm not!"
+
+Crozier caught sight of Mrs. Tynan. "It's hard on you to have me brought
+here," he murmured as she took his hand.
+
+"Not so hard as if they hadn't," she replied. "That's what a home's
+for--not just a place for eating and drinking and sleeping."
+
+"It wasn't part of the bargain," he said weakly.
+
+"It was my part of the bargain."
+
+"Here's Kitty," said the maker of mineral waters, as there was the swish
+of a skirt at the door.
+
+"Who are you calling 'Kitty'?" asked the girl indignantly, as they
+motioned her back from the bedside. "There's too many people here,"
+she added abruptly to her mother. "We can take care of him"--she nodded
+towards the bed. "We don't want any help except--except from John
+Sibley, if he will stay, and you too," she added to the banker.
+
+She had not yet looked at the figure on the bed. She felt she could not
+do so while all these people were in the room. She needed time to adjust
+herself to the situation. It was as though she was the authority in the
+household and took control even of her mother. Mrs. Tynan understood.
+She had a great belief in her daughter and admired her cleverness, and
+she was always ready to be ruled by her; it was like being "bossed" by
+the man she had lost.
+
+"Yes, you'd all better go," Mrs. Tynan said. "He wants all the air he
+can get, and I can't make things ready with all of you in the room. Go
+outdoors for a while, anyway. It's summer and you'll not take cold! The
+Young Doctor has work to do, and my girl and I and these two will help
+him plenty." She motioned towards the banker and the gambling farmer.
+
+In a moment the room was cleared of all save the four and Crozier,
+who knew that upon the coming operation depended his life. He had been
+conscious when the Young Doctor said this was so, and he was thinking,
+as he lay there watching these two women out of his nearly closed eyes,
+that he would like to be back in Ireland at Castlegarry with the girl he
+had married and had left without a good-bye near five years gone. If he
+had to die he would like to die at home; and that could not be.
+
+Kitty had the courage to turn towards him now. As she caught sight
+of his face for the first time--she had so far kept her head turned
+away--she became very pale. Then, suddenly, she gathered herself
+together. Going over to the bed, she took the limp hand lying on the
+coverlet.
+
+"Courage, soldier," she said in the colloquialism her father often used,
+and she smiled at Crozier a great-hearted, helpful smile.
+
+"You are a brick of bricks, Kitty Tynan," he whispered, and smiled.
+
+"Here comes the Young Doctor," said Mrs. Tynan as the door opened
+unceremoniously.
+
+"Well, I have to make an excursion," Crozier said, "and I mayn't come
+back. If I don't, au revoir, Kitty."
+
+"You are coming back all right," she answered firmly. "It'll take more
+than a horse-thief's bullet to kill you. You've got to come back. You're
+as tough as nails. And I'll hold your hand all through it--yes, I will!"
+she added to the Young Doctor, who had patted her shoulder and told her
+to go to another room.
+
+"I'm going to help you, doctor-man, if you please," she said, as he
+turned to the box of instruments which his assistant held.
+
+"There's another--one of my colleagues--coming I hope," the Young Doctor
+replied.
+
+"That's all right, but I am staying to see Mr. Crozier through. I said
+I'd hold his hand, and I'm going to do it," she added firmly.
+
+"Very well; put on a big apron, and see that you go through with us if
+you start. No nonsense."
+
+"There'll be no nonsense from me," she answered quietly.
+
+"I want the bed in the middle of the room," the Young Doctor said, and
+the others gently moved it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. A STORY TO BE TOLD
+
+A great surgeon said a few years ago that he was never nervous when
+performing an operation, though there was sometimes a moment when every
+resource of character, skill, and brain came into play. That was when,
+having diagnosed correctly and operated, a new and unexpected seat of
+trouble and peril was exposed, and instant action had to be taken. The
+great man naturally rose to the situation and dealt with it coolly; but
+he paid the price afterwards in his sleep when, night after night, he
+performed the operation over and over again with the same strain on his
+subconscious self.
+
+So it was with Kitty Tynan in her small way. She had insisted on being
+allowed to help at the operation, and the Young Doctor, who had a good
+knowledge of life and knew the stuff in her, consented; and so far as
+the operation was concerned she justified his faith in her. When the
+banker had to leave the room at the sight of the carnage, she remained,
+and she and John Sibley were as cool as the Young Doctor and his
+fellow-anatomist, till it was all over, and Shiel Crozier was started
+again on a safe journey back to health. Then a thing, which would have
+been amusing if it had not been so deeply human, happened. She and John
+Sibley went out of the house together into the moonlit night, and the
+reaction seized them both at the same moment. She gave a gulp and burst
+into tears, and he, though as tall as Crozier, also broke down, and they
+sat on the stump of a tree together, her hand in his, and cried like two
+children.
+
+"Never since I was a little runt--did I--never cried in thirty
+years--and here I am-leaking like a pail!" Thus spoke John Sibley
+in gasps and squeezing Kitty's hand all the time unconsciously, but
+spontaneously, and as part of what he felt. He would not, however, have
+dared to hold her hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to
+hold it, and wanting her also to share his not wholly reputed, though
+far from precarious, existence. He had never got so far as to tell her
+that; but if she had understanding she would realise after to-night what
+he had in his mind. She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of
+his very vital palm, had her turn at explanation. "I wouldn't have broke
+down myself--it was all your fault," she said. "I saw it--yes--in your
+face as we left the house. I'm so glad it's over safe--no one belonging
+to him here, and not knowing if he'd wake up alive or not--I just was
+swamped."
+
+He took up the misty excuse and explanation. "I had a feeling for him
+from the start; and then that Logan Trial to-day, and the way he talked
+out straight, and told the truth to shame the devil--it's what does a
+man good! And going bung over a horserace--that's what got me too, where
+I was young and tender. Swatted that Burlingame every time--one eye,
+two eyes all black, teeth out, nose flattened--called him an
+'outrageous lawyer'--my, that last clip was a good one! You bet he's a
+sport--Crozier."
+
+Kitty nodded eagerly while still wiping her red eyes. "He made the judge
+smile--I saw it, not ten minutes before his honour put on the black cap.
+You couldn't have believed it, if you hadn't seen it--
+
+"Here, let go my hand," she added, suddenly conscious of the enormity
+John Sibley was committing by squeezing it now.
+
+It is perfectly true that she did not quite realise that he had taken
+her hand--that he had taken her hand. She was conscious in a nice,
+sympathetic way that her hand had been taken, but it was lost in the
+abstraction of her emotion.
+
+"Oh, here, let it go quick!" she added--"and not because mother's
+coming, either," she added as the door opened and her mother came
+out--not to spy, not to reproach her daughter for sitting with a man
+in the moonlight at ten o'clock at night, but--good, practical soul--to
+bring them each a cup of beef-tea.
+
+"Here, you two," she said as she hurried to them. "You need something
+after that business in there, and there isn't time to get supper ready.
+It's as good for you as supper, anyway. I don't believe in underfeeding.
+Nothing's too good to swallow."
+
+She watched them sip the tea slowly like two schoolchildren.
+
+"And when you've drunk it you must go right to bed, Kitty," she added
+presently. "You've had your own way, and you saw the thing through; but
+there's always a reaction, and you'll pay for it. It wasn't fit work for
+a girl of your age; but I'm proud of your nerve, and I'm glad you showed
+the Young Doctor what you can do. You've got your father's brains and
+my grit," she added with a sigh of satisfaction. "Come along--bed now,
+Kitty. If you get too tired you'll have bad dreams."
+
+Perhaps she was too tired. In any case she had dreams. Just as the great
+surgeon performed his operation over and over in his sleep, so Kitty
+Tynan, through long hours that night, and for many nights afterwards,
+saw the swift knives, helped to staunch the blood, held the basin,
+disinfected the instruments which had made an attack on the man of men
+in her eyes, and saw the wound stitched up--the last act of the business
+before the Young Doctor turned to her and said, "You'll do wherever
+you're put in life, Miss Kitty Tynan. You're a great girl. And now get
+some fresh air and forget all about it."
+
+Forget all about it! So, the Young Doctor knew what happened after a
+terrific experience like that! In truth, he knew only too well. Great
+surgeons do surgery only and have innumerable operations to give them
+skill; but a country physician and surgeon must be a sane being to keep
+his nerve when called on to use the knife, and he must have a more than
+usual gift for such business. That is what the Young Doctor had; but he
+knew it was not easy to forget those scenes in which man carved the body
+of fellow-man, laying bare the very vitals of existence, seeing "the
+wheels go round."
+
+It haunted Kitty Tynan in the night-time, and perhaps it was that which
+toned down a little the colour of her face--the kind of difference of
+colouring there is between natural gold and 14-carat. But in the daytime
+she was quite happy, and though there was haunting, it was Shiel Crozier
+who, first helpless, then convalescent, was haunted by her presence. It
+gave him pleasure, but it was a pleasure which brought pain. He was
+not so blind that he had not caught at her romance, in which he was
+the central figure--a romance which had not vanished since the day he
+declared in the court-room that he was married, or had been married.
+Kitty's eyes told their own story, and it made him uneasy and
+remorseful. Yet he could not remember when, even for an instant, he had
+played with her. She had always seemed part of a simple family life for
+which he and Jesse Bulrush and her mother and the nurse-Nurse Egan-were
+responsible. What a blessing Nurse Egan had been! Otherwise, all the
+nursing would have been performed by Kitty and her mother, and it
+might well have broken them down, for they were determined to nurse him
+themselves.
+
+When, however, Nurse Egan came back, two days after the operation
+was performed, they included her in the responsibility, as one of
+the family; and as she had no other important case on at the time,
+fortunately she could give Crozier almost undivided attention. She had
+been at first disposed to keep Kitty out of the sick-chamber, as no
+place for a girl, but she soon abandoned that position, for Kitty was
+not the girl ever to think of impropriety. She was primitive and she had
+rather a before-the-flood nature, but she had not the faintest vulgar
+strain in her. Her mind was essentially pure; nothing material in her
+had been awakened. Her greatest joy was to do the many things for the
+patient which a nurse must do--prepare his food, give him drink, adjust
+his pillows, bathe his face and hands, take his temperature; and on his
+part he tried hard to disguise from her the apprehension he felt, and to
+avoid any hint by word or look that he saw anything save the actions of
+a kind heart. True, her views as to what was proper and improper might
+possibly be on a different plane from his own. For instance, he had seen
+girls of her station in the West kiss young men freely--men whom they
+had no thought of marrying; and that was not the custom of his own class
+in his home-country.
+
+As he got well slowly, and life opened out before him again, he felt he
+had to pursue a new course, and in that course he must take account of
+Kitty Tynan, though he could not decide how. He had a deep confidence in
+the Young Doctor, in his judgment and his character; and it was almost
+inevitable that he should tell his life-story to the man whose skill had
+saved him from death in a strange land, with all undone he wanted to do
+ere he returned to a land which was not strange.
+
+The thing happened, as such things do happen, in a quite natural way one
+day when he and the Young Doctor were discussing the probable verdict
+against the man who had shot him--the trial was to come on soon, and
+once again Augustus Burlingame was to be counsel for the defence, and
+once again Crozier would have to appear in a witness-box.
+
+"I think you ought to know, Crozier, that, in view of the trial,
+Burlingame has written to a firm of lawyers in Kerry to get full
+information about your past," the Young Doctor said.
+
+Crozier gave one of those little jerks of the head characteristic of
+him and said: "Why, of course; I knew he would do that after I gave my
+evidence in the Logan Trial." He raised himself on his elbow. "I owe
+you a great deal," he added feelingly, "and I can't repay you in cash or
+kindness for what you have done; but it is due you to tell you my whole
+story, and that is what I propose to do now."
+
+"If you think--"
+
+"I do think; and also I want both Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear
+my story. Better, truer friends a man could not have; and I want them to
+know the worst and the best there is, if there is any best. They and you
+have trusted me, been too good to me, and what I said at the trial is
+not enough. I want to do what I've never done before. I want to tell
+everything. It will do me good; and perhaps as I tell it I'll see myself
+and everything else in a truer light than I've yet seen it all."
+
+"You are sure you want Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear?"
+
+"Absolutely sure."
+
+"They are not in your rank in life, you know."
+
+"They are my friends, and I owe them more than I can say. There is
+nothing they cannot or should not hear. I can say that at least."
+
+"Shall I ask them to come?"
+
+"Yes. Give me a swig of water first. It won't be easy, but--"
+
+He held out his hand, and the Young Doctor grasped it.
+
+Suddenly the latter said: "You are sure you will not be sorry? That it
+is not a mood of the moment due to physical weakness?"
+
+"Quite sure. I determined on it the day I was shot--and before I was
+shot."
+
+"All right." The Young Doctor disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. "HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
+
+The stillness of a summer's day in Prairie Land has all the
+characteristics of music. That is not so paradoxical as it seems. The
+effect of some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the senses,
+a suspension of motion and aggressive life; to reduce existence to mere
+pulsation. It was this kind of feeling which pervaded that region
+of sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story. The sounds that
+sprinkled the general stillness were in themselves sleepy notes of the
+pervasive music of somnolent nature--the sough of the pine at the door,
+the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding beat of the steam-thresher
+out of sight hard by, the purring of the cat in the arms of Kitty Tynan
+as, with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the tale of a life
+as distant from that which she lived as she was from Eve.
+
+She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on; it even seemed to
+her she was listening to a theme beyond her sphere, like some shameless
+eavesdropper at the curtains of a secret ceremonial. Once or twice she
+looked at her mother and at the Young Doctor, as though to reassure
+herself that she was not a vulgar intruder. It was far more impressive
+to her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene at the Logan Trial
+when a man was sentenced to death. It was strangely magnetic, this
+tale of a man's existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the
+mantelpiece, as it mechanically ticked off the time, seemed only part
+of some mysterious machinery of life. Once a dove swept down upon the
+window-sill, and, peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital
+with its deep contralto note, and then fled like a small blue cloud into
+the wide and--as it seemed--everlasting peace beyond the doorway.
+
+There was nothing at all between themselves and the far sky-line save
+little clumps of trees here and there, little clusters of buildings and
+houses--no visible animal life. Everything conspired to give a dignity
+in keeping with the drama of failure being unfolded in the commonplace
+home of the widow Tynan. Yet the home too had its dignity. The engineer
+father had had tastes, and he had insisted on plain, unfigured curtains
+and wallpaper and carpets, when carpets were used; and though his wife
+had at first protested against the unfigured carpets as more difficult
+to keep clean and as showing the dirt too easily, she had come to like
+the one-colour scheme, and in that respect her home had an individuality
+rare in her surroundings.
+
+That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background; for what her
+bright colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes
+and "Axminsters," such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the
+imagination. It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous
+surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been
+arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the
+story; and if it were not a true tale told just as it happened.
+
+Perhaps the tale was the more impressive because of Crozier's deep
+baritone voice, capable, as it was, of much modulation, yet, except
+when he was excited, having a slight monotone like the note of a violin
+with the mute upon the strings.
+
+This was his tale:
+
+"Well, to begin with, I was born at Castlegarry, in Kerry--you know the
+main facts from what I said in court. As a boy I wasn't so bad a sort.
+I had one peculiarity. I always wanted 'to have something on,' as John
+Sibley would say. No matter what it was, I must have something on it.
+And I was very lucky--worse luck!"
+
+They all laughed at the bull. "I feel at home at once," murmured the
+Young Doctor, for he had come from near Enniskillen years agone, and
+there is not so much difference between Enniskillen and Kerry when it
+comes to Irish bulls.
+
+"Worse luck, it was," continued Crozier, "because it made me confident
+of always winning. It's hard to say how early I began to believe I could
+see things that were going to happen. By the hour I used to shake the
+dice on the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes
+shut the numbers about to come up. Of course now and then I saw the
+right numbers; and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated
+the gift I'd be able to be right nearly every time. When I went to a
+horse-race I used to fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see
+beforehand the number of the winner. Again sometimes I was very right
+indeed, and that deepened my confidence in myself. I was always at it.
+I'd try and guess--try and see--the number of the hymn which was on the
+paper in the vicar's hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with
+myself on it. I would bet with myself or with anybody available on any
+conceivable thing--the minutes late a train would be; the pints of
+milk a cow would give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the
+babies that would be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a
+peck of raw potatoes. I was out against the universe. But it wasn't
+serious at all--just a boy's mania--till one day my father met me in
+London when I came down from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club
+in St. James's Street. There was the thing that finished me. I was
+twenty-one, and restless-minded, and with eyes wide open.
+
+"Well, he took me to Thwaite's where I was to become a member, and
+after a little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the
+committee--he was a member of it. He told me to make myself at home,
+and I did so as soon as his back was turned. Almost the first thing with
+which I became sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a
+fascination for me. The binding was very old, and the leather was worn,
+as you will see the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels
+like a nice soap. That book brought me here."
+
+He paused, and in the silence the Young Doctor pushed a glass of milk
+and brandy towards him. He sipped the contents. The others were in
+a state of tension. Kitty Tynan's eyes were fixed on him as though
+hypnotised, and the Young Doctor was scarcely less interested; while the
+widow knitted harder and faster than she had ever done, and she could
+knit very fast indeed.
+
+"It was the betting-book of Thwaite's, and it dated back almost to the
+time of the conquest of Quebec. Great men dead and gone long ago--near
+a hundred and fifty years ago-had put down their bets in the book, for
+Thwaite's was then what it is now, the highest and best sporting club in
+the world."
+
+Kitty Tynan's face had a curious look, for there was a club in Askatoon,
+and it was said that all the "sports" assembled there. She had no idea
+what Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street would look like; but that did
+not matter. She supposed it must be as big as the Askatoon Court House
+at least.
+
+"Bets--bets--bets by men whose names were in every history, and the
+names of their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons; and all betting
+on the oddest things as well as the most natural things in the world.
+Some of the bets made were as mad as the bets I made myself. Oh!
+ridiculous, some of them were; and then again bets on things that
+stirred the world to the centre, from the loss of America to the
+beheading of Louis XVI.
+
+"It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis
+whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government
+which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six
+months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is
+now the United States if they revolted. This would be cheek-by-jowl with
+a bet that an heir would be born to one new-married pair before another
+pair. The very last bet made on the day I opened the book was that Queen
+Victoria would make Lord Salisbury a duke, that a certain gentleman
+known as S. S. could find his own door in St. James's Square, blindfold,
+from the club, and that Corsair would win the Derby.
+
+"For two long hours I sat forgetful of everything around me, while I
+read that record--to me the most interesting the world could show. Every
+line was part of the history of the country, a part of the history of
+many lives, and it was all part of the ritual of the temple of the great
+god Chance. I was fascinated, lost in a land of wonders. Men came and
+went, but silently. At last there entered a gentleman whose picture I
+had so often seen in the papers--a man as well known in the sporting
+world as was Chamberlain in the political world. He was dressed
+spectacularly, but his face oozed good-nature, though his eyes were like
+bright bits of coal. He bred horses, he raced this, he backed that, he
+laid against the other; he was one of the greatest plungers, one of the
+biggest figures on the turf. He had been a kind of god to me--a god in
+a grey frock-coat, with a grey top-hat and field-glasses slung over
+his shoulder; or in a hunting-suit of the most picturesque kind--great
+pockets in a well-fitting coat, splendid striped waistcoat. Well, there,
+I only mention this because it played so big a part in bringing me to
+Askatoon.
+
+"He came up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful
+Adam's fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and
+said, 'Do you mind--for one minute?' and he reached out a hand for the
+book.
+
+"I made way for him, and I suppose admiration showed in my eyes, because
+as he hastily wrote--what a generous scrawl it was!--he said to me,
+'Haven't we met somewhere before? I seem to remember your face.
+
+"Great gentleman, I thought, because it was certain he knew he had never
+seen me before, and I was overcome by the reflection that he wished
+to be civil in that way to me. 'It's my father's face you remember, I
+should think,' I answered. 'He is a member here. I am only a visitor.
+I haven't been elected yet.' 'Ah, we must see to that!' he said with
+a smile, and laid a hand on my shoulder as though he'd known me many a
+year--and I only twenty-one. 'Who is your father?' he asked. When I told
+him he nodded. 'Yes, yes, I know him--Crozier of Castlegarry; but I knew
+his father far better, though he was so much older than me, and indeed
+your grandfather also. Look--in this book is the first bet I ever
+made here after my election to the club, and it was made with your
+grandfather. There's no age in the kingdom of sport, dear lad,' he
+added, laughing--'neither age nor sex nor position nor place. It's the
+one democratic thing in the modern world. It's a republic inside
+this old monarchy of ours. Look, here it is, my first bet with your
+grandfather--and I'm only sixty now!' He smoothed the page with his hand
+in a manner such as I have seen a dean do with his sermon-paper in a
+cathedral puplit. 'Here it is, thirty-six years ago.' He read the bet
+aloud. It was on the Derby, he himself having bet that the Prince of
+Wale's horse would win. 'Your grandfather, dear lad,' he repeated, 'but
+you'll find no bets of mine with your father. He didn't inherit
+that strain, but your grandfather and your great-grandfather had
+it--sportsmen both, afraid of nothing, with big minds, great eyes for
+seeing, and a sense for a winner almost uncanny. Have you got it by any
+chance? Yes, yes, by George and by John, I see you have; you are your
+grandfather to a hair! His portrait is here in the club--in the next
+room. Have a look at it. He was only forty when it was done, and you're
+very like him; the cut of the jib is there.' He took my hand. 'Good-bye,
+dear lad,' he said; 'we'll meet-yes, we'll meet often enough if you
+are like your grandfather. And I'll always like to see you,' he added
+generously.
+
+"'I always wanted to meet you,' I answered. 'I've cut your pictures out
+of the papers to keep them--at Eton and Oxford.' He laughed in great
+good-humour and pride. 'So so, so so, and I am a hero then, with one
+follower! Well, well, dear lad, I don't often go wrong, or anyhow I'm
+oftener right than wrong, and you might do worse than follow me--but no,
+I don't want that responsibility. Go on your own--go on your own.'
+
+"A minute more and he was gone with a wave of the hand, and in
+excitement I picked up the betting-book. It almost took my breath away.
+He had staked a thousand pounds that the favourite of the Derby would
+not win the race, and that one of three outsiders would. As I sat
+overpowered by the magnitude of the bet the door opened, and he appeared
+with another man, not one with whose face I was then familiar, though as
+a duke and owner of great possessions, he was familiar to society. 'I've
+put it down,' he said. 'Sign it, if it's all in order.' This the duke
+did, after apologizing for disturbing me. He looked at me keenly as
+he turned away. 'Not the most elevating literature in the library,'
+he said, smiling ironically. 'If you haven't got a taste for it beyond
+control, don't cultivate it.' He nodded kindly, and left; and again,
+till my father came and found me, I buried myself in that book of
+fate--to me. I found many entries in my grandfather's name, but not one
+in my father's name. I have an idea that when a vice or virtue skips
+one generation, it appears with increased violence or persistence in the
+next, for, passing over my father into my defenceless breast, the spirit
+of sport went mad in me--or almost so. No miser ever had a more cheerful
+and happy hour than I had as I read the betting-book at Thwaites'.
+
+"I became a member of Thwaite's soon after I left Oxford. As some men go
+to the Temple, some to the Stock Exchange, some to Parliament, I went to
+Thwaite's. It was the centre of my interest, and I took chambers in Park
+Place, St. James's Street, a few steps away. Here I met again constantly
+the great sportsman who had noticed me so kindly, and I became his
+follower, his disciple. I had started with him on a wave of prejudice in
+his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had
+staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could
+get with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred
+pounds. What he won--to my youthful eyes-was fabulous. There's no use
+saying what you think--you kind friends, who've always done something
+in life--that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to
+the turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport. You must
+remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin
+of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in
+any generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the
+younger son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary
+for livelihood. If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman,
+had lived, it's hard to tell what I should have become; for steered
+aright, given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have
+become ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another. But there
+it was, she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me. At
+Eton, at Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business
+of life. And when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left
+me, I had only one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman. I had
+a name as a cricketer--"
+
+"Ah--I remember, Crozier of Lammis!" interjected the Young Doctor
+involuntarily. "I'm a north of Ireland man, but I remember--"
+
+"Yes, Lammis," the sick man went on. "Castlegarry was my father's place,
+but my mother left me Lammis. When I got control of it, and of the
+securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn't long in
+making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader.
+He gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed
+horses of my own. But the luck went against him at last, and then, of
+course, against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws
+the cash out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw
+also the whole internal economy out of your body--a ghastly, empty,
+collapsing thing."
+
+Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh. She had once put two hundred dollars in
+a mine--on paper--and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in the
+lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more. When she read a
+fatal telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty,
+collapsing feeling.
+
+Pausing for a moment, in which he sipped some milk, Crozier then
+continued: "At last my leader died, and the see-saw of fortune began for
+me; and a good deal of my sound timber was sawed into logs and made
+into lumber to build some one else's fortune. When things were balancing
+pretty easily, I married. It wasn't a sordid business to restore my
+fortunes--I'll say that for myself; but it wasn't the thing to do, for
+I wasn't secure in my position. I might go on the rocks; but was there
+ever a gambler who didn't believe that he'd pull it off in a big way
+next time, and that the turn of the wheel against him was only to tame
+his spirit? Was there ever a gambler or sportsman of my class who didn't
+talk about the 'law of chances,' on the basis that if red, as it were,
+came up three times, black stood a fair chance of coming up the fourth
+time? A silly enough conclusion; for on the law of chances there's no
+reason why red shouldn't come up three hundred times; and so I found
+that your run of bad luck may be so long that you cannot have a chance
+to recover, and are out of it before the wheel turns in your favour. I
+oughn't to have married."
+
+His voice had changed in tone, his look become most grave, there was
+something very like reverence in his face, and deprecating submission in
+his eyes. His fingers fussed with the rug that covered his knees.
+
+"God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!" remarked the Young
+Doctor to himself, not erroneously reading the expression of Crozier's
+face and the tone of his voice. "There's nothing so unnerving."
+
+"No, I oughtn't to have done it," Crozier went on. "But I will say again
+it wasn't a sordid marriage, though she had great expectations, but
+not immediate; and she was a girl of great character. She was able and
+brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and she knew her own mind, and
+was radiantly handsome."
+
+Kitty Tynan almost sniffed. Through a whole fortnight she had, with a
+courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation
+for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what
+his wife was like. She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman,
+delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw
+in the picture-papers. She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat,
+with a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief
+crossed on her breast, holding a basket of flowers, while a King Charles
+spaniel gambolled at her feet.
+
+This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
+Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
+exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
+afraid of stepping on her train. Was it strange she should think
+that? She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons
+according to her kind and from what she knew of life. So she imagined
+Crozier's wife to have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who
+swept up the dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at
+all to the children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower
+than their ankles. She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a
+man like Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in
+the witness-box as he did; who took the bullet of the assassin with such
+courage; who broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech
+on a filly's flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who,
+anyhow, couldn't be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn't a hand
+like a piece of steel and the skin of an antelope. It was enough to make
+a cat laugh, or a woman cry with rage.
+
+"Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly
+handsome!" There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing
+woman, in velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and
+overbearing, like grey poplin. Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the
+mirror-the half-length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her
+hands clench and her bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive
+calico frock, a thing for Chloe, not for Juno.
+
+She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
+deprecating homage, that "Hush-she-is-coming" in his eyes. What a fool a
+man was where a woman was concerned! Here she had been fighting herself
+for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the
+world, fit to command an array of giants; and she saw him now almost
+breathless as he spoke of a great wild-cat of a woman who ought to be by
+his side now. What sort of a woman was she anyhow, who could let him go
+into exile as he had done and live apart from her all these years,
+while he "slogged away"--that was the Western phrase which came to
+her mind--to pull himself level with things again? Her feet shuffled
+unevenly on the floor, and it would have been a joy to shake the in
+valid there with the rapt look in his face. Unable to bear the situation
+without some demonstration, she got to her feet and caught up the glass
+of brandy and milk with a little exclamation.
+
+"Here," she said, holding the glass to his lips, "here, courage,
+soldier. You don't need to be afraid at a six-thousand-mile range."
+
+The Young Doctor started, for she had said what was in his own mind,
+but what he would not have said for a thousand dollars. It was fortunate
+that Crozier was scarcely conscious of what she was saying. His mind was
+far away. Yet, when she took the glass from him again, he touched her
+arm.
+
+"Nothing is good enough for your friends, is it?" he said gratefully.
+
+"That wouldn't be an excuse for not getting them the best there was at
+hand," she answered with a little laugh, and at least the Young Doctor
+read the meaning of her words.
+
+Presently Crozier, with a sigh, continued: "If I had done what my wife
+wanted from the start, I shouldn't have been here. I'd have saved what
+was left of a fortune, and I'd have had a home of my own."
+
+"Is she earning her living too?" asked Kitty softly, and Crozier did not
+notice the irony under the question.
+
+"She has a home of her own," answered Crozier almost sharply. "Just
+before the worst came to the worst she inherited her fortune--plenty of
+it, as I got near the end of mine. One thing after another had gone.
+I was mortgaged up to the eyes. I knew the money-lenders from Newry
+to Jewry and Jewry to Jerusalem. Then it was I promised her I'd bet no
+more--never again: I'd give up the turf; I'd try and start again. Down
+in my soul I knew I couldn't start again--not just then. But I wanted
+to please her. She was remarkable in her way; she had one of the most
+imposing intelligences I have ever known. So I promised. I promised I'd
+bet no more."
+
+The Young Doctor caught Kitty Tynan's eyes by accident, and there was
+the same look of understanding in both. They both knew that here was
+the real tragedy of Crozier's life. If he had had less reverence for his
+wife, less of that obvious prostration of soul, he probably would never
+have come to Askatoon.
+
+"I broke my promise," he murmured. "It was a horse--well, never mind.
+I was as sure of Flamingo as that the sun would rise by day and set by
+night. It was a certainty; and it was a certainty. The horse could win,
+it would win; I had it from a sure source. My judgment was right, too.
+I bet heavily on Flamingo, intending it for my last fling, and, to save
+what I had left, to get back what I had lost. I could get big odds on
+him. It was good enough. From what I knew, it was like picking up a
+gold-mine. And I was right, right as could be. There was no chance about
+it. It was being out where the rain fell to get wet. It was just being
+present when they called the roll of the good people that God wished to
+be kind to. It meant so much to me. I couldn't bear to have nothing and
+my wife to have all. I simply couldn't stand--"
+
+Again the Young Doctor met the glance of Kitty Tynan, and there was,
+once more, a new and sudden look of comprehension in the eyes of both.
+They began to see light where their man was concerned.
+
+After a moment of struggle to control himself, Crozier proceeded: "It
+didn't seem like betting. Besides, I had planned it, that when I showed
+her what I had won, she would shut her eyes to the broken promise, and
+I'd make another, and keep it ever after. I put on all the cash there
+was to put on, all I could raise on what was left of my property."
+
+He paused as though to get strength to continue. Then a look of intense
+excitement suddenly possessed him, and there--passed over him a wave of
+feeling which transformed him. The naturally grave mediaeval face became
+fired, the eyes blazed, the skin shone, the mouth almost trembled with
+agitation. He was the dreamer, the enthusiast, the fanatic almost, with
+that look which the pioneer, the discoverer, the adventurer has when he
+sees the end of his quest.
+
+His voice rose, vibrated. "It was a day to make you thank Heaven the
+world was made. Such days only come once in a while in England, but when
+they do come, what price Arcady or Askatoon! Never had there been so big
+a Derby. Everybody had the fever of the place at its worst. I was
+happy. I meant to pouch my winnings and go straight to my wife and say,
+'Peccavi,' and I should hear her say to me, 'Go and sin no more.' Yes,
+I was happy. The sky, the green of the fields, the still, home-like,
+comforting trees, the mass of glorious colour, the hundreds of horses
+that weren't running and the scores that were to run, sleek and long,
+and made like shining silk and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to
+me--a horse-race heaven on earth. There you have the state of my mind in
+those days, the kind of man I was."
+
+Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom
+Downs before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that
+bore him down. He was terribly, exhaustingly alive. Something possessed
+him, and he possessed his hearers.
+
+"It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away
+from the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
+ahead. It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it
+to be for me. The race was all Flamingo's own, and the mob was going
+wild, when all of a sudden a woman--the widow of a racing-man gone
+suddenly mad--rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle
+with a shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey
+came, a melee of crushed humanity. And that was how I lost my last two
+thousand five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial."
+
+"Oh! Oh!" said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns,
+her hands wringing. "Oh, that was--oh, poor Flamingo!" she added.
+
+A strange smile shot into Crozier's face, and the dark passion of
+reminiscence fled from his eyes. "Yes, you are right, little friend,"
+he said. "That was the real tragedy after all. There was the horse doing
+his best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on
+him, stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon,
+feeling the psalm of success in his heart--yes, he knows, he knows what
+he has done, none so well!--and out comes a black, hateful thing against
+him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run. I felt exactly as
+you do, and I felt that before everything else when it happened. Then I
+felt for myself afterwards, and I felt it hard, as you can think."
+
+The break went from his voice, but it rang with reflective, remembered
+misery. "I was ruined. One thing was clear to me. I would not live on
+my wife's money. I would not eat and drink what her money bought. No,
+I would not live on my wife. Her brother, a good enough, impulsive lad,
+with a tongue of his own and too small to thresh, came to me in London
+the night of the race. He said his sister had been in the country-down
+at Epsom--and that she bitterly resented my having broken my promise and
+lost all I had. He said he had never seen her so angry, and he gave me
+a letter from her. On her return to town she had been obliged to go
+away at once to see her sister taken suddenly ill. He added, with an
+unfeeling jibe, that he wouldn't like the reading of the letter himself.
+If he hadn't been such a chipmunk of a fellow I'd have wrung his neck. I
+put the letter her letter-in my pocket, and next day gave my lawyer full
+instructions and a power of attorney. Then I went straight to Glasgow,
+took steamer for Canada, and here I am. That was near five years ago."
+
+"And the letter from your wife?" asked Kitty Tynan demurely and slyly.
+
+The Young Doctor looked at Crozier, surprised at her temerity, but
+Crozier only smiled gently. "It is in the desk there. Bring it to me,
+please," he said.
+
+In a moment Kitty was beside him with the letter. He took it, turned it
+over, examined it carefully as though seeing it for the first time, and
+laid it on his knee.
+
+"I have never opened it," he said. "There it is, just as it was handed
+to me."
+
+"You don't know what is in it?" asked Kitty in a shocked voice. "Why, it
+may be that--"
+
+"Oh, yes, I know what is in it!" he replied. "Her brother's confidences
+were enough. I didn't want to read it. I can imagine it all."
+
+"It's pretty cowardly," remarked Kitty.
+
+"No, I think not. It would only hurt, and the hurting could do no good.
+I can hear what it says, and I don't want to see it."
+
+He held the letter up to his ear whimsically. Then he handed it back to
+her, and she replaced it in the desk.
+
+"So, there it is, and there it is," he sighed. "You have got my
+story, and it's bad enough, but you can see it's not what Burlingame
+suggested."
+
+"Burlingame--but Burlingame's beneath notice," rejoined Kitty. "Isn't
+he, mother?"
+
+Mrs. Tynan nodded. Then, as though with sudden impulse, Kitty came
+forward to Crozier and leaned over him. The look of a mother was in her
+eyes. Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than this man
+with the heart of a boy, who was afraid of his own wife.
+
+"It's time for your beef-tea, and when you've had it you must get your
+sleep," she said, with a hovering solicitude.
+
+"I'd like to give him a threshing first, if you don't mind," said the
+Young Doctor to her.
+
+"Please let a little good advice satisfy you," Crozier remarked
+ruefully. "It will seem like old times," he added rather bitterly.
+
+"You are too young to have had 'old times,'" said Kitty with gentle
+scorn. "I'll like you better when you are older," she added.
+
+"Naughty jade," exclaimed the Young Doctor, "you ought to be more
+respectful to those older than yourself."
+
+"Oh, grandpapa!" she retorted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+
+The harvest was over. The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved
+like a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose
+in innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye. The ground appeared
+bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could
+take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn
+sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert. The land now, all stubble,
+still looked good for anything. If bare, it did not seem starved. It was
+naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down
+after the fight. Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it
+was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed
+the fibre of its being to no disadvantage. And overhead the joy of the
+prairie grew apace.
+
+September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and
+shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come
+into the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of
+nature recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength,
+a battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and
+energy. Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must
+strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
+evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those
+colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his
+eyes. There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of
+pensiveness--the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian
+summer soon to come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to
+the past and forget that to-morrow was all in all.
+
+Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than
+elsewhere. Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself
+in the delicate contentment of the sunset. There were many who took it
+all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something
+from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at
+all, save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose
+solicitous friend is the sun. These heeded it little, even though a
+good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north
+Atlantic and the German Ocean. From Erin and England and the land o'
+cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity
+as to the permanency of such conditions, and then settled down to take
+it as it was, endless days of sunshine and stirring vivacious air--as
+though they had always known it and had it.
+
+There were exceptions, and these had joy in what they saw and felt
+according to the measure of their temperament. Shiel Crozier saw and
+felt much of it, and probably the Young Doctor saw more of it than any
+one; stray people here and there who take no part in this veracious tale
+had it in greater or less degree; fat Jesse Bulrush was so sensitive to
+it that he, as he himself said, "almost leaked sentimentality" and Kitty
+Tynan possessed it. She was pulsing with life, as a bird drunken with
+the air's sweetness sings itself into an abandonment of motion.
+
+Before Crozier came she had enjoyed existence as existence, wondering
+often why it was she wanted to spring up from the ground with the idea
+that she could fly, if she chose to try. Once when she was quite a
+little girl she had said to her mother, "I'm going to ile away," and her
+mother, puzzled, asked her what she meant. Her reply was, "It's in
+the hymn." Her mother persisted in asking what hymn; and was told with
+something like scorn that it was the hymn she herself had taught her
+only child--"I'll away, I'll away to the Promised Land."
+
+Kitty had thought that "I'll away" meant some delicious motion which was
+to ile, and she had visions of something between floating and flying as
+being that blessed means of transportation.
+
+As the years grew, she still wanted to "ile away" whenever the spirit
+of elation seized her, and it had increased greatly since Shiel Crozier
+came. Out of her star as he was, she still felt near to him, and as
+though she understood him and he comprehended her. He had almost at once
+become to her an admired mystery, which, however, at first she did not
+dare wish to solve. She had been content to be a kind of handmaiden to a
+generous and adored master. She knew that where he had been she could
+in one sense never go, and yet she wanted to be near him just the same.
+This was intensified after the Logan Trial and the shooting of the man
+who somehow seemed to have made her live in a new way.
+
+As long ago as she could recall she had, in a crude, untutored way, been
+fond of the things that nature made beautiful; but now she seemed to
+see them in a new light, but not because any one had deliberately taught
+her. Indeed, it bored her almost to hear books read as Jesse Bulrush
+and Nurse Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his
+operation, to help him pass away the time. The only time she ever cared
+to listen--at school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for
+the printed page--was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or
+recited. Then she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but
+by the music of the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying
+feeling; and she got something out of it which had in one sense nothing
+to do with the verses themselves or with the conception of the poet.
+
+Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read. He was
+a born sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to
+Kitty during Crozier's illness. Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse
+contrived to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too;
+for he was a picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and
+clean linen--he always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and
+he had a taste in ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought
+by the yard. He was, in fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for
+material things, as he had shown in the land proposal on which Shiel
+Crozier's fortunes hung, but with no gift for carrying them out, having
+neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose. Yet he was an
+agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found
+himself "an old bach," as he called himself, in love at last with a
+middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent
+eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.
+
+Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
+volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
+the bedside of the wounded man. Jesse had been away so much in different
+parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
+had a real chance to make permanent impression. By accident, however,
+his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at
+the moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer
+feelings.
+
+It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened
+to his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville,
+and Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest. His
+content was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was
+lovely, as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their
+cordial, ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the
+divine lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice
+rising and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse; though
+it meant nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound was
+using it on her behalf.
+
+This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty
+understood. Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a
+mistress of his heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did
+not talk. That, to him, was the best thing of all. She was a superb
+listener, and he was a prodigious talker--was it not all appropriate?
+
+One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little
+knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made
+a pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point. He found her in her
+usual place, with a look almost pensive on her face. He did not notice
+that, for he was excited and elated.
+
+"I want to read you something I've written," he said, and he drew from
+his pocket a paper.
+
+"If it's another description of the timber-land you have for
+sale-please, not to me," she answered provokingly, for she guessed well
+what he held in his hand. She had seen him writing it. She had even seen
+some of the lines scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing
+careful if not swift and skillful manufacture. One of these crumpled-up
+bits of paper she had in her pocket now, having recovered it that she
+might tease him by quoting the lines at a provoking opportunity.
+
+"It's not that. It's some verses I've written," he said, with a wave of
+his hand.
+
+"All your own?" she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and
+he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of
+aloes on her tongue.
+
+"Yes. Yes. I've always written verses more or less--I write a good many
+advertisements in verse," he added cheerfully. "They are very popular.
+Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses in
+commerce as in affairs of the heart. But if you'd rather not, if it
+makes you tired--"
+
+"Courage, soldier, bear your burden," she said gaily. "Mount your horse
+and get galloping," she added, motioning him to sit.
+
+A moment later he was pouring out his soul through a pleasing voice,
+from fat lips, flanked by a high-coloured healthy cheek like a russet
+apple:
+
+       "Like jewels of the sky they gleam,
+        Your eyes of light, your eyes of fire;
+        In their dark depths behold the dream
+        Of Life's glad hope and Love's desire.
+
+       "Above your quiet brow, endowed
+        With Grecian charm to crown your grace,
+        Your hair in one soft Titian cloud
+        Throws heavenly shadows on your face."
+
+"Well, I've never had verses written to me before," Kitty remarked
+demurely, when he had finished and sat looking at her questioningly.
+"But 'dark depths'--that isn't the right thing to say of my eyes! And
+Titian cloud of hair--is my hair Titian? I thought Titian hair
+was bronzy-tawny was what Mr. Burlingame called it when he was
+spouting,"--her upper lip curled in contempt.
+
+"It isn't you, and you know it," he replied jerkily. She bridled.
+"Do you mean to say that you come and read to me without a word of
+explanation, so that I shouldn't misunderstand, verses written for
+another? Am I to be told now that my eyes aren't eyes of light and eyes
+of fire, that I haven't got a Grecian brow? Do you dare to say those
+verses don't fit me--except for the Titian hair and heavenly shadows?
+And that I've got no right to think they're meant for me? Is it so, that
+a man that's lived in my mother's house for years, eating at the same
+table with the family, and having his clothes mended free, with supper
+to suit him and no questions asked--is it so, that he reads me poetry,
+four lines at a stretch, and a rhyme every other line, and then
+announces it isn't for me!"
+
+Her eyes flashed, her bosom palpitated, her hand made passionate
+gestures, and she really seemed a young fury let loose. For a moment
+he was deceived by her acting; he did not see the lurking grin in the
+depths of her eyes.
+
+Her voice shook with assumed passion. "Because I didn't show what I felt
+all these years, and only exposed my real feelings when you read those
+verses to me, do you think any man who was a gentleman wouldn't in the
+circumstances say, 'These verses are for you, Kitty Tynan'? You betrayed
+me into showing you what I felt, and then you tell me your verses are
+for another girl!"
+
+"Girl! Girl! Girl!" he burst out. "Nurse is thirty-seven--she told me
+so herself, and how could I tell that you--why, it's absurd! I've only
+thought of you always as a baby in long skirts"--she spasmodically drew
+her skirts down over her pretty, shapely ankles, while she kept her eyes
+covered with one hand--"and you've seen me makin' up to her ever since
+Crozier got the bullet. Ever since he was operated on, I've--"
+
+"Yes, yes, that's right," she interrupted. "That's manly! Put the blame
+on him--him that couldn't help himself, struck by a horse-thief's bullet
+in the dark; him that's no more to blame for your carryings on while
+death was prowling about the door there--"
+
+"Carryings on! Carryings on!" Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and
+indignant. The little devil, to put him in a hole like this! "Carryings
+on! I've acted like a man all through--never anything else in your
+house, and it's a shame that I've got to listen to things that have
+never been said of me in all my life. My mother was a good, true woman,
+and she brought me up--"
+
+"Yes, that's it, put it on your mother now, poor woman! who isn't here
+to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two
+girls so placed they couldn't help themselves--just doing kind acts for
+a sick man." Suddenly she got to her feet. "I tell you, Jesse Bulrush,
+that you're a man--you're a man--"
+
+But she could keep it up no longer. She burst out laughing, and the
+false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: "That
+you're a man after my own heart. But you can't have it, even if you are
+after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in
+there!" She tossed a hand towards the house.
+
+By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting. "Well, you wicked
+little rip--you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up
+like that! Why, never on the stage was there such--!"
+
+"It's the poetry made me do it. It inspired me," she gurgled. "I
+felt--why, I felt here"--she pressed her hand to her heart "all the
+pangs of unrequited love--oh, go away, go back to the house and read
+that to her! She's in the sitting-room, and my mother's away down-town.
+Now's your chance, Claude Melnotte."
+
+She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
+towards the house. "You're good enough for anybody, and if I wasn't so
+young and daren't leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
+I'm thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!" She laughed till the tears came into her
+eyes. "This is as good as--as a play."
+
+"It's the best acted play I ever saw, from 'Ten Nights in a Bar-room'
+to 'Struck Oil,'" rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed
+yet beaming. "But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses
+worth anything? Do you think she'll like them?"
+
+Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read
+deepened in her eyes. "Nurse 'll like them--of course she will," she
+said gently. "She'll like them because they are you. Read them to her as
+you read them to me, and she'll only hear your voice, and she'll think
+them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh
+a thousand pounds. It doesn't matter to a woman what a man's saying or
+doing, or whether he's so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that
+under everything he's saying, 'I love you.' A man isn't that way, but a
+woman is. Now go." Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.
+
+"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" he said admiringly.
+
+"Then be a father to me," she said teasingly.
+
+"I can't marry both your mother and nurse."
+
+"P'r'aps you can't marry either," she replied sarcastically, "and I know
+that in any case you'll never be any relative of mine by marriage. Get
+going," she said almost impatiently.
+
+He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, "I'll let
+you hear some of my verses one day when you're more developed and can
+understand them."
+
+"I'll bet they beat mine," he called back.
+
+"You'll win your bet," she answered, and stood leaning against a tree
+with a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes. When he had
+disappeared, sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper,
+unfolded it, and laid it on her knee. "It is better," she said. "It's
+not good poetry, of course, but it's truer, and it's not done according
+to a pattern like his. Yes, it's real, real, real, and he'll never see
+it--never see it now, for I've fought it' all out, and I've won."
+
+Then she slowly read the verses aloud:
+
+"Yes, I've won," she said with determination. So many of her sex have
+said things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their
+decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never,
+never, never do. Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a
+new force awakened in her character.
+
+For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the
+little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house. She was
+thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom
+in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social
+pale. Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world
+beyond this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the
+conscience of a man or woman was the only law. She was not lawless in
+mind or spirit. She was only rebelling against a situation in which she
+was bound hand and foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive
+desire, if she wished to do so.
+
+Here was a man who was married, yet in a real sense who had no wife.
+Suppose that man cared for her, what a tragedy it would be for them to
+be kept apart! This man did not love her, and so there was no tragedy
+for both. Still all was not over yet--yes, all was "over and over
+and over," she said to herself as she sprang to her feet with a sharp
+exclamation of disgust--with herself.
+
+Her mother was coming hurriedly towards her from the house. There was
+a quickness in her walk suggesting excitement, yet from the look in her
+face it was plain that the news she brought was not painful. "He told me
+you were here, and--"
+
+"Who told you I was here?"
+
+"Mr. Bulrush."
+
+"So it's all settled," she said, with a little quirk of her shoulders.
+
+"Yes, he's asked her, and they're going to be married. It's enough to
+make you die laughing to see the two middle-aged doves cooing in there."
+
+"I thought perhaps it would be you. He said he would like to be a father
+to me."
+
+"That would prevent me if nothing else would," answered the widow of
+Tyndall Tynan. "A stepfather to an unmarried girl, both eyeing each
+other for a chance to find fault--if you please, no thank you!"
+
+"That means you won't get married till I'm out of the way?" asked Kitty,
+with a look which was as much touched with myrrh as with mirth.
+
+"It means I wouldn't get married till you are married, anyway," was the
+complacent answer.
+
+"Is there any one special that--"
+
+"Don't talk nonsense. Since your father died I've only thought of his
+child and mine, and I've not looked where I might. Instead, I've done
+my best to prove that two women could live and succeed without a man
+to earn for them; though of course without the pension it couldn't have
+been done in the style we've done it. We've got our place!"
+
+There is a dignity attached to a pension which has an influence quite
+its own, and in the most primitive communities it has an aristocratic
+character which commands general respect. In Askatoon people gave Mrs.
+Tynan a better place socially because of her pension than they would
+have done if she had earned double the money which the pension brought
+her.
+
+"Everybody has called on us," she added with reflective pride.
+
+"Principally since Mr. Crozier came," added Kitty. "It's funny, isn't
+it, how he made people respect him before they knew who he was?"
+
+"He would make Satan stand up and take off his hat, if he paid Hades a
+visit," said Mrs. Tynan admiringly. "Anybody'd do anything for him."
+
+Kitty eyed her mother closely. There was a strange, far-away, brooding
+look in Mrs. Tynan's eyes, and she seemed for a moment lost in thought.
+
+"You're in love with him," said Kitty sharply.
+
+"I was, in a way," answered her mother frankly. "I was, in a way, a kind
+of way, till I knew he was married. But it didn't mean anything. I never
+thought of it except as a thing that couldn't be."
+
+"Why couldn't it be?" asked Kitty, smothering an agitation rising in her
+breast.
+
+"Because I always knew he belonged to where we didn't, and because if
+he was going to be in love himself, it would be with some girl like you.
+He's young enough for that, and it's natural he should get as his profit
+the years of youth that a young woman has yet to live."
+
+"As though it was a choice between you and me, for instance!"
+
+Mrs. Tynan started, but recovered herself. "Yes. If there had been any
+choosing, he'd not have hesitated a minute. He'd have taken you, of
+course. But he never gave either of us a thought that way."
+
+"I thought that till--till after he'd told us his story," replied Kitty
+boldly.
+
+"What has happened since then?" asked her mother, with sudden
+apprehension.
+
+"Nothing has happened since. I don't understand it, but it's as though
+he'd been asleep for a long time and was awake again."
+
+Mrs. Tynan gravely regarded her daughter, and a look of fear came into
+her face. "I knew you kept thinking of him always," she said; "but you
+had such sense, and he never showed any feeling for you; and young
+girls get over things. Besides, you always showed you knew he wasn't a
+possibility. But since he told us that day about his being married and
+all, has--has he been different towards you?"
+
+"Not a thing, not a word," was the reply; "but--but there's a difference
+with him in a way. I feel it when I go in the room where he is."
+
+"You've got to stop thinking of him," insisted the elder woman
+querulously. "You've got to stop it at once. It's no good. It's bad for
+you. You've too much sense to go on caring for a man that--"
+
+"I'm going to get married," said Kitty firmly. "I've made up my mind.
+If you have to think about one person, you should stop thinking about
+another; anyhow, you've got to make yourself stop. So I'm going to
+marry--and stop."
+
+"Who are you going to marry, Kitty? You don't mean to say it's John
+Sibley!"
+
+"P'r'aps. He keeps coming."
+
+"That gambling and racing fellow!"
+
+"He owns a big farm, and it pays, and he has got an interest in a mine,
+and--"
+
+"I tell you, you shan't," peevishly interjected Mrs. Tynan. "You shan't.
+He's vicious. He's--oh, you shan't! I'd rather--"
+
+"You'd rather I threw myself away--on a married man?" asked Kitty
+covertly.
+
+"My God--oh, Kitty!" said the other, breaking down. "You can't mean
+it--oh, you can't mean that you'd--"
+
+"I've got to work out my case in my own way," broke in Kitty calmly. "I
+know how I've got to do it. I have to make my own medicine--and take it.
+You say John Sibley is vicious. He has only got one vice."
+
+"Isn't it enough? Gambling--"
+
+"That isn't a vice; it's a sport. It's the same as Mr. Crozier had.
+Mr. Crozier did it with horses only, the other does it with cards and
+horses. The only vice John Sibley's got is me."
+
+"Is you?" asked her mother bewilderedly.
+
+"Well, when you've got an idea you can't control and it makes you its
+slave, it's a vice. I'm John's vice, and I'm thinking of trying to cure
+him of it--and cure myself too," Kitty added, folding and unfolding the
+paper in her hand.
+
+"Here comes the Young Doctor," said her mother, turning towards the
+house. "I think you don't mean to marry Sibley, but if you do, make him
+give up gambling."
+
+"I don't know that I want him to give it up," answered Kitty musingly.
+
+A moment later she was alone with the Young Doctor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+
+"What's this you've been doing?" asked the Young Doctor, with a
+quizzical smile. "We never can tell where you'll break out."
+
+"Kitty Tynan's measles!" she rejoined, swinging her hat by its ribbon.
+"Mine isn't a one-sided character, is it?"
+
+"I know one of the sides quite well," returned the Young Doctor.
+
+"Which, please, sir?"
+
+The Young Doctor pretended to look wise. "The outside. I read it like a
+book. It fits the life in which it moves like the paper on the wall. But
+I'm not sure of the inside. In fact, I don't think I know that at all."
+
+"So I couldn't call you in if my character was sick inside, could I?"
+she asked obliquely.
+
+"I might have an operation, and see what's wrong with it," he answered
+playfully.
+
+Suddenly she shivered. "I've had enough of operations to last me
+awhile," she rejoined. "I thought I could stand anything, but your
+operation on Mr. Crozier taught me a lesson. I'd never be a doctor's
+wife if I had to help him cut up human beings."
+
+"I'll remember that," the Young Doctor replied mockingly.
+
+"But if it would help put things on a right basis, I'd make a bargain
+that I wasn't to help do the carving," she rejoined wickedly. The Young
+Doctor always incited her to say daring things. They understood each
+other well. "So don't let that stand in the way," she added slyly.
+
+"The man who marries you will be glad to get you without the anatomy,"
+he returned gallantly.
+
+"I wasn't talking of a man; I was talking of a doctor."
+
+He threw up a hand and his eyebrows. "Isn't a doctor a man?"
+
+"Those I've seen have been mostly fish."
+
+"No feelings--eh?"
+
+She looked him in the eyes, and he felt a kind of shiver go through him.
+"Not enough to notice. I never observed you had any," she replied. "If I
+saw that you had, I'd be so frightened I'd fly. I've seen pictures of
+an excited whale turning a boat full of men over. No, I couldn't bear to
+see you show any feeling."
+
+The dark eyes of the Young Doctor suddenly took on a look which was
+a stranger to them. In his relations with women he was singularly
+impersonal, but he was a man, and he was young enough to feel the Adam
+stir in him. The hidden or controlled thing suddenly emerged. It was not
+the look which would be in his eyes if he were speaking to the woman he
+wanted to marry. Kitty saw it, and she did not understand it, for she
+had at heart a feeling that she could go to him in any trouble of life
+and be sure of healing. To her he seemed wonderful; but she thought of
+him as she would have thought of her father, as a person of authority
+and knowledge--that operation showed him a great man, she thought, so
+skillful and precise and splendid; and the whole countryside had such
+confidence in him.
+
+She regarded him as a being apart; but for a moment, an ominous moment,
+he was almost one with that race of men who feed in strange pastures.
+She only half saw the reddish glow which came swimming into his eyes,
+and she did not realise it, for she did not expect to find it there.
+For an instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of
+woman life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material
+being, the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence. It was the
+emergence of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he
+had never married and had never dallied! But in a moment it was gone
+again--driven away.
+
+"What a wicked little flirt you are!" he said, with a shake of the head.
+"You'll come to a bad end, if you don't change your ways."
+
+"Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what's the matter
+with me," she retorted. "Sometimes in operating for one disease we come
+on another, and then there's a lot of thinking to be done."
+
+The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive
+gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing. "If you were going to
+operate on me, what would it be for?" she asked more flippantly than her
+face showed.
+
+"Well, it's obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike
+for the cancer love," he answered, with a direct look.
+
+She flushed and changed on the instant. "Is love a cancer?" she asked.
+All at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something
+very like anger quickened in her.
+
+"Unrequited love is," he answered deliberately. "How do you know it is
+unrequited?" she asked sharply.
+
+"Well, I don't know it," he answered, dismayed by the look in her face.
+"But I certainly hope I'm right. I do, indeed."
+
+"And if you were right, what would you do--as a surgeon?" she
+questioned, with an undertone of meaning.
+
+"I would remove the cause of the disease."
+
+She came close and looked him straight in the eyes. "You mean that he
+should go? You think that would cure the disease? Well, you are not
+going to interfere. You are not going to manoeuvre anything to get him
+away--I know doctors' tricks. You'd say he must go away east or west
+to the sea for change of air to get well. That's nonsense, and it isn't
+necessary. You are absolutely wrong in your diagnosis--if that's what
+you call it. He is going to stay here. You aren't going to drive away
+one of our boarders and take the bread out of our mouths. Anyhow, you're
+wrong. You think because a girl worships a man's ability that she's in
+love with him. I adore your ability, but I'd as soon fall in love with a
+lobster--and be boiled with the lobster in a black pot. Such conceit men
+have!"
+
+He was not convinced. He had a deep-seeing eye, and he saw that she was
+boldly trying to divert his belief or suspicion. He respected her for
+it. He might have said he loved her for it--with a kind of love which
+can be spoken of without blushing or giving cause to blush, or reason
+for jealousy, anger, or apprehension.
+
+He smiled down into her gold-brown eyes, and he thought what a real
+woman she was. He felt, too, that she would tell him something that
+would give him further light if he spoke wisely now.
+
+"I'd like to see some proof that you are right, if I am wrong," he
+answered cautiously.
+
+"Well, I'm going to be married," she said, with an air of finality.
+
+He waved a hand deprecatingly. "Impossible--there's no man worth it. Who
+is the undeserving wretch?"
+
+"I'll tell you to-morrow," she replied. "He doesn't know yet how happy
+he's going to be. What did you come here for? Why did you want to see
+me?" she added. "You had something you were going to tell me. Hadn't
+you?"
+
+"That's quite right," he replied. "It's about Crozier. This is my last
+visit to him professionally. He can go on now without my care. Yours
+will be sufficient for him. It has been all along the very best care he
+could have had. It did more for him than all the rest, it--"
+
+"You don't mean that," she interrupted, with a flush and a bosom that
+leaped under her pretty gown. "You don't mean that I was of more use
+than the nurse--than the future Mrs. Jesse Bulrush?"
+
+"I mean just that," he answered. "Nearly every sick person, every sick
+man, I should say, has his mascot, his ministering angel, as it were.
+It's a kind of obsession, and it often means life or death, whether the
+mascot can stand the strain of the situation. I knew an old man--down by
+Dingley's Flat it was, and he wanted a boy--his grand-nephew-beside him
+always. He was getting well, but the boy took sick and the old man died
+the next day. The boy had been his medicine. Sometimes it's a particular
+nurse that does the trick; but whoever it is, it's a great vital fact.
+Well, that's the part you played to Mr. Shiel Crozier of Lammis and
+Castlegarry aforetime. He owes you much."
+
+"I am glad of that," she said softly, her eyes on the distance.
+
+"She is in love with him in spite of what she says," remarked the Young
+Doctor to himself. "Well," he continued aloud, "the fact is, Crozier's
+almost well in a way, but his mind is in a state, and he is not going to
+get wholly right as things are. Since things came out in court, since he
+told us his whole story, he has been different. It's as though--"
+
+She interrupted him hastily and with suppressed emotion. "Yes, yes,
+do you think I've not noticed that? He's been asleep in a way for five
+years, and now he's awake again. He is not James Gathorne Kerry now;
+he is James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, and--oh, you understand: he's back
+again where he was before--before he left her."
+
+The Young Doctor nodded approvingly. "What a little brazen wonder you
+are! I declare you see more than--"
+
+"Yet you won't have me?" she asked mockingly. "You're too clever for
+me," he rejoined with spirit. "I'm too conceited. I must marry a girl
+that'd kneel to me and think me as wise as Socrates. But he's back
+again, as you say, and, in my view, his wife ought to be back again
+also."
+
+"She ought to be here," was Kitty's swift reply, "though I think mighty
+little of her--mighty little, I can tell you. Stuckup, great tall stork
+of a woman, that lords it over a man as though she was a goddess. Wears
+diamonds in the middle of the day, I suppose, and cold-blooded as--as a
+fish."
+
+"She ought to have married me, according to your opinion of me. You said
+I was a fish," remarked the Young Doctor, with a laugh.
+
+"The whale and the catfish!"
+
+"Heavens, what spite!" he rejoined. "Catfish--what do you know about
+Mrs. Crozier? You may be brutally unjust--waspishly unjust, I should
+say."
+
+"Do I look like a wasp?" she asked half tearfully. She was in a strange
+mood.
+
+"You look like a golden busy bee," he answered. "But tell me, how did
+you come to know enough about her to call her a cat?"
+
+"Because, as you say, I was a busy golden bee," she retorted.
+
+"That information doesn't get me much further," he answered.
+
+"I opened that letter," she replied.
+
+"'That letter'--you mean you opened the letter he showed us which he had
+left sealed as it came to him five years ago?" The Young Doctor's face
+wore a look of dismay.
+
+"I steamed the envelope open--how else could I have done it! I steamed
+it open, saw what I wanted, and closed it up again."
+
+The Young Doctor's face was pale now. This was a terrible revelation. He
+had a man's view of such conduct. He almost shrank from her, though she
+stood there as inviting and innocent a specimen of girlhood as the eye
+could wish to see. She did not look dishonourable.
+
+"Do you realise what that means?" he asked in a cold, hard tone.
+
+"Oh, come, don't put on that look and don't talk like John the
+Evangelist," she retorted. "I did it, not out of curiosity, and not to
+do any one harm, but to do her good--his wife."
+
+"It was dishonourable--wicked and dishonourable."
+
+"If you talk like that, Mr. Piety, I'm off," she rejoined, and she
+started away.
+
+"Wait--wait," he said, laying firm fingers on her arm. "Of course you
+did it for a good purpose. I know. You cared enough for him for that."
+
+He had said the right thing, and she halted and faced him. "I cared
+enough to do a good deal more than that if necessary. He has been like a
+second father to me, and--"
+
+Suddenly a light of humour shot into the eyes of both. Sheil Crozier as
+a "father" to her was too artificial not to provoke their sense of the
+grotesque.
+
+"I wanted to find out his wife's address to write to her and tell her to
+come quick," she explained. "It was when he was at the worst. And then,
+too, I wanted to know the kind of woman she was before I wrote to her.
+So--"
+
+"You mean to say you read that letter which he had kept unopened and
+unread for five long years?" The Young Doctor was certainly disturbed
+again.
+
+"Every word of it," Kitty answered shamelessly, "and I'm not sorry. It
+was in a good cause. If he had said, 'Courage, soldier,' and opened it
+five years ago, it would have been good for him. Better to get things
+like that over."
+
+"It was that kind of a letter, was it--a catfish letter?"
+
+Kitty laughed a little scornfully. "Yes, just like that, Mr. Easily
+Shocked. Great, showy, purse-proud creature!"
+
+"And you wrote to her?"
+
+"Yes--a letter that would make her come if anything would. Talk of
+tact--I was as smooth as a billiard-ball. But she hasn't come."
+
+"The day after the operation I cabled to her," said the Young Doctor.
+
+"Then you steamed the letter open and read it too?" asked Kitty
+sarcastically.
+
+"Certainly not. Ladies first-and last," was the equally sarcastic
+answer. "I cabled to Castlegarry, his father's place, also to Lammis
+that he mentioned when he told us his story. Crozier of Lammis, he was."
+
+"Well, I wrote to the London address in the letter," added Kitty. "I
+don't think she'll come. I asked her to cable me, and she hasn't. I
+wrote such a nice letter, too. I did it for his sake."
+
+The Young Doctor laid his hands on both her shoulders. "Kitty Tynan, the
+man who gets you will get what he doesn't deserve," he remarked.
+
+"That might mean anything."
+
+"It means that Crozier owes you more than he can guess."
+
+Her eyes shone with a strange, soft glow. "In spite of opening the
+letter?"
+
+The Young Doctor nodded, then added humorously: "That letter you wrote
+her--I'm not sure that my cable wouldn't have far more effect than your
+letter."
+
+"Certainly not. You tried to frighten her, but I tried to coax her, to
+make her feel ashamed. I wrote as though I was fifty."
+
+The Young Doctor regarded her dubiously. "What was the sort of thing you
+said to her?"
+
+"For one thing, I said that he had every comfort and attention two
+loving women and one fond nurse could give him; but that, of course, his
+legitimate wife would naturally be glad to be beside him when he passed
+away, and that if she made haste she might be here in time."
+
+The Young Doctor leaned against a tree shaking with laughter.
+
+"What are you smiling at?" Kitty asked ironically. "Oh, she'll be sure
+to come--nothing will keep her away after being coaxed like that!" he
+said, when he could get breath.
+
+"Laughing at me as though I was a clown in a circus!" she exclaimed.
+"Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she--the cat--wrote
+that fiendish letter to is in trouble."
+
+"It was a fiendish letter, was it?" he asked, suddenly sobered again.
+"No, no, don't tell me," he added, with a protesting gesture. "I don't
+want to hear. I don't want to know. I oughtn't to know. Besides, if she
+comes, I don't want to be prejudiced against her. He is troubled, poor
+fellow."
+
+"Of course he is. There's the big land deal--his syndicate. He's got
+a chance of making a fortune, and he can't do it because--but Jesse
+Bulrush told me in confidence, so I can't explain."
+
+"I have an idea, a pretty good idea. Askatoon is small."
+
+"And mean sometimes."
+
+"Tell me what you know. Perhaps I can help him," urged the Young Doctor.
+"I have helped more than one good man turn a sharp corner here."
+
+She caught his arm. "You are as good as gold."
+
+"You are--impossible," he replied.
+
+They talked of Crozier's land deal and syndicate as they walked slowly
+towards the house. Mrs. Tynan met them at the door, a look of excitement
+in her face. "A telegram for you Kitty," she said.
+
+"For me!" exclaimed Kitty eagerly. "It's a year since I had one."
+
+She tore open the yellow envelope. A light shot up in her face. She
+thrust the telegram into the Young Doctor's hands.
+
+"She's coming; his wife's coming. She's in Quebec now. It was my
+letter--my letter, not your cable, that brought her," Kitty added
+triumphantly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+
+It was as though Crozier had been told of the coming of his wife, for
+when night came, on the day Kitty had received her telegram, he could
+not sleep. He was the sport of a consuming restlessness. His brain would
+not be still. He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and
+make it vacuous. It would not relax. It seized with intentness on each
+thing in turn, which was part of his life at the moment, and gave it
+an abnormal significance. In vain he tried to shake himself free of the
+successive obsessions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging
+him after them, a slave lashed to the wheels of a chariot of flame.
+
+At last it was the land deal and syndicate on which his future depended,
+and the savage fate which seemed about to snatch his fortune away as it
+had done so often before; as it had done on the day when Flamingo went
+down near the post at the Derby with a madwoman dragging at the bridle.
+He had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would
+have enabled him to pass the crisis of his life. Wife, home, the old
+fascinating, crowded life--they had all vanished because of that vile
+trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the
+wilderness through years that brought no fruit of his labours. Yet here
+was his chance, his great chance, to get back what he had and was in the
+old misspent days, with new purposes in life to follow and serve; and
+it was all in cruel danger of being swept away when almost within his
+grasp.
+
+If he could but achieve the big deal, he could return to wife and home,
+he could be master in his own house, not a dependent on his wife's
+bounty. That very evening Jesse Bulrush, elated by his own good fortune
+in capturing Cupid, had told him as sadly as was possible, while his
+own fortunes were, as he thought, soaring, that every avenue of credit
+seemed closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan
+company, would let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him
+to hold his place in the syndicate; while each of the other members
+of the clique had flatly and cheerfully refused, saying they were busy
+carrying their own loads. Crozier had commanded Jesse not to approach
+them, but the fat idealist had an idea that his tongue had a gift of
+wheedling, and he believed that he could make them "shell out," as
+he put it. He had failed, and he was obliged to say so, when Crozier,
+suspecting, brought him to book.
+
+"They mean to crowd you out--that's their game," Bulrush had said.
+"They've closed up all the ways to cash or credit. They're laying to do
+you out of your share. Unless you put up the cash within the four days
+left, they'll put it through without you. They told me to tell you
+that."
+
+And Crozier had not even cursed them. He said to Jesse Bulrush that it
+was an old game to get hold of a patent that made a fortune for a song
+while the patentee died in the poor-house. Yet that four days was time
+enough for a live man to do a "flurry of work," and he was fit enough to
+walk up their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when
+a man was out for war.
+
+Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and
+in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little
+and big things to torture him--remembrances of incidents when debts and
+disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the
+elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face. It
+was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but
+one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years. It
+was the first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the
+operation which saved his life--the face of Kitty Tynan.
+
+And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face
+had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence. Kitty
+had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after
+he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was
+startlingly true. It was as though, while he was living under an assumed
+name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the
+far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry. His wife and
+the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived
+out, which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the
+present. Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her
+had seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of
+his own name and the telling if his story had produced a complete
+psychological change in him mentally and bodily. The impersonal feeling
+which had marked his relations with the two women of this household,
+and with all women, was suddenly gone. He longed for the arms of a woman
+round his neck--it was five years since any woman's arms had been there,
+since he had kissed any woman's lips. Now, in the hour when his fortunes
+were again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a
+fair race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another
+face came between.
+
+All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife
+was living, came to him. He had never for an instant thought of her as
+dead, but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him. If his wife
+was living! Living? Her death had never been even a remote possibility
+to his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death.
+Beneath all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a
+romanticist to whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.
+
+It was impossible to sleep. He tossed from side to side. Once he got up
+in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought
+of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a
+sudden impulse seized him. He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went
+to the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out. With the
+feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he
+knew, ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any
+cruelty, of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of
+the candle when he thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of
+his room gently closing. Laying the letter down, he went to the door
+and opened it. There was no one stirring. Yet he had a feeling as though
+some one was there in the darkness. His lips framed the words,
+
+"Who is it? Is any one there?" but he did not utter them.
+
+A kind of awe possessed him. He was Celtic; he had been fed on the
+supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable
+experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry,
+and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical. It is hard to
+tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness
+of the other room-the living-room of the house. He was in a state of
+trance, almost, a victim of the night. But as he closed the door softly
+the words of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he
+found her brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain. The last
+two verses of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was
+swayed by the superstition of bygone ancestors:
+
+     "Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
+     Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
+     Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown
+     Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
+
+     "When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+     Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+     I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
+     'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"
+
+He went to bed again, but sleep would not come. The verses of the lament
+kept singing in his brain. He tossed from side to side, he sought to
+control himself, but it was of no avail. Suddenly he remembered the bed
+of boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her
+meeting with the Young Doctor the previous day. Before he was shot he
+used to sleep in the open in the summer-time. If he could get to sleep
+anywhere it would be there.
+
+Hastily dressing himself in flannel shirt and trousers, and dragging a
+blanket from the bed, he found his way to the bedroom door, went into
+the other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open
+into the night. All at once he was conscious of another presence in the
+room, but the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved
+himself for succumbing to fantasy. Finding the front door in the dark,
+he opened it and stepped outside. There was no moon, but there were
+millions of stars in the blue vault above, and there was enough light
+for him to make his way to the place where he had slept "hereaway and
+oft."
+
+He knew that the bed of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his,
+and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet,
+infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth.
+He found the place and threw himself down. Why, here were green boughs
+under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there! Kitty--it
+was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing,
+thinking that he might want to sleep in the open again after his
+illness. Kitty--it was she who had so thoughtfully served him; Kitty,
+with the instinct of strong, unselfish womanhood, with the gift of the
+outdoor life, with the unpurchasable gift of friendship. What a girl she
+was! How rich she could make the life of a man!
+
+     "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+     Held my hand, and laid his cheek warm against my brow,
+     Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies
+     Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"
+
+How different she was, this child of the West, of Nature, from the
+woman he had left behind in England, the sophisticated, well-appointed,
+well-controlled girl; too well-controlled even in the first days of
+married life; too well-controlled for him who had the rushing impulses
+of a Celtic warrior of olden days. Delicate, refined, perfectly
+poised, and Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope!
+Mona--Kitty, the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life,
+each in her own way, as none others had done, they floated before his
+eyes till sight and feeling grew dim. With a last effort he strove to
+eject Kitty from his thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the
+race of life, and he must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly,
+even in exile from her, run straight, even with that unopened, bitter,
+upbraiding letter in the--
+
+He fell asleep, and soon and slowly and ever so dimly the opal light of
+the prairie dawn crept shyly over the landscape. With it came stealing
+the figure of a girl towards the group of trees where lay the man of
+Lammis on the bed of green boughs which she had renewed for him. She had
+followed him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through
+the night--near him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him
+and the kind, holy night before the morrow came which belonged to the
+other woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to
+any man in whose arms she ever had lain. And the pity and the tragedy
+of it was that he loved his wife--the catfish wife. The sharp, pitiless
+instinct of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come
+of late to him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near
+him now, was only the reflection of what he felt for his wife. She knew
+the unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet
+what she must put away from herself after to-morrow. Those verses she
+wrote--they were to show that she had conquered herself. Yet, but a few
+hours after, here she was kneeling outside his door at night, here she
+was pursuing him to the place where he slept. The coming of the other
+woman--she knew well that she was something to this man of men--had
+roused in her all she had felt, had intensified it.
+
+She trembled, but she drew near, accompanied by the heavenly odours of
+the freshened herbs and foliage and the cool tenderness of the river
+close by. In her white dress and loosened hair she was like some spirit
+of a new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home. It
+was all so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the
+bushes and the night. Noiselessly she stole over the grass and into
+the shadows of the trees where he lay. Again and again she paused. What
+would she do if he was awake and saw her? She did not know. The moment
+must take care of itself. She longed to find him sleeping.
+
+It was so. The hazy light showed his face upward to the skies, his
+breast rising and falling in a heavy, luxurious sleep.
+
+She drew nearer and nearer till she was kneeling beside him. His face
+was warm with colour even in the night air, warmer than she had ever
+seen it. One hand lay across his chest and one was thrown back over his
+head with the abandon of perfect rest. All the anxiety and restlessness
+which had tortured him had fled, and his manhood showed bold and serene
+in the brightening dusk.
+
+A sob almost broke from her as she gazed her fill, then slowly she
+leaned over and softly pressed her lips to his--the first time that ever
+in love they had been given to any man. She had the impulse to throw
+her arms round him, but she mastered herself. He stirred, but he did not
+wake. His lips moved as she withdrew hers.
+
+"My darling!" he said in the quick, broken way of the dreamer.
+
+She rose swiftly and fled away among the trees towards the house.
+
+What he had said in his sleep--was it in reality the words of
+unconsciousness, or was it subconscious knowledge?--they kept ringing in
+her ears.
+
+"My darling!" he had said when she kissed him. There was a light of joy
+in her eyes now, though she felt that the words were meant for another.
+Yet it was her kiss, her own kiss, which had made him say it. If--but
+with happy eyes she stole to her room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. "S. O. S."
+
+At breakfast next morning Kitty did not appear. Had it been possible
+she would have fled into the far prairie and set up a lonely tabernacle
+there; for with the day came a reaction from the courage possessing
+her the night before and in the opal wakening of the dawn. When broad
+daylight came she felt as though her bones were water and her body a
+wisp of straw. She could not bear to meet Shiel Crozier's eyes, and thus
+it was she had an early breakfast on the plea that she had ironing to
+do. She was not, however, prepared to see Jesse Bulrush drive up with
+a buggy after breakfast and take Crozier away. When she did see them at
+the gate the impulse came to cry out to Crozier; what to say she did not
+know, but still to cry out. The cry on her lips was that which she
+had seen in the newspaper the day before, the cry of the shipwrecked
+seafarers, the signal of the wireless telegraphy, "S. O. S."--the
+piteous call, "Save Our Souls!" It sprang to her lips, but it got no
+farther except in an unconscious whisper. On the instant she felt
+so weak and shaken and lonely that she wanted to lean upon some one
+stronger than herself; as she used to lean against her father, while he
+sat with one arm round her studying his railway problems. She had been
+self-sufficient enough all her life,--"an independent little bird of
+freedom," as Crozier had called her; but she was like a boat tossed on
+mountainous waves now.
+
+"S. O. S.!--Save Our Souls!"
+
+As though she really had made this poignant call Crozier turned round in
+the buggy where he sat with Jesse Bulrush, pale but erect; and, with a
+strange instinct, he looked straight to where she was. When he saw her
+his face flushed, he could not have told why. Was it that there had
+passed to him in his sleep the subconscious knowledge of the kiss which
+Kitty had given him; and, after all, had he said "My darling" to her
+and not to the wife far away across the seas, as he thought? A strange
+feeling, as of secret intimacy, never felt before where Kitty was
+concerned, passed through him now, and he was suddenly conscious
+that things were not as they had ever been; that the old impersonal
+comradeship had vanished. It disturbed, it almost shocked him. Whereupon
+he made a valiant effort to recover the old ground, to get out of the
+new atmosphere into the old, cheering air.
+
+"Come and say good-bye, won't you?" he called to her.
+
+"S. O. S.--S. O. S.--S. O. S.!" was the cry in her heart, but she called
+back to him from her lips, "I can't. I'm too busy. Come back soon,
+soldier."
+
+With a wave of the hand he was gone. "Not a care in the world she has,"
+Crozier said to Jesse Bulrush. "She's the sunniest creature Heaven ever
+made."
+
+"Too skittish for me," responded the other with a sidelong look, for he
+had caught a note in Crozier's voice which gave him a sudden suspicion.
+
+"You want the kind you can drive with an oatstraw and a chirp--eh, my
+friend?"
+
+"Well, I've got what I want," was the reply. "Neither of us 'll kick
+over the traces."
+
+"You are a lucky man," replied Crozier. "You've got a remarkably big
+prize in the lottery. She is a fine woman, is Nurse Egan, and I owe her
+a great deal. I only hope things turn out so well that I can give her
+a good fat wedding-present. But I shan't be able to do anything
+that's close to my heart if I can't get the cash for my share in the
+syndicate."
+
+"Courage, soldier, as Kitty Tynan says," responded Jesse Bulrush
+cheerily. "You never know your luck. The cash is waiting for you
+somewhere, and it'll turn up, be sure of that."
+
+"I'm not sure of that. I can see as plain as your nose how Bradley and
+his clique have blocked me everywhere from getting credit, and I'd give
+five years of my life to beat them in their dirty game. If I fail to get
+it at Aspen Vale I'm done. But I'll have a try, a good big try. How far
+exactly is it? I've never gone by this trail."
+
+Bulrush shook his head reprovingly. "It's too long a journey for you to
+take after your knock-out. You're not fit to travel yet. I don't like
+it a bit. Lydia said this morning it was a crime against yourself, going
+off like this, and--"
+
+"Lydia?--oh yes, pardonnez-moi, m'sieu'! I did not know her name was
+Lydia."
+
+"I didn't either till after we were engaged." Crozier stared in blank
+amazement. "You didn't know her name till after you were engaged? What
+did you call her before that?"
+
+"Why, I called her Nurse." answered the fat lover. "We all called her
+that, and it sounded comfortable and homelike and good for every day.
+It had a sort of York-shilling confidence, and your life was in her
+hands--a first-class you-and-me kind of feeling."
+
+"Why don't you stick to it, then?"
+
+"She doesn't want it. She says it sounds so old, and that I'd be calling
+her 'mother' next."
+
+"And won't you?" asked Crozier slyly. "Everything in season," beamed
+Jesse, and he shone, and was at once happy and composed. Crozier
+relapsed into silence, for he was thinking that the lost years had been
+barren of children. He turned to look at the home they had left. It was
+some distance away now, but he could see Kitty still at the corner of
+the house with a small harvest of laundered linen in her hand.
+
+"She made that fresh bed of boughs for me--ah, but I had a good sleep
+last night!" he added aloud. "I feel fit for the fight before me." He
+drew himself up and began to nod here and there to people who greeted
+him.
+
+In the house behind them at that moment Kitty was saying to her mother,
+"Where is he going, mother?"
+
+"To Aspen Vale," was the reply. "If you'd been at breakfast you'd have
+heard. He'll be gone two days, perhaps three."
+
+Three days! She regretted now that she had not said to herself,
+"Courage, soldier," and gone to say good-bye to him when he called
+to her. Perhaps she would not see him again till after the other
+woman--till after the wife-came. Then--then the house would be empty;
+then the house would be so still. And then John Sibley would come and--
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+Three days passed, but before they ended there came another telegram
+from Mrs. Crozier stating the time of her expected arrival at Askatoon.
+It was addressed to Kitty, and Kitty almost savagely tore it up into
+little pieces and scattered it to the winds. She did not even wait to
+show it to the Young Doctor; but he had a subtle instinct as to why she
+did not; and he was rather more puzzled than usual at what was passing
+before his eyes. In any case, the coming of the wife must alter all
+the relations existing in the household of the widow Tynan. The old,
+unrestrained, careless friendship could not continue. The newcomer
+would import an element of caste and class which would freeze mother and
+daughter to the bones. Crozier was the essence of democracy, which in
+its purest form is akin to the most aristocratic element and is easily
+affiliated with it. He had no fear of Crozier. Crozier would remain
+exactly the same; but would not Crozier be whisked away out of Askatoon
+to a new fate, reconciled to being a receiver of his wife's bounty.
+
+"If his wife gets her arms round his neck, and if she wants to get them
+there, she will, and once there he'll go with her like a gentleman,"
+said the Young Doctor sarcastically. Admiring Crozier as he did, he also
+had underneath all his knowledge of life an unreasonable apprehension
+of man's weakness where a woman was concerned. The man who would face
+a cannon's mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could
+crumple with one hand.
+
+The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and
+Kitty met the train. The local operator had not divulged to any one the
+contents of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators
+on the platform. As the great express stole in almost noiselessly, like
+a tired serpent, Kitty watched its approach with outward cheerfulness.
+She had braced herself to this moment, till she looked the most buoyant,
+joyous thing in the world. It had not come easily. With desperation she
+had fought a fight during these three lonely days, till at last she had
+conquered, sleeping each night on Crozier's star-lit bed of boughs and
+coming in with the silver-grey light of dawn. Now she leaned forward
+with heart beating fast; but with smiling face and with eyes so bright
+that she deceived the Young Doctor.
+
+There was no sign of inward emotion, of hidden troubles, as she leaned
+forward to see the great lady step from the train--great in every sense
+was this lady in her mind; imposing in stature, a Juno, a tragedy queen,
+a Zenobia, a daughter of the gods who would not stoop to conquer. She
+looked in vain, however, for the Mrs. Crozier she had imagined made no
+appearance from the train. She hastened down the platform still with
+keen eyes scanning the passengers, who were mostly alighting to stretch
+their legs and get a breath of air.
+
+"She's not here," she said at last darkly to the Young Doctor who had
+followed her.
+
+Then suddenly she saw emerge from a little group at the steps of a car
+a child in a long dress--so it seemed to her, the being was so small
+and delicate--and come forward, having hastily said good-bye to her
+fellow-passengers. As the Young Doctor said afterwards, "She wasn't
+bigger than a fly," and she certainly was as graceful and pretty and
+piquante as a child-woman could be.
+
+Presently, with her alert, rather assertive blue eyes she saw Kitty, and
+came forward. "Miss Tynan?" she asked, with an encompassing look.
+
+Now Kitty was idiomatic in her speech at times, and she occasionally
+used slang of the best brand, but she avoided those colloquialisms
+which were of the vocabulary of the uneducated. Indeed, she had had no
+inclination to use them, for her father had set her a good example, and
+she liked to hear good English spoken. That was why Crozier's talk had
+been like music to her; and she had been keen to distinguish between the
+rhetorical method of Augustus Burlingame, who modelled himself on the
+orators of all the continents, and was what might be called a synthetic
+elocutionist. Kitty was as simple and natural as a girl could be, and
+as a rule had herself in perfect command; but she was so stunned by the
+sight of this petite person before her that, in reply to Mrs. Crozier's
+question, she only said abruptly
+
+"The same!"
+
+Then she came to herself and could have bitten her tongue out for that
+plunge into the vernacular of the West; and forthwith a great prejudice
+was set up in her mind against Mona Crozier, in whose eyes she caught
+a look of quizzical criticism or, as she thought, contemptuous comment.
+That for one instant she had been caught unawares and so had put
+herself at a disadvantage angered her; but she had been embarrassed and
+confounded by this miniature goddess, and her reply was a vague echo
+of talk she heard around her every day. Also she could have choked the
+Young Doctor, whom she caught looking at her with wondering humour,
+as though he was trying to see "what her game was," as he said to her
+afterwards.
+
+It was all due to the fact that from the day of the Logan Trial, and
+particularly from the day when Shiel Crozier had told his life-story,
+she had always imagined his wife as a stately Amazonian being with
+the carriage of a Boadicea. She had looked for an empress in splendid
+garments, and--and here was a humming-bird of a woman, scarcely bigger,
+than a child, with the buzzing energy of a bee, but with a queer sort of
+manfulness too; with a square, slightly-projecting chin, as Kitty came
+to notice afterwards; together with some small lines about the mouth and
+at the eyes, which came from trouble endured and suffering undergone.
+Kitty did not notice that, but the Young Doctor took it in with his
+embracing glance, as the wife saluted Kitty with her inward comment,
+which was:
+
+"So this is the chit who wrote to me like a mother!" But Mona Crozier
+did not underestimate Kitty for all that, and she wondered why it was
+that Kitty had written as she did. One thing was quite clear: Kitty had
+had good intentions, else why have written at all?
+
+All these thoughts had passed through the mind of each, with a good many
+others, while they were shaking hands; and the Young Doctor summoned his
+man to carry Mona's hand-luggage to the extra buggy he had brought to
+the station. One of the many other thoughts that were passing through
+three active minds was Kitty's unspoken satire:
+
+"Just think; this is the woman he talked of as though she was a moving
+mountain which would fall on you and crush you, if you didn't look out!"
+
+No doubt Crozier would have repudiated this description of his talk, but
+the fact was he had unconsciously spoken of Mona with a sort of hush in
+his voice; for a woman to him was something outside real understanding.
+He had a romantic mediaeval view, which translated weakness and beauty
+into a miracle, and what psychologists call "an inspired control."
+
+"She's no bigger than--than a wasp," said Kitty to herself, after the
+Young Doctor had assured Mrs. Crozier that her husband was almost well
+again; that he had recovered more quickly than was expected, and had
+gained strength wonderfully after the crisis was passed.
+
+"An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you," was Kitty's
+further inward comment, "and that's why he was always nervous when he
+spoke of her." Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed
+the tiny lines about the tiny mouth, and the fine-spun webs about the
+bird-bright eyes.
+
+The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward
+suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward
+fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more
+offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most,
+spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey--and this, a
+journey across a continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and
+fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold
+of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the
+decision of every step and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and she said
+to herself,
+
+"Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo," and she instinctively felt
+the little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she
+ever wore, or had ever worn.
+
+"Sensible of her not to bring a maid," commented the Young Doctor
+inwardly. "That would have thrown Kitty into a fit. Yet how she manages
+to look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is
+beyond me--and Crozier so rather careless in his ways. Not what you
+would call two notes in the same key, she and Crozier," he reflected as
+he told her she need not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of
+the checks for it.
+
+"My husband--is--is he quite better now?" Mrs. Crozier asked with sharp
+anxiety, as the two-seated "rig" started away with the ladies in the
+back seat.
+
+"Oh, better, thanks to him," was Kitty's reply, nodding towards the
+Young Doctor.
+
+"You have told him I was coming?"
+
+"Wasn't it better to have a talk with you first?" asked Kitty meaningly.
+
+Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried,
+then she looked Kitty in the eyes.
+
+"You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it," was
+her enigmatical reply. "And of course you will tell me. You did not let
+him know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?"
+
+"Oh, you got his cable?" questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph
+in her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor. It did reach
+him, and he replied to the question.
+
+"We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country
+planned his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did
+not, unfortunately, take you into account."
+
+The little lady blushed, or flushed. "May I ask how you know this to be
+so, if it is so?" she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in
+her tone, as it seemed to Kitty.
+
+"The Logan Trial--I mentioned it in my letter to you," interposed Kitty.
+"He was shot for the evidence he gave at the trial. Well, at the trial a
+great many questions were asked by a lawyer who wanted to hurt him, and
+he answered them."
+
+"Why did the lawyer want to hurt him?" Mona Crozier asked quickly.
+
+"Just mean-hearted envy and spite and devilry," was Kitty's answer.
+"They were both handsome men, and perhaps that was it."
+
+"I never thought my husband handsome, though he was always distinguished
+looking," was the quiet reply.
+
+"Ah, but you haven't seen him at all for so long!" remarked Kitty, a
+little spitefully.
+
+"How do you know that?" Mrs. Crozier was nettled, though she did not
+show it; but Kitty felt it was so, and was glad.
+
+"He said so at the Logan Trial."
+
+"Was that the kind of question asked at the trial?" the wife quickly
+interjected.
+
+"Yes, lots of that kind," returned Kitty.
+
+"What was the object?"
+
+"To make him look not so distinguished--like nothing. If a man isn't
+handsome, but only distinguished"--Kitty's mood was dangerous--"and you
+make him look cheap, that's one advantage, and--"
+
+Here the Young Doctor, having observed the rising tide of antagonism in
+the tone of the voices behind him, gently interposed, and made it clear
+that the purpose was to throw a shadow on the past of her husband
+in order to discredit his evidence; to which Mrs. Crozier nodded her
+understanding. She liked the Young Doctor, as who did not who came in
+contact with him, except those who had fear of him, and who had an idea
+that he could read their minds as he read their bodies. And even this
+girl at her side--Mona Crozier realised that the part she had played was
+evidently an unselfish one, though she felt with piercing intuition that
+whatever her husband thought of the girl, the girl thought too much of
+her husband. Somehow, all in a moment, it made her sorry for the girl's
+sake. The girl had meant well by her husband in sending for his wife,
+that was certain; and she did not look bad. She was too sedately and
+reservedly dressed, in spite of her auriferous face and head and her
+burnished tone, to be bad; too fearless in eye, too concentrated to be
+the rover in fields where she had no tenure or right.
+
+She turned and looked Kitty squarely in the eyes, and a new, softer look
+came into her own, subduing what to Kitty was the challenging alertness
+and selfish inquisitiveness.
+
+"You have been very good to Shiel--you two kind people," she said, and
+there came a sudden faint mist to her eyes.
+
+That was her lucky moment, and she spoke as she did just in time, for
+Kitty was beginning to resent her deeply; to dislike her far more than
+was reasonable, and certainly without any justice.
+
+Kitty spoke up quickly. "Well, you see, he was always kind and good to
+other people, and that was why--"
+
+"But that Mr. Burlingame did not like him?" The wife had a strange
+intuition regarding Mr. Burlingame. She was sure that there was a woman
+in the case--the girl beside her?
+
+"That was because Mr. Burlingame was not kind or good to other people,"
+was Kitty's sedate response. There was an undertone of reflection in the
+voice which did not escape Mrs. Crozier's senses, and it also caught the
+ear of the Young Doctor, to whom there came a sudden revelation of the
+reason why Burlingame had left Mrs. Tynan's house.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Crozier enigmatically. Presently, with suppressed
+excitement as she saw the Young Doctor reining in the horses slowly, she
+added: "My husband--when have you arranged that I should see him?"
+
+"When he gets back--home," Kitty replied, with an accent on the last
+word.
+
+Mrs. Crozier started visibly. "When he gets back home-back from where?
+He is not here?" she asked in a tone of chagrin. She had come a long
+way, and she had pictured this meeting at the end of the journey with
+a hundred variations, but never with this one--that she should not see
+Shiel at once when the journey was over, if he was alive. Was it hurt
+pride or disappointed love which spoke in her face, in her words? After
+all, it was bad enough that her private life and affairs should be
+dragged out in a court of law; that these two kind strangers, whom she
+had never seen till a few minutes ago, should be in the inner circle
+of knowledge of the life of her husband and herself, without her
+self-esteem being hurt like this. She was very woman, and the look
+of the thing was not nice to her eyes, while it must belittle her in
+theirs. Had this girl done it on purpose? Yet why should she--she who
+had so appealed to her to come to him--have sought to humiliate her?
+
+Kitty was not quite sure what she ought to say. "You see, we expected
+him back before this. He is very exact!"
+
+"Very exact?" asked Mrs. Crozier in astonishment. This was a new phase
+of Shiel Crozier's character. He must, indeed, have changed since he had
+caused her so much anxiety in days gone by.
+
+"Usen't he to be so?" asked Kitty, a little viciously. "He is so very
+exact now," she added. "He expected to be back home before this"--how
+she loved to use that word home--"and so we thought he would be here
+when you arrived. But he has been detained at Aspen Vale. He had a big
+business deal on--"
+
+"A big business deal? Is he--is he in a large way of business?" Mona
+asked almost incredulously. Shiel Crozier in a large way of business,
+in a big business deal? It did not seem possible. His had ever been the
+game of chance. Business--business?
+
+"He doesn't talk himself, of course; that wouldn't be like him,"--Kitty
+had joy in giving this wife the character of her husband, "but they say
+that if he succeeds in what he's trying to do now he will make a great
+deal of money."
+
+"Then he has not made it yet?" asked Mrs. Crozier.
+
+"He has always been able to pay his board regularly, with enough left
+for a pew in church," answered Kitty with dry malice; for she mistook
+the light in the other's eyes, and thought it was avarice; and the love
+of money had no place in Kitty's make-up. She herself would never have
+been influenced by money where a man was concerned.
+
+"Here's the house," she quickly added; "our home, where Mr. Crozier
+lives. He has the best room, so yours won't be quite so good. It's
+mother's--she's giving it up to you. With your trunks and things, you'll
+want a room to yourself," Kitty added, not at all unconscious that she
+was putting a phase of the problem of Crozier and his wife in a very
+commonplace way; but she did not look into Mrs. Crozier's face as she
+said it.
+
+Mrs. Crozier, however, was fully conscious of the poignancy of the
+remark, and once again her face flushed slightly, though she kept
+outward composure.
+
+"Mother, mother, are you there?" Kitty called, as she escorted the wife
+up the garden walk.
+
+An instant later Mrs. Tynan cheerfully welcomed the disturber of the
+peace of the home where Shiel Crozier had been the central figure for so
+long.
+
+
+
+
+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 eyes 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 doesn'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:
+
+     And I was very lucky--worse luck!
+     Any man as is a man has to have one vice
+     God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!
+     He saw what he wished to see, which is the way of man
+     Her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios
+     Law's delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed
+     Searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
+     Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+     She looked too gay to be good
+     Telling the unnecessary truth
+     They had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler
+     What isn't never was to those that never knew
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of You Never Know Your Luck, Complete
+by Gilbert Parker
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, COMPLETE ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook You Never Know Your Luck, Parker, Complete
+#115 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: You Never Know Your Luck, Complete
+       [BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6288]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 5, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, ENTIRE***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+Volume 1.
+PROEM
+I.        "PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"
+II.       CLOSING THE DOORS
+III.      THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
+IV.       "STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE"
+V.        A STORY TO BE TOLD
+
+Volume 2.
+VI.       "HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
+VII.      A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+VIII.     ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+IX.       NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+X.        "S. O. S."
+XI.       IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+This volume contains two novels dealing with the life of prairie people
+in the town of Askatoon in the far West. 'The World for Sale' and the
+latter portion of 'The Money Master' deal with the same life, and 'The
+Money Master' contained some of the characters to be found in 'Wild
+Youth'.  'The World for Sale' also was a picture of prairie country with
+strife between a modern Anglo-Canadian town and a French-Canadian town in
+the West.  These books are of the same people; but 'You Never Know Your
+Luck' and 'Wild Youth' have several characters which move prominently
+through both.
+
+In the introduction to 'The World for Sale' in this series, I drew a
+description of prairie life, and I need not repeat what was said there.
+'In You Never Know Your Luck' there is a Proem which describes briefly
+the look of the prairie and suggests characteristics of the life of the
+people.  The basis of the book has a letter written by a wife to her
+husband at a critical time in his career when he had broken his promise
+to her.  One or two critics said the situation is impossible, because no
+man would carry a letter unopened for a long number of years.  My reply
+is: that it is exactly what I myself did.  I have still a letter written
+to me which was delivered at my door sixteen years ago.  I have never
+read it, and my reason for not reading it was that I realised, as I
+think, what its contents were.  I knew that the letter would annoy, and
+there it lies.  The writer of the letter who was then my enemy is now my
+friend.  The chief character in the book, Crozier, was an Irishman, with
+all the Irishman's cleverness, sensitiveness, audacity, and timidity; for
+both those latter qualities are characteristic of the Irish race, and as
+I am half Irish I can understand why I suppressed a letter and why
+Crozier did.  Crozier is the type of man that comes occasionally to the
+Dominion of Canada; and Kitty Tynan is the sort of girl that the great
+West breeds.  She did an immoral thing in opening the letter that Crozier
+had suppressed, but she did it in a good cause--for Crozier's sake; she
+made his wife write another letter, and she placed it again in the
+envelope for Crozier to open and see.  Whatever lack of morality there
+was in her act was balanced by the good end to the story, though it meant
+the sacrifice of Kitty's love for Crozier, and the making of his wife
+happy once more.
+
+As for 'Wild Youth' I make no apology for it.  It is still fresh in the
+minds of the American public, and it is true to the life.  Some critics
+frankly called it melodramatic.  I do not object to the term.  I know
+nothing more melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare's
+plays.  Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic;
+Balzac was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and
+Sir Walter Scott.  The charge of melodrama is not one that should
+disturb a writer of fiction.  The question is, are the characters
+melodramatic.  Will anyone suggest to me the marriage of a girl of
+seventeen with a man over sixty is melodramatic.  It may be, but I think
+it tragical, and so it was in this case.  As for Orlando Guise, I
+describe the man as I knew him, and he is still alive.  Some comments
+upon the story suggested that it was impossible for a man to spend the
+night on the prairie with a woman whom he loved without causing her to
+forget her marriage vows.  It is not sentimental to say that is nonsense.
+It is a prurient mind that only sees evil in a situation of the sort.
+Why it should be desirable to make a young man and woman commit a
+misdemeanor to secure the praise of a critic is beyond imagination.  It
+would be easy enough to do.  I did it in The Right of Way.  I did it in
+others of my books.  What happens to one man and one woman does not
+necessarily happen to another.  There are men who, for love of a woman,
+would not take advantage of her insecurity.  There are others who would.
+In my books I have made both classes do their will, and both are true to
+life.  It does not matter what one book is or is not, but it does matter
+that an author writes his book with a sense of the fitting and the true.
+
+Both these books were written to present that side of life in Canada
+which is not wintry and forbidding.  There is warmth of summer in both
+tales, and thrilling air and the beauty of the wild countryside.  As for
+the cold, it is severe in most parts of Canada, but the air is dry, and
+the sharpness is not felt as it is in this damper climate of England.
+Canadians feel the cold of a March or November day in London far more
+than the cold of a day in Winnipeg, with the thermometer many degrees
+below zero.  Both these books present the summer side of Canada, which is
+as delightful as that of any climate in the world; both show the modern
+western life which is greatly changed since the days when Pierre roamed
+the very fields where these tales take place.  It should never be
+forgotten that British Columbia has a climate like that of England,
+where, on the Coast, it is never colder than here, and where there is
+rain instead of snow in winter.
+
+There is much humour and good nature in the West, and this also I tried
+to bring out in these two books; and Askatoon is as cosmopolitan as
+London.  Canada in the West has all races, and it was consistent of me to
+give a Chinaman of noble birth a part to play in the tragicomedy.  I have
+a great respect for the Chinaman, and he is a good servant and a faithful
+friend.  Such a Chinaman as Li Choo I knew in British Columbia, and all I
+did was to throw him on the Eastern side of the Rockies, a few miles from
+the border of the farthest Western province.  The Chinaman's death was
+faithful in its detail, and it was true to his nature.  He had to die,
+and with the old pagan philosophy, still practised in China and Japan, he
+chose the better way, to his mind.  Princes still destroy themselves in
+old Japan, as recent history proves.
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+Volume 1.
+
+PROEM
+I.        "PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"
+II.       CLOSING THE DOORS
+III.      THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
+IV.       "STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE"
+V.        A STORY TO BE TOLD
+
+
+
+PROEM
+
+Have you ever seen it in reaping-time?  A sea of gold it is, with gentle
+billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
+salute the reaper and say, "All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
+the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall."  The countless million
+heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles them
+to the hour of harvest.  The air-like the tingle of water from a
+mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
+the dust of the world flushed away.
+
+Arcady?  Look closely.  Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are
+houses--sometimes in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
+domesticity or naked industry in the workfield.  Also rising here and
+there in the expanse, clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a
+powdery mist.  They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
+Sacrifice it is.  The vast steam-threshers are mightily devouring what
+their servants, the monster steam-reapers, have gleaned for them.  Soon,
+when September comes, all that waving sea will be still.  What was gold
+will still be a rusted gold, but near to the earth-the stubble of the
+corn now lying in vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
+east and west and south and across the seas.
+
+Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
+whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
+chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature's travail which
+is not pain.  Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
+white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun
+will be a soft--sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
+wool.  Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the
+threshers, will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home.
+There the farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought
+that while he waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding;
+and as in April, the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it
+will push upward and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with
+the "What cheer, partner!" of a mate in the scheme of nature.
+
+Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here--bright, singing
+birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the
+wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth, the
+lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
+plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash of
+the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the mallard
+from the sedge.  And, more than all, a human voice declaring by its joy
+in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+"PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"
+
+If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
+pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
+have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
+possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the "field of
+the cloth of gold," which your eye has already been invited to see.  With
+the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
+joyously at twenty-two.  This morning singer was just that age; and if
+you had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of
+miles, before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in
+tone with the scene.  She was a symphony in gold--nothing less.  Her
+hair, her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all
+gold.  Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might
+have had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal,
+and the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion.  The eyelashes were
+so long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
+cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
+painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
+other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
+was so very busy, a keynote.
+
+Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
+not; but it is a libel.  She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and is
+never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation.  There was,
+however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl's
+presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her quite
+apart from her place in this nature-scheme.  She was not wholly
+aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which would
+have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so black.
+Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it may be a
+matter of parentage.
+
+Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted.  Her father had
+been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West.
+His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to
+maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
+daughter was now brushing as she sang.  The widow herself was the origin
+of the girl's slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of
+selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial
+decision.  The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his
+daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul as
+ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little
+sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter's sake at least, keeping
+herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked
+temptations.  She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample
+but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers.  The girl
+was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who can
+say?  Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish
+coast long since?  Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her
+father's.  You would have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have
+thought that nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so
+pointedly designed to express the ancient dame's colour-scheme, even to
+the delicate auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud
+look of her faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a
+purse and scarcely needed one.  In any case she had an ample pocket in
+her dress.
+
+This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
+important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
+have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
+herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
+chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story.
+As a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
+deserter.  Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
+had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean and
+low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
+matrimony without its status.
+
+As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
+misleading.  A man had once said to her that "she looked too gay to be
+good," but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
+rather better.  Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
+getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
+knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
+turned from her wiser if not better men.  Because they had pursued the
+old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan
+had exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional
+and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for
+their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
+themselves well.  She scored in any contest--in spite of her rather small
+brain, large heart, and ardent appearance.  A very clever, shiftless
+Irish husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy
+watching and fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and fend
+herself to the same extent as she would have done had she been free and
+childless and thirty.  The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw none of
+those things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time and look
+into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or the grey-
+blue foothills.  She never sang--she had never sung a note in her life;
+but this girl of hers, with a man's coat in her hand, and eyes on the
+joyous scene before her, was for ever humming or singing.  She had even
+sung in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer, because
+strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not so vain
+as people of her colouring sometimes are.  It was just as bad, however,
+when she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang, people
+stared at her.  So it was that she seldom went to church at all; but it
+was not because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were quite
+individual and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial deserter
+will show.
+
+This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom to
+the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when he was
+in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair
+proportion of the time.  It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy
+and the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as a
+child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the
+alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular
+man whose coat she now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust
+upon it.  This was the song she sang:
+
+         "Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
+          Hereaway I waited him, hereaway and oft;
+          When I sang my song to him, bright his eyes began to shine--
+          Hereaway I loved him well, for my heart was soft.
+
+         "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+          Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
+          Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies--
+          'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"
+
+         "Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
+          Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
+          Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown--
+          Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
+
+         "When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+          Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+          I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
+          'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"
+
+
+There was a plaintive quality in the voice of this russet maiden in
+perfect keeping with the music and the words; and though her lips smiled,
+there was a deep, wistful look in her eyes more in harmony with the
+coming autumn than with this gorgeous harvest-time.
+
+For a moment after she had finished singing she stood motionless,
+absorbed by the far horizon; then suddenly she gave a little shake
+of the body and said in a brisk, playfully chiding way:
+
+"Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"  There was no one near,
+so far as eye could see, so it was clear that the words were addressed
+to herself.  She was expressing that wonder which so many people feel
+at discovering in themselves long-concealed characteristics, or find
+themselves doing things out of their natural orbit, as they think.  If
+any one had told Kitty Tynan that she had rare imagination, she would
+have wondered what was meant.  If anyone had said to her, "What are you
+dreaming about, Kitty?" she would have understood, however, for she had
+had fits of dreaming ever since she was a child, and they had increased
+during the past few years--since the man came to live with them whose
+coat she was brushing.  Perhaps this was only imitation, because the man
+had a habit of standing or sitting still and looking into space for
+minutes--and on Sundays for hours--at a time; and often she had watched
+him as he lay on his back in the long grass, head on a hillock, hat down
+over his eyes, while the smoke from his pipe came curling up from beneath
+the rim.  Also she had seen him more than once sitting with a letter
+before him and gazing at it for many minutes together.  She had also
+noted that it was the same letter on each occasion; that it was a closed
+letter, and also that it was unstamped.  She knew that, because she had
+seen it in his desk--the desk once belonging to her father, a sloping
+thing with a green-baize top.  Sometimes he kept it locked, but very
+often he did not; and more than once, when he had asked her to get him
+something from the desk, not out of meanness, but chiefly because her
+moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios, she had
+examined the envelope curiously.  The envelope bore a woman's
+handwriting, and the name on it was not that of the man who owned the
+coat--and the letter.  The name on the envelope was Shiel Crozier, but
+the name of the man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry--James Gathorne
+Kerry, so he said.
+
+Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
+mystery.  She wondered greatly what it all meant.  Never in anything else
+had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but she
+felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up fifty
+stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who for over
+four years had lived in her mother's house.  He had become part of her
+life, perhaps just because he was a man,--and what home is a real home
+without a man?--perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet, confidential
+word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness; indeed, he showed in
+his manner occasionally almost a boisterous hilarity.  He undoubtedly was
+what her mother called "a queer dick," but also "a pippin with a perfect
+core," which was her way of saying that he was a man to be trusted with
+herself and with her daughter; one who would stand loyally by a friend or
+a woman.  He had stood by them both when Augustus Burlingame, the lawyer,
+who had boarded with them when J. G. Kerry first came, coarsely exceeded
+the bounds of liberal friendliness which marked the household, and by
+furtive attempts at intimacy began to make life impossible for both
+mother and daughter.  Burlingame took it into his head, when he received
+notice that his rooms were needed for another boarder, that J. G. Kerry
+was the cause of it.  Perhaps this was not without reason, since Kerry
+had seen Kitty Tynan angrily unclasping Burlingame's arm from around her
+waist, and had used cutting and decisive words to the sensualist
+afterwards.
+
+There had taken the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent--Jesse
+Bulrush--who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three
+days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous
+fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and
+adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient
+for harmless deceit.  He was fifty, and no gallant save in words; and,
+as a wary bachelor of many years' standing, it was a long time before he
+showed a tendency to blandish a good-looking middle-aged nurse named Egan
+who also lodged with Mrs. Tynan; though even a plain-faced nurse in
+uniform has an advantage over a handsome unprofessional woman.  Jesse
+Bulrush and J. G. Kerry were friends--became indeed such confidential
+friends to all appearance, though their social origin was evidently so
+different, that Kitty Tynan, when she wished to have a pleasant
+conversation which gave her a glow for hours afterwards, talked to the
+fat man of his lean and aristocratic-looking friend.
+
+"Got his head where it ought to be--on his shoulders; and it ain't for
+playing football with," was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush concerning
+Mr. Kerry.  This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she could not have
+told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a long history of
+the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and whom even the
+inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to "discover" when he lived in
+the same house.  But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing as a canary,
+and relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and becoming means,
+with her good contralto voice.  She was indeed a creature of
+contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice
+it was she.  She looked a soprano.
+
+What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry's coat in her hand it
+would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the
+detectives say when tracking down a criminal.  It is, however, of no
+consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her, for
+there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the house,
+the words of the lyric singing themselves over in her brain:
+
+         "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+          Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
+          Home I saw upon the hearth, heaven stood there in the skies'
+          Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"'
+
+She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of laying
+his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had said
+aloud to herself, "Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"
+Perhaps--and perhaps not.
+
+As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the
+house, and she quickened her footsteps.  The blood in her face, the look
+in her eye quickened also.  And now a figure appeared in the doorway--a
+figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.
+
+"Villain'!" he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient
+moods--after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush.  "Hither with my coat; my
+spotless coat in a spotted world,--the unbelievable anomaly--
+
+                  "'For the earth of a dusty to-day
+                    Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.'"
+
+When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought it
+was clever beyond thinking--a heavenly jumble.  "If it wasn't for me
+you'd be carted for rubbish," she replied joyously as she helped him on
+with his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.
+
+"I heard you singing--what was it?" he asked cheerily, while it could
+be seen that his mind was preoccupied.  The song she had sung, floating
+through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
+engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long time,
+with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or rear-
+guard or what you will:
+
+        "'Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
+          Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft--'"
+
+she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
+saddened her, she knew not why.  At the words the flaming exhilaration of
+the man's face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant look.
+
+"That--oh, that!" he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a
+clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.
+
+"Your hat!" she called after him, and ran inside the house.  An instant
+later she gave it to him.  Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
+kindly at her.
+
+"'Whereaway, hereaway' is a wonderful song," he said.  "We used to sing
+it when I was a boy--and after, and after.  It's an old song--old as the
+hills.  Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan.  What a girl you are--to be so kind
+to a fellow like--me!"
+
+"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"--these were the very words she had
+used about herself a little while before.  The song--why did it make Mr.
+Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it?  Kitty
+watched him striding down the street into the town.
+
+Now a voice--a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:
+
+"Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat," it said.
+
+Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
+struggle, into his coat.
+
+"Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly," she answered cheerily as she entered.
+
+"Of course I'm not the star boarder--nothing for me!" he said in
+affected protest.
+
+"A little more to starboard and you'll get it on," she retorted with a
+glint of her late father's raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch which
+put it right on the ample shoulders.
+
+"Bully! bully!" he cried.  "I'll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup."
+
+"I'm a Christian.  I hate horse-racers and gamblers," she returned
+mockingly.
+
+"I'll turn Christian--I want to be loved," he bleated from the doorway.
+
+"Roll on, proud porpoise!" she rejoined, which shows that her
+conversation was not quite aristocratic at all times.
+
+"Golly, but she's a gold dollar in a gold bank," remarked Jesse Bulrush
+warmly as he lurched into the street.
+
+The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down the
+way the two men had gone.
+
+The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her.  She heard the dizzy din
+of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of the
+solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing, machine-
+like sound.  This particular sound went on and on.
+
+She opened the door of the next room.  Her mother sat at a sewing-machine
+intent upon some work, the needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.
+
+"What are you making, mother?" Kitty asked.  "New blinds for Mr. Kerry's
+bedroom-he likes this green colour," the widow added with a slight flush,
+due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.
+
+"Everybody does everything for him," remarked the girl almost pettishly.
+
+"That's a nice spirit, I must say!" replied her mother reprovingly, the
+machine almost stopping.
+
+"If I said it in a different way it would be all right," the other
+returned with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft
+inflection, like a born actress.
+
+"Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" declared her mother, and she
+bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring
+way.  Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes.  A look
+of pleasure stole over the girl's face, and her bosom rose and fell with
+a happy sigh.  Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CLOSING THE DOORS
+
+There are many people who, in some subtle psychological way, are very
+like their names; as though some one had whispered to "the parents of
+this child" the name designed for it from the beginning of time.  So it
+was with Shiel Crozier.  Does not the name suggest a man lean and flat,
+sinewy, angular and isolated like a figure in one of El Greco's pictures
+in the Prado at Madrid?  Does not the name suggest a figure of elongated
+humanity with a touch of ancient mysticism and yet also of the
+fantastical humour of Don Quixote?
+
+In outward appearance Shiel Crozier, otherwise J. G. Kerry, of Askatoon,
+was like his name for the greater part of the time.  Take him in repose,
+and he looked a lank ascetic who dreamed of a happy land where
+flagellation was a joy and pain a panacea.  In action, however, as when
+Kitty Tynan helped him on with his coat, he was a pure improvisation of
+nature.  He had a face with a Cromwellian mole, which broke out in
+emotion like an April day, with eyes changing from a blue-grey to the
+deepest ultramarine that ever delighted the soul and made the reputation
+of an Old Master.  Even in the prairie town of Askatoon, where every man
+is so busy that he scarcely knows his own children when he meets them,
+and almost requires an introduction to his wife when the door closes on
+them at bedtime, people took a second look at him when he passed.  Many
+who came in much direct contact with him, as Augustus Burlingame the
+lawyer had done, tried to draw from him all there was to tell about
+himself; which is a friendly custom of the far West.  The native-born
+greatly desire to tell about themselves.  They wear their hearts on their
+sleeves, and are childlike in the frank recitals of all they were and are
+and hope to be.  This covers up also a good deal of business acumen,
+shrewdness, and secretiveness which is not so childlike and bland.
+
+In this they are in sharp contrast to those not native-born.  These
+come from many places on the earth, and they are seldom garrulously
+historical.  Some of them go to the prairie country to forget they ever
+lived before, and to begin the world again, having been hurt in life
+undeservingly; some go to bury their mistakes or worse in pioneer work
+and adventure; some flee from a wrath that would devour them--the law,
+society, or a woman.
+
+This much must be said at once for Crozier, that he had no crime to
+hide.  It was not because of crime that "He buckles up his talk like the
+bellyband on a broncho," as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said
+of him; and Deely was a man of "horse-sense," no doubt because he was a
+horse-doctor--"a veterenny surgeon," as his friends called him when they
+wished to flatter him.  Deely supplemented this chaste remark about the
+broncho with the observation that, "Same as the broncho, you buckle him
+tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush."  And he
+added further, "'Tis a woman that's put the mumplaster on his tongue,
+Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it's another man's wife."
+
+Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of
+his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law,
+or with another man's wife, nor yet with any single maid--not yet; though
+there was now Kitty Tynan in his path.  Yet he had had trouble.  There
+was hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more than all
+else in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived his life for
+over four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer, and stud-
+manager for Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire.  In the opinion of
+the West, "big-bugs" did not come down to this kind of occupation unless
+they had been roughly handled by fate or fortune.
+
+"Talk?  Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame," said
+Malachi Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling
+young farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and
+farming.
+
+"Words to him are like nuts to a monkey.  He's an artist, that man is.
+Been in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the music
+smells--fairly smells like parfumery," responded Sibley.  "I'd like to
+get at the bottom of him.  There's a real good story under his asbestos
+vest--something that'd make a man call for the oh-be-joyful, same as I do
+now."
+
+After they had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler Deely
+continued the gossip.  "Watch me now, been a friend of dukes in England--
+and Ireland, that Mr. James Gathorne Kerry, as any one can see; and there
+he is feelin' the hocks of a filly or openin' the jaws of a stud horse,
+age-hunting!  Why, you needn't tell me--I've had my mind made up ever
+since the day he broke the temper of Terry Brennan's Inniskillen
+chestnut, and won the gold cup with her afterwards.  He just sort of
+appeared out of the mist of the marnin', there bein' a divil's lot of
+excursions and conferences and holy gatherin's in Askatoon that time
+back, ostensible for the business which their names denote, like the
+Dioceesan Conference and the Pure White Water Society.  That was their
+bluff; but they'd come herealong for one good pure white dioceesan thing
+before all, and that was to see the dandiest horse-racing which ever
+infested the West.  Come--he come like that!"--Deely made a motion like a
+swoop of an aeroplane to earth--"and here he is buckin' about like a
+rough-neck same as you and me; but yet a gent, a swell, a cream della
+cream, that's turned his back on a lady--a lady not his own wife,
+that's my sure and sacred belief."
+
+"You certainly have got women on the brain," retorted Sibley.  "I ain't
+ever seen such a man as you.  There never was a woman crossing the street
+on a muddy day that you didn't sprint to get a look at her ankles.
+Behind everything you see a woman.  Horses is your profession, but woman
+is your practice."
+
+"There ain't but one thing worth livin' for, and that's a woman,"
+remarked Deely.
+
+"Do you tell Mrs. Deely that?" asked Sibley.
+
+"Watch me now, she knows.  What woman is there don't know when her
+husband is what he is!  And it's how I know that the trouble with James
+Gathorne Kerry is a woman.  I know the signs.  Divils me own, he's got
+'em in his face."
+
+"He's got in his face what don't belong here and what you don't know much
+about--never having kept company with that sort," rejoined Sibley.
+
+"The way he lives and talks--'No, thank you, I don't care for anny
+thing,' says he, when you're standin' at the door of a friendly saloon,
+which is established by law to bespeak peace and goodwill towards men,
+and you ask him pleasant to step inside.  He don't seem to have a single
+vice.  Haven't we tried him?  There was Belle Bingley, all frizzy hair
+and a kicker; we put her on to him.  But he give her ten dollars to buy
+a hat on condition she behaved like a lady in the future--smilin' at her,
+the divil!  And Belle, with temper like dinnemite, took it kneelin' as it
+were, and smiled back at him--her!  Drink, women--nothin' seems to have a
+hold on him.  What's his vice?  Sure, then, that's what I say, what's his
+vice?  He's got to have one; anny man as is a man has to have one vice."
+
+"Bosh!  Look at me," rejoined Sibley.  "Drink women--nit!  Not for me!
+I've got no vice.  I don't even smoke."
+
+"No vice?  Begobs, yours has got you like a tire on a wheel!  Vice--what
+do you call gamblin'?  It's the biggest vice ever tuk grip of a man.
+It's like a fever, and it's got you, John, like the nail on your finger."
+
+"Well, p'r'aps, he's got that vice too.  P'r'aps J. G. Kerry's got that
+vice same as me."
+
+"Annyhow, we'll get to know all we want when he goes into the witness
+box at the Logan murder trial next week.  That's what I'm waitin' for,
+"Deely returned, with a grin of anticipation.  "That drug-eating Gus
+Burlingame's got a grudge against him somehow, and when a lawyer's got
+a grudge against you it's just as well to look where y' are goin'.
+Burlingame don't care what he does to get his way in court.  What set him
+against Kerry I ain't sure, but, bedad, I think it's looks.  Burlingame
+goes in for lookin' like a picture in a frame--gold seals hangin' beyant
+his vestpocket, broad silk cord to his eye-glass, loose flowin' tie, and
+long hair-makes him look pretentuous and showy.  But your 'Mr. Kerry,
+sir,' he don't have anny tricks to make him look like a doge from Veenis
+and all the eyes of the females battin' where'er he goes.  Jealousy, John
+Sibley, me boy, is a cruil thing."
+
+"Why is it you ain't jealous of him?  There's plenty of women that watch
+you go down-town--you got a name for it, anyway," remarked Sibley
+maliciously.
+
+Deely nodded sagely.  "Watch me now, that's right, me boy.  I got a name
+for it, but I want the game without the name, and that's why I ain't
+puttin' on anny airs--none at all.  I depend on me tongue, not on me
+looks, which goes against me.  I like Mr. J. G. Kerry.  I've plenty
+dealin's with him, naturally, both of us being in the horse business,
+and I say he's right as a minted dollar as he goes now.  Also, and
+behold, I'd take my oath he never done annything to blush for.  His
+touble's been a woman--wayward woman what stoops to folly!  I give up
+tryin' to pump him just as soon as I made up my mind it was a woman.
+That shuts a man's mouth like a poor-box.
+
+"Next week's fixed for the Logan killin' case, is it?"
+
+"Monday comin', for sure.  I wouldn't like to be in Mr. Kerry's shoes.
+Watch me now, if he gives the, evidence they say he can give--the
+prasecution say it--that M'Mahon Gang behind Logan 'll get him sure as
+guns, one way or another."
+
+"Some one ought to give Mr. Kerry the tip to get out and not give
+evidence," remarked Sibley sagely.  Deely shook his head vigorously.
+"Begobs, he's had the tip all right, but he's not goin'.  He's got as
+much fear as a canary has whiskers.  He doesn't want to give evidence,
+he says, but he wants to see the "law do its work.  Burlingame 'll try to
+make it out manslaughter; but there's a widow with children to suffer for
+the manslaughter, just as much as though it was murder, and there isn't a
+man that doesn't think murder was the game, and the grand joory had that
+idea too.
+
+"Between Gus Burlingame and that M'Mahon bunch of horse-thieves, the
+stranger in a strange land 'll have to keep his eyes open, I'm thinkin'."
+
+"Divils me darlin', his eyes are open all right," returned Deely.
+
+"Still, I'd like to jog his elbow," Sibley answered reflectively.
+"It couldn't do any harm, and it might do good."
+
+Deely nodded good-naturedly.  "If you want to so bad as that, John,
+you've got the chance, for he's up at the Sovereign Bank now.  I seen him
+leave the Great Overland Railway Bureau ten minutes ago and get away
+quick to the bank."
+
+"What's he got on at the bank and the railway?"
+
+"Some big deal, I guess.  I've seen him with Studd Bradley."
+
+"The Great North Trust Company boss?"
+
+"On it, my boy, on it--the other day as thick as thieves.  Studd Bradley
+doesn't knit up with an outsider from the old country unless there's
+reason for it--good gold-currency reasons."
+
+"A land deal, eh?" ventured Sibley.  "What did I say--speculation,
+that's his vice, same as mine!  P'r'aps that's what ruined him.  Cards,
+speculation, what's the difference?  And he's got a quiet look, same as
+me."
+
+Deely laughed loudly.  "And bursts out same as you!  Quiet one hour like
+a mill-pond or a well, and then--swhish, he's blazin'!  He's a volcano in
+harness, that spalpeen."
+
+"He's a volcano that doesn't erupt when there's danger," responded
+Sibley.  "It's when there's just fun on that his volcano gets loose.
+I'll go wait for him at the bank.  I got a fellow-feeling for Mr. Kerry.
+I'd like to whisper in his ear that he'd better be lookin' sharp for the
+M'Mahon Gang, and that if he's a man of peace he'd best take a holiday
+till after next week, or get smallpox or something."
+
+The two friends lounged slowly up the street, and presently parted near
+the door of the bank.  As Sibley waited, his attention was drawn to a
+window on the opposite side of the street at an angle from themselves.
+The light was such that the room was revealed to its farthest corners,
+and Sibley noted that three men were evidently carefully watching the
+bank, and that one of the men was Studd Bradley, the so-called boss.  The
+others were local men of some position commercially and financially in
+the town.  Sibley did not give any sign that he noticed the three men,
+but he watched carefully from under the rim of his hat.  His imagination,
+however, read a story of consequence in the secretive vigilance of the
+three, who evidently thought that, standing far back in the room, they
+could not be seen.
+
+Presently the door of the bank opened, and Sibley saw Studd Bradley lean
+forward eagerly, then draw back and speak hurriedly to his companions,
+using a gesture of satisfaction.
+
+"Something damn funny there!"  Sibley said to himself, and stepped
+forward to Crozier with a friendly exclamation.  Crozier turned rather
+impatiently, for his face was aflame with some exciting reflection.  At
+this moment his eyes were the deepest blue that could be imagined--an
+almost impossible colour, like that of the Mediterranean when it reflects
+the perfect sapphire of the sky.  There was something almost wonderful
+in their expression.  A woman once said as she looked at a picture of
+Herschel, whose eyes had the unworldly gaze of the great dreamer looking
+beyond this sphere, "The stars startled him."  Such a look was in
+Crozier's eyes now, as though he was seeing the bright end of a
+long road, the desire of his soul.
+
+That, indeed, was what he saw.  After two years of secret negotiation he
+had (inspired by information dropped by Jesse Bulrush, his fellow-
+boarder) made definite arrangements for a big land-deal in connection
+with the route of a new railway and a town-site, which would mean more
+to him than any one could know.  If it went through, he would, for an
+investment of ten thousand dollars, have a hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars; and that would solve an everlasting problem for him.
+
+He had reached a critical point in his enterprise.  All that was wanted
+now was ten thousand dollars in cash to enable him to close the great
+bargain and make his hundred and fifty thousand.  But to want ten
+thousand dollars and to get it in a given space of time, when you have
+neither securities, cash, nor real estate, is enough to keep you awake at
+night.  Crozier had been so busy with the delicate and difficult
+negotiations that he had not deeply concerned himself with the absence of
+the necessary ten thousand dollars.  He thought he could get the money at
+any time, so good was the proposition; and it was best to defer
+raising it to the last moment lest some one learning the secret should
+forestall him.  He must first have the stake to be played for before he
+moved to get the cash with which to make the throw.  This is not
+generally thought a good way, but it was his way, and it had yet to be
+tested.
+
+There was no cloud of apprehension, however, in Crozier's eyes as they
+met those of Sibley.  He liked Sibley.  At this point it is not necessary
+to say why.  The reason will appear in due time.  Sibley's face had
+always something of that immobility and gravity which Crozier's face had
+part of the time-paler, less intelligent, with dark lines and secret
+shadows absent from Crozier's face; but still with some of the El Greco
+characteristics which marked so powerfully that of the man who passed as
+J. G. Kerry.
+
+"Ah, Sibley," he said, "glad to see you!  Anything I can do for you?"
+
+"It's the other way if there's any doing at all," was the quick response.
+
+"Well, let's walk along together," remarked Crozier a little
+abstractedly, for he was thinking hard about his great enterprise.
+
+"We might be seen," said Sibley, with an obvious undermeaning meant to
+provoke a question.
+
+Crozier caught the undertone of suggestion.  "Being about to burgle the
+bank, it's well not to be seen together--eh?"
+
+"No, I'm not in on that business, Mr. Kerry.  I'm for breaking banks,
+not burgling 'em," was the cheerful reply.
+
+They laughed, but Crozier knew that the observant gambling farmer was not
+talking at haphazard.  They had met on the highway, as it were, many
+times since Crozier had come to Askatoon, and Crozier knew his man.
+
+"Well, what are we going to do, and who will see us if we do it?"
+Crozier asked briskly.
+
+"Studd Bradley and his secret-service corps have got their eyes on this
+street--and on you," returned Sibley dryly.
+
+Crozier's face sobered and his eyes became less emotional.  "I don't see
+them anywhere," he answered, but looking nowhere.
+
+"They're in Gus Burlingame's office.  They had you under observation
+while you were in the bank."
+
+"I couldn't run off with the land, could I?" Crozier remarked dryly, yet
+suggestively, in his desire to see how much Sibley knew.
+
+"Well, you said it was a bank.  I've no more idea what it is you're
+tryin' to run off with than I know what an ace is goin' to do when
+there's a joker in the pack," remarked Sibley; "but I thought I'd tell
+you that Bradley and his lot are watchin' you gettin' ready to run."
+Then he hastily told what he had seen.
+
+Crozier was reassured.  It was natural that Bradley & Co. should take an
+interest in his movements.  They would make a pile of money if he pulled
+off the deal-far more than he would.  It was not strange that they should
+watch his invasion of the bank.  They knew he wanted money, and a bank
+was the place to get it.  That was the way he viewed the matter on the
+instant.  He replied to Sibley cheerfully.  "A hundred to one is a lot
+when you win it," he said enigmatically.
+
+"It depends on how much you have on," was Sibley's quiet reply--"a dollar
+or a thousand dollars.
+
+"If you've got a big thing on, and you've got an outsider that you think
+is goin' to win and beat the favourite, it's just as well to run no
+risks.  Believe me, Mr. Kerry, if you've got anything on that asks for
+your attention, it'd be sense and saving if you didn't give evidence at
+the Logan Trial next week.  It's pretty well-guessed what you're goin'
+to say and what you know, and you take it from me, the M'Mahon mob that's
+behind Logan 'll have it in for you.  They're terrors when they get
+goin', and if your evidence puts one of that lot away, ther'll be trouble
+for you.  I wouldn't do it--honest, I wouldn't.  I've been out West here
+a good many years, and I know the place and the people.  It's a good
+place, and there's lots of first-class people here, but there's a few
+offscourings that hang like wolves on the edge of the sheepfold, ready to
+murder and git."
+
+"That was what you wanted to see me about, wasn't it?" Crozier asked
+quietly.
+
+"Yes; the other was just a shot on the chance.  I don't like to see men
+sneakin' about and watching.  If they do, you can bet there's something
+wrong.  But the other thing, the Logan Trial business, is a dead
+certainty.  You're only a new-comer, in a kind of way, and you don't need
+to have the same responsibility as the rest.  The Law'll get what it
+wants whether you chip in or not.  Let it alone.  What's the Law ever
+done for you that you should run risks for it?  It's straight talk, Mr.
+Kerry.  Have a cancer in the bowels next week or go off to see a dyin'
+brother, but don't give evidence at the Logan Trial--don't do it.  I got
+a feeling--I'm superstitious--all sportsmen are.  By following my
+instincts I've saved myself a whole lot in my time."
+
+"Yes; all men that run chances have their superstitions, and they're not
+to be sneered at," replied Crozier thoughtfully.  "If you see black,
+don't play white; if you see a chestnut crumpled up, put your money on
+the bay even when the chestnut is a favourite.  Of course you're
+superstitious, Sibley.  The tan and the green baize are covered with
+ghosts that want to help you, if you'll let them."
+
+Sibley's mouth opened in amazement.  Crozier was speaking with the look
+of the man who hypnotises himself, who "sees things," who dreams as only
+the gambler and the plunger on the turf do dream, not even excepting the
+latter-day Irish poets.
+
+"Say, I was right what I said to Deely--I was right," remarked Sibley
+almost huskily, for it seemed to him as though he had found a long-lost
+brother.  No man except one who had staked all he had again and again
+could have looked or spoken like that.
+
+Crozier looked at the other thoughtfully for a moment, then he said:
+
+"I don't know what you said to Deely, but I do know that I'm going to
+the Logan Trial in spite of the M'Mahon mob.  I don't feel about it as
+you do.  I've got a different feeling, Sibley.  I'll play the game out.
+I shall not hedge.  I shall not play for safety.  It's everything on the
+favourite this time."
+
+"You'll excuse me, but Gus Burlingame is for the defence, and he's got
+his knife into you," returned Sibley.
+
+"Not yet."  Crozier smiled sardonically.
+
+"Well, I apologise, but what I've said, Mr. Kerry, is said as man to man.
+You're ridin' game in a tough place, as any man has to do who starts with
+only his pants and his head on.  That's the way you begun here, I guess;
+and I don't want to see your horse tumble because some one throws a
+fence-rail at its legs.  Your class has enemies always in a new country
+--jealousy, envy."
+
+The lean, aristocratic, angular Crozier, with a musing look on his long
+face, grown ascetic again, as he held out his hand and gripped that of
+the other, said warmly: "I'm just as much obliged to you as though I took
+your advice, Sibley.  I am not taking it, but I am taking a pledge to
+return the compliment to you if ever I get the chance."
+
+"Well, most men get chances of that kind," was the gratified reply of the
+gambling farmer, and then Crozier turned quickly and entered the doorway
+of the British Bank, the rival of that from which he had turned in brave
+disappointment a little while before.
+
+Left alone in the street, Sibley looked back with the instinct of the
+hunter.  As he expected, he saw a head thrust out from the window where
+Studd Bradley and his friends had been.  There was an hotel opposite the
+British Bank.  He entered and waited.  Bradley and one of his companions
+presently came in and seated themselves far back in the shadow, where
+they could watch the doorway of the bank.
+
+It was quite a half-hour before Shiel Crozier emerged from the bank.  His
+face was set and pale.  For an instant he stood as though wondering which
+way to go, then he moved up the street the way he had come.
+
+Sibley heard a low, poisonous laugh of triumph rankle through the hotel
+office.  He turned round.  Bradley, the over-fed, over-confident, over-
+estimated financier, laid a hand on the shoulder of his companion as they
+moved towards the door.
+
+"That's another gate shut," he said.  "I guess we can close 'em all with
+a little care.  It's working all right.  He's got no chance of raising
+the cash," he added, as the two passed the chair where Sibley sat--with
+his hat over his eyes, chewing an unlighted cigar.
+
+"I don't know what it is, but it's dirt--and muck at that," John Sibley
+remarked as he rose from his chair and followed the two into the street.
+
+Bradley and his friends were trying steadily to close up the avenues of
+credit to the man to whom the success of his enterprise meant so much.
+To crowd him out would mean an extra hundred and fifty thousand dollars
+for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
+
+What the case was in which Shiel Crozier was to give evidence is not
+important; what came from the giving of his testimony is all that
+matters; and this story would never have been written if he had not
+entered the witness-box.
+
+A court-room at any time seems a little warmer than any other spot to all
+except the prisoner; but on a July day it is likely to be a punishment
+for both innocent and guilty.  A man had been killed by one of the group
+of toughs called locally the M'Mahon Gang, and against the charge of
+murder that of manslaughter had been set up in defence; and manslaughter
+might mean jail for a year or two or no jail at all.  Any evidence which
+justified the charge of murder would mean not jail, but the rope in due
+course; for this was not Montana or Idaho, where the law's delays
+outlasted even the memory of the crime committed.
+
+The court-room of Askatoon was crowded to suffocation, for the
+M'Mahons were detested, and the murdered man had a good reputation in
+the district.  Besides, a widow and three children mourned their loss,
+and the widow was in court.  Also Crozier's evidence was expected to be
+sensational, and to prove the swivel on which the fate of the accused man
+would hang.  Among those on the inside it was also known that the clever
+but dissipated Augustus Burlingame, the counsel for the prisoner, had a
+grudge against Crozier,--no one quite knew why except Kitty Tynan and her
+mother, and that cross-examination would be pressed mercilessly when
+Crozier entered the witness-box.  As Burlingame came into the court-room
+he said to the Young Doctor--he was always spoken of as the Young Doctor
+in Askatoon, though he had been there a good many years and he was no
+longer as young as he looked--who was also called as a witness, "We'll
+know more about Mr. J. G. Kerry when this trial is over than will suit
+his book."  It did not occur to Augustus Burlingame that in Crozier, who
+knew why he had fled the house of the showy but virtuous Mrs. Tynan, he
+might find a witness of a mental and moral calibre with baffling
+qualities and some gift of riposte.
+
+Crozier entered the witness-box at a stage when excitement was at fever
+height; for the M'Mahon Gang had given evidence which every one believed
+to be perjured; and the widow of the slain man was weeping bitterly in
+her seat because of noxious falsehoods sworn against her honest husband.
+
+There was certainly someting credible and prepossessing in the look of
+Crozier.  He might be this or that, but he carried no evil or vice of
+character in his face.  He was in his grave mood this summer afternoon.
+There he stood with his long face and the very heavy eyebrows, clean-
+shaven, hard-bitten, as though by wind and weather, composed and
+forceful, the mole on his chin a kind of challenge to the vertical dimple
+in his cheek, his high forehead more benevolent than intellectual, his
+brown hair faintly sprinkled with grey and a bit unmanageable, his
+fathomless eyes shining.  "No man ought to have such eyes," remarked a
+woman present to the Young Doctor, who abstractedly nodded assent, for,
+like Malachi Deely and John Sibley, he himself had a theory about
+Crozier; and he had a fear of what the savage enmity of the morally
+diseased Burlingame might do.  He had made up his mind that so intense a
+scrupulousness as Crozier had shown since coming to Askatoon had behind
+it not only character, but the rigidity of a set purpose; and that view
+was supported by the stern economy of Crozier's daily life, broken only
+by sudden bursts of generosity for those in need.
+
+In the box Crozier kept his eye on the crown attorney, who prosecuted,
+and on the judge.  He appeared not to see any one in the court-room,
+though Kitty Tynan had so placed herself that he must see her if he
+looked at the audience at all.  Kitty thought him magnificent as he told
+his story with a simple parsimony but a careful choice of words which
+made every syllable poignant with effect.  She liked him in his grave
+mood even better than when he was aflame with an internal fire of his
+own creation, when he was almost wildly vivid with life.
+
+"He's two men," she had often said to herself; and she said it now as she
+looked at him in the witness-box, measuring out his words and measuring
+off at the same time the span of a murderer's life; for when the crown
+attorney said to the judge that he had concluded his examination there
+was no one in the room--not even the graceless Burlingame--who did not
+think the prisoner guilty.
+
+"That is all," the crown attorney said to Crozier as he sank into his
+chair, greatly pleased with one of the best witnesses who had ever been
+through his hands--lucid, concentrated, exact, knowing just where
+he was going and reaching his goal without meandering.  Crozier was about
+to step down when Burlingame rose.
+
+"I wish to ask a few questions," he said.
+
+Crozier bowed and turned, again grasping the rail of the witness-box with
+one hand, while with an air of cogitation and suspense he stroked his
+chin with the long fingers of the other hand.
+
+"What is your name?" asked Burlingame in a tone a little louder than he
+had used hitherto in the trial, indeed even louder than lawyers generally
+use when they want to bully a witness.  In this case it was as though he
+wished to summon the attention of the court.
+
+For a second Crozier's fingers caught his chin almost spasmodically.  The
+real meaning of the question, what lay behind it, flashed to his mind.
+He saw in lightning illumination the course Burlingame meant to pursue.
+For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, and he turned slightly
+pale, but the blue of his eyes took on a new steely look--a look also
+of striking watchfulness, as of an animal conscious of its danger, yet
+conscious too of its power when at bay.
+
+"What is your name?" Burlingame asked again in a somewhat louder tone,
+and turned to look at the jury, as if bidding them note the hesitation of
+the witness; though, indeed, the waiting was so slight that none but a
+trickster like Burlingame would have taken advantage of it, and only then
+when there was much behind.
+
+For a moment longer Crozier remained silent, getting strength, as it
+were, and saying to himself, "What does he know?" and then, with a
+composed look of inquiry at the judge, who appeared to take no notice,
+he said: "I have already, in evidence, given my name to the court."
+
+"Witness, what is your name?" again almost shouted the lawyer, with a
+note of indignation in his voice, as though here was a dangerous fellow
+committing a misdemeanour in their very presence.  He spread out his
+hands to the jury, as though bidding them observe, if they would, this
+witness hesitating in answer to a simple, primary question--a witness who
+had just sworn a man's life away!
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"James Gathorne Kerry, as I have already given it to the court," was the
+calm reply.
+
+"Where do you live?"
+
+"In Askatoon, as I have already said in evidence; and if it is necessary
+to give my domicile, I live at the house of Mrs. Tyndall Tynan, Pearl
+Street--as you know so well."
+
+The tone in which he uttered the last few words was such that even the
+judge pricked up his ears.
+
+A look of hatred came into the decadent but able lawyer's face.
+
+"Where do you live when you are at home?"
+
+"Mrs. Tynan's house is the only home I have at present."
+
+He was outwitting the pursuer so far, but it only gained him time, as he
+knew; and he knew also that no suggestive hint concerning the episode at
+Mrs. Tynan's, when Burlingame was asked to leave her house, would be of
+any avail now.
+
+"Where were you born?"
+
+"In Ireland."
+
+"What part of Ireland?"
+
+"County Kerry."
+
+"What place--what town or city or village in County Kerry?"
+
+"In neither."
+
+"What house, then--what estate?" Burlingame was more than nettled; and
+he sharpened his sword.
+
+"The estate of Castlegarry."
+
+"What was your name in Ireland?"
+
+In the short silence that followed, the quick-drawn breath of many
+excited and some agitated people could be heard.  Among the latter were
+Mrs. Tynan and her daughter and Malachi Deely; among those who held their
+breath in suspence were John Sibley, Studd Bradley the financier, and the
+Young Doctor.  The swish of a skirt seemed ridiculously loud in the hush,
+and the scratching of the judge's quill pen was noisily irritating.
+
+"My name in Ireland was James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, commonly called
+Shiel Crozier," came the even reply from the witness-box.
+
+"James Shiel Gathorne Crozier in Ireland, but James Gathorne Kerry here!"
+Burlingame turned to the jury significantly.  "What other name have you
+been known by in or out of Ireland?" he added sharply to Crozier.  "No
+other name so far as I know."
+
+"No other name so far as you know," repeated the lawyer in a sarcastic
+tone intended to impress the court.
+
+"Who was your father?"
+
+"John Gathorne Crozier."
+
+"Any title?"
+
+"He was a baronet."
+
+"What was his business?"
+
+"He had no profession, though he had business, of course."
+
+"Ah, he lived by his wits?"
+
+"No, he was not a lawyer!  I have said he had no profession.  He lived on
+his money on his estate."
+
+The judge waved down the laughter at Burlingame's expense.
+
+"In official documents what was his description?" snarled Burlingame.
+
+"'Gentleman' was his designation in official documents."
+
+"You, then, were the son of a gentleman?"  There was a hateful suggestion
+in the tone.
+
+"I was."
+
+"A legitimate son?"
+
+Nothing in Crozier's face showed what he felt, except his eyes, and they
+had a look in them which might well have made his questioner shrink.  He
+turned calmly to the judge.
+
+"Your honour, does this bear upon the case?  Must I answer this legal
+libertine?"
+
+At the word libertine, the judge, the whole court, and the audience
+started; but it was presently clear the witness meant that the questioner
+was abusing his legal privileges, though the people present interpreted
+it another way, and quite rightly.
+
+The reply of the judge was in favour of the lawyer.  "I do not quite see
+the full significance of the line of defence, but I think I must allow
+the question," was the judge's gentle and reluctant reply, for he was
+greatly impressed by this witness, by his transparent honesty and
+straightforwardness.
+
+"Were you a legitimate son of John Gathorne Crozier and his wife?" asked
+Burlingame.
+
+"Yes, a legitimate son," answered Crozier in an even voice.
+
+"Is John Gathorne Crozier still living?"
+
+"I said that gentleman was his designation in official documents.  I
+supposed that would convey the fact that he was not living, but I see you
+do not quickly grasp a point."
+
+Burlingame was stung by the laughter in the court and ventured a riposte.
+
+"But is once a gentleman always a gentleman an infallible rule?"
+
+"I suppose not; I did not mean to convey that; but once a rogue always a
+bad lawyer holds good in every country," was Crozier's comment in a low,
+quiet voice which stirred and amused the audience again.
+
+"I must ask counsel to put questions which have some relevance even to
+his own line of defence," remarked the judge sternly.  "This is not a
+corner grocery."
+
+Burlingame bowed.  He had had a facer, but he had also shown the witness
+to have been living under an assumed name.  That was a good start.  He
+hoped to add to the discredit.  He had absolutely no knowledge of
+Crozier's origin and past; but he was in a position to find it out if
+Crozier told the truth on oath, and he was sure he would.
+
+"Where was your domicile in the old country?" Burlingame asked.
+
+"In County Kerry--with a flat in London."
+
+"An estate in County Kerry?"
+
+"A house and two thousand acres."
+
+"Is it your property still?"
+
+"It is not."
+
+"You sold it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"If you did not sell, how is it that you do not own it?"
+
+"It was sold for me--in spite of me."
+
+The judge smiled, the people smiled, the jury smiled.  Truly, though a
+life-history was being exposed with incredible slowness--"like pulling
+teeth," as the Young Doctor said--it was being touched off with laughter.
+
+"You were in debt?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"How did you get into debt?"
+
+"By spending more than my income."
+
+If Askatoon had been proud of its legal talent in the past it had now
+reason for revising its opinion.  Burlingame was frittering away the
+effect of his inquiry by elaboration of details.  What he gained by the
+main startling fact he lost in the details by which the witness scored.
+He asked another main question.
+
+"Why did you leave Ireland?"
+
+"To make money."
+
+"You couldn't do it there?"
+
+"They were too many for me over there, so I thought I'd come here," slyly
+answered Crozier, and with a grave face; at which the solemn scene of a
+prisoner being tried for his life was shaken by a broad smiling, which in
+some cases became laughter haughtily suppressed by the court attendant.
+
+"Have you made money here?"
+
+"A little--with expectations."
+
+"What was your income in Ireland?"
+
+"It began with three thousand pounds--"
+
+"Fifteen thousand dollars about?"
+
+"About that--about a lawyer's fee for one whisper to a client less than
+that.  It began with that and ended with nothing."
+
+"Then you escaped?"
+
+"From creditors, lawyers, and other such?  No, I found you here."
+
+The judge intervened again almost harshly on the laughter of the court,
+with the remark that a man was being tried for his life; that ribaldry
+was out of place; and that, unless the course pursued by the counsel was
+to discredit the reliability of the character of the witness, the
+examination was in excess of the privilege of counsel.
+
+"Your honour has rightly apprehended what my purpose is," Burlingame said
+deprecatingly.  He then turned to Crozier again, and his voice rose as it
+did when he began the examination.  It was as though he was starting all
+over again.
+
+"What was it compelled" (he was boldly venturing) "you to leave Ireland
+at last?  What was the incident which drove you out from the land where
+you were born--from being the owner of two thousand acres"--
+
+"Partly bog," interposed Crozier.
+
+"--From being the owner of two thousand acres to becoming a kind of head-
+groom on a ranch?  What was the cause of your flight?"
+
+"Flight!  I came in one of the steamers of the Company for which your
+firm are the agents.  Eleven days it took to come from Glasgow to
+Quebec."
+
+Again the court rippled, again the attendant intervened.
+
+Burlingame was nonplussed this time, but he gathered himself together.
+
+"What was the process of law which forced you to leave your own land?"
+
+"None at all."
+
+"What were your debts when you left?"
+
+"None at all."
+
+"How much was the last debt you paid?"
+
+"Two thousand five hundred pounds."
+
+"What was its nature?"
+
+"It was a debt of honour--do you understand?"  The subtle challenge of
+the voice, the sarcasm, was not lost.  Again there was a struggle on the
+part of the audience not to laugh outright, and so be driven from the
+court as had been threatened.
+
+The judge interposed again with the remark, not very severe in tone,
+that the witness was not in the box to ask questions, but to answer them.
+At the same time he must remind counsel that the examination must
+discontinue unless something more relevant immediately appeared in the
+evidence.
+
+There was silence again for a moment, and even Crozier himself seemed to
+steel himself for a question he felt was coming.
+
+"Are you married or single?" asked Burlingame, and he did not need to
+raise his voice to summon the interest of the court.
+
+"I was married."
+
+One person in the audience nearly cried out.  It was Kitty Tynan.  She
+had never allowed herself to think of that, but even if she had, what
+difference could it make whether he was married or single, since he was
+out of her star?
+
+"Are you not married now?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"You mean you do not know if you have been divorced?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You mean your wife is dead?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What do you mean?  That you do not know whether your wife is living or
+dead?"
+
+"Quite so."
+
+"Have you heard from her since you saw her last?"
+
+"I had one letter."
+
+Kitty Tynan thought of the unopened letter in a woman's handwriting in
+the green baize desk in her mother's house.
+
+"No more?"
+
+"No more."
+
+"Are we to understand that you do not know whether your wife is living or
+dead?"
+
+"I have no information that she is dead."
+
+"Why did you leave her?"
+
+"I have not said that I left her.  Primarily I left Ireland."
+
+"Assuming that she is alive, your wife will not live with you?"
+
+"Ah, what information have you to that effect?"  The judge informed
+Crozier that he must not ask questions of counsel.
+
+"Why is she not with you here?"
+
+"As you said, I am only picking up a living here, and even the passage
+by your own second-class steamship line is expensive."
+
+The judge suppressed a smile.  He greatly liked the witness.
+
+"Do you deny that you parted from your wife in anger?"
+
+"When I am asked that question I will try to answer it.  Meanwhile, I do
+not deny what has not been put before me in the usual way."
+
+Here the judge sternly rebuked the counsel, who ventured upon one last
+question.
+
+"Have you any children?"
+
+"None."
+
+"Has your brother, who inherited, any children?"
+
+"None that I know of."
+
+"Are you the heir-presumptive to the baronetcy?"
+
+"I am."
+
+"Yet your wife will not live with you?"
+
+"Call Mrs. Crozier as a witness and see.  Meanwhile, I am not upon my
+trial."
+
+He turned to the judge, who promptly called upon Burlingame to conclude
+his examination.
+
+Burlingame asked two questions more.
+
+"Why did you change your name when you came here?"
+
+"I wanted to obliterate myself."
+
+"I put it to you, that what you want is to avoid the outraged law of your
+own country."
+
+"No--I want to avoid the outrageous lawyers of yours."
+
+Again there was a pause in the proceedings, and on a protest from the
+crown attorney the judge put an end to the cross-examination with the
+solemn reminder that a man was being tried for his life, and that the
+present proceedings were a lamentable reflection on the levity of human
+nature--in Askatoon.  Turning with friendly scrutiny to Crozier, he said:
+
+"In the early stage of his examination the witness informed the court
+that he had made a heavy loss through a debt of honour immediately before
+leaving England.  Will he say in what way he incurred the obligation?
+Are we to assume that it was through gambling-card-playing, or other
+games of chance?"
+
+"Through backing the wrong horse," was Crozier's instant reply.
+
+"That phrase is often applied to mining or other unreal flights for
+fortune," said the judge, with a dry smile.
+
+"This was a real horse on a real flight to the winning-post," added
+Crozier, with a quirk at the corner of his mouth.
+
+"Honest contest with man or horse is no crime, but it is tragedy to
+stake all on the contest and lose," was the judge's grave and pedagogic
+comment.  "We shall now hear from the counsel for defence his reason for
+conducting his cross-examination on such unusual lines.  Latitude of this
+kind is only permissible if it opens up any weakness in the case against
+the prisoner."
+
+The judge thus did Burlingame a good turn as well as Crozier, by creating
+an atmosphere of gravity, even of tragedy, in which Burlingame could make
+his speech in defence of the prisoner.
+
+Burlingame started hesitatingly, got into his stride, assembled the
+points of his defence with the skill of which he really was capable.  He
+made a strong appeal for acquittal, but if not acquittal, then a verdict
+of manslaughter.  He showed that the only real evidence which could
+convict his man of murder was that of the witness Crozier.  If he had
+been content to discredit evidence of the witness by an adroit but
+guarded misuse of the facts he had brought out regarding Crozier's past,
+to emphasise the fact that he was living under an assumed name and that
+his bona fides was doubtful, he might have impressed the jury to some
+slight degree.  He could not, however, control the malice he felt, and he
+was smarting from Crozier's retorts.  He had a vanity easily lacerated,
+and he was now too savage to abate the ferocity of his forensic attack.
+He sat down, however, with a sure sense of failure.  Every orator knows
+when he is beating the air, even when his audience is quiet and
+apparently attentive.
+
+The crown attorney was a man of the serenest method and of cold,
+unforensic logic.  He had a deadly precision of speech, a very remarkable
+memory, and a great power of organising and assembling his facts.  There
+was little left of Burlingame's appeal when he sat down.  He declared
+that to discredit Crozier's evidence because he chose to use another
+name than his own, because he was parted from his wife, because he left
+England practically penniless to earn an honest living--no one had shown
+it was not--was the last resort of legal desperation.  It was an
+indefensible thing to endeavour to create prejudice against a man because
+of his own evidence given with great frankness.  Not one single word of
+evidence had the defence brought to discredit Crozier, save by Crozier's
+own word of mouth; and if Crozier had cared to commit perjury, the
+defence could not have proved him guilty of it.  Even if Crozier had not
+told the truth as it was, counsel for the defence would have found it
+impossible to convict him of falsehood.  But even if Crozier was a
+perjurer, justice demanded that his evidence should be weighed as truth
+from its own inherent probability and supported by surrounding facts.
+In a long experience he had never seen animus against a witness so
+recklessly exhibited as by counsel in this case.
+
+The judge was not quite so severe in his summing up, but he did say of
+Crozier that his direct replies to Burlingame's questions, intended to
+prejudice him in the eyes of the community into which he had come a
+stranger, bore undoubted evidence of truth; for if he had chosen to say
+what might have saved him from the suspicions, ill or well founded, of
+his present fellow-citizens, he might have done so with impunity, save
+for the reproach of his own conscience.  On the whole, the judge summed
+up powerfully against the prisoner Logan, with the result that the jury
+were not out for more than a half-hour.  Their verdict was, guilty of
+murder.
+
+In the scene which followed, Crozier dropped his head into his hand and
+sat immovable as the judge put on the black cap and delivered sentence.
+When the prisoner left the dock, and the crowd began to disperse,
+satisfied that justice had been done--save in that small circle where the
+M'Mahons were supreme--Crozier rose with other witnesses to leave.  As he
+looked ahead of him the first face he saw was that of Kitty Tynan, and
+something in it startled him.  Where had he seen that look before?  Yes,
+he remembered.  It was when he was twenty-one and had been sent away to
+Algiers because he was falling in love with a farmer's daughter.  As he
+drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those long
+years ago, he had seen the girl's face looking at him from the window of
+a labourer's cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied desolation
+haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married and gone to
+live in Scotland--that place of torment for an Irish soul.
+
+The look in Kitty Tynan's face reminded him of that farmer's lass in his
+boyhood's history.  He was to blame then--was he to blame now?  Certainly
+not consciously, not by any intended word or act.  Now he met her eyes
+and smiled at her, not gaily, not gravely, but with a kind of whimsical
+helplessness; for she was the first to remind him that he was leaving the
+court-room in a different position (if not a different man) from that in
+which he entered it.  He had entered the court-room as James Gathorne
+Kerry, and he was leaving it as Shiel Crozier; and somehow James Gathorne
+Kerry had always been to himself a different man from Shiel Crozier, with
+different views, different feelings, if not different characteristics.
+
+He saw faces turned to him, a few with intense curiosity, fewer
+still with a little furtiveness, some with amusement, and many with
+unmistakable approval; for one thing was clear, if his own evidence was
+correct: he was the son of a baronet, he was heir-presumptive to a
+baronetcy, and he had scored off Augustus Burlingame in a way which
+delighted a naturally humorous people.  He noted, however, that the nod
+which Studd Bradley, the financier, gave him had in it an enigmatic
+something which puzzled him.  Surely Bradley could not be prejudiced
+against him because of the evidence he had given.  There was nothing
+criminal in living under an assumed name, which, anyhow, was his own name
+in three-fourths of it, and in the other part was the name of the county
+where he was born.
+
+"Divils me own, I told you he was up among the dukes," said Malachi Deely
+to John Sibley as they came out.  "And he's from me own county, and I
+know the name well enough; an' a damn good name it is.  The bulls of
+Castlegarry was famous in the south of Ireland."
+
+"I've a warm spot for him.  I was right, you see.  Backing horses ruined
+him," said Sibley in reply; and he looked at Crozier admiringly.
+
+There is the communion of saints, but nearer and dearer is the communion
+of sinners; for a common danger is their bond, and that is even more than
+a common hope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+"STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE"
+
+On the evening of the day of the trial, Mrs. Tynan, having fixed the new
+blind to the window of Shiel Crozier's room, which was on the ground-
+floor front, was lowering and raising it to see if it worked properly,
+when out in the moonlit street she saw a wagon approaching her house
+surrounded and followed by obviously excited men.  Once before she had
+seen just such a group nearing her door.  That was when her husband was
+brought home to die in her arms.  She had a sudden conviction, as,
+holding the blind in her hand, she looked out into the night, that again
+tragedy was to cross her threshold.  Standing for an instant under the
+fascination of terror, she recovered herself with a shiver, and, stepping
+down from the chair where she had been fixing the blind, with the
+instinct of real woman, she ran to the bed of the room where she was, and
+made it ready.  Why did she feel that it was Shiel Crozier's bed which
+should be made ready?  Or did she not feel it?  Was it only a dazed,
+automatic act, not connected with the person who was to lie in the bed?
+Was she then a fatalist?  Were trouble and sorrow so much her portion
+that to her mind this tragedy, whatever it was, must touch the man
+nearest to her--and certainly Shiel Crozier was far nearer than Jesse
+Bulrush.  Quite apart from wealth or position, personality plays a part
+more powerful than all else in the eyes of every woman who has a soul
+which has substance enough to exist at all.  Such men as Crozier have
+compensations for "whate'er they lack."  It never occurred to Mrs. Tynan
+to go to Jesse Bulrush's room or the room of middle-aged, comely Nurse
+Egan.  She did the instinctive thing, as did the woman who sent a man a
+rope as a gift, on the ground that the fortune in his hand said that he
+was born not to be drowned.
+
+Mrs. Tynan's instinct was right.  By the time she had put the bed into
+shape, got a bowl of water ready, lighted a lamp, and drawn the bed out
+from the wall, there was a knocking at the door.  In a moment she had
+opened it, and was faced by John Sibley, whose hat was off as though he
+were in the presence of death.  This gave her a shock, and her eyes
+strove painfully to see the figure which was being borne feet foremost
+over her threshold.
+
+"It's Mr. Crozier?" she asked.
+
+"He was shot coming home here--by the M'Mahon mob, I guess," returned
+Sibley huskily.
+
+"Is--is he dead?" she asked tremblingly.  "No.  Hurt bad."
+
+"The kindest man--it'd break Kitty's heart--and mine," she added hastily,
+for she might be misunderstood; and John Sibley had shown signs of
+interest in her daughter.
+
+"Where's the Young Doctor?" she asked, catching sight of Crozier's face
+as they laid him on the bed.  "He's done the first aid, and he's off
+getting what's needed for the operation.  He'll be here in a minute or
+so," said a banker who, a few days before, had refused Crozier credit.
+
+"Gently, gently--don't do it that way," said Mrs. Tynan in sharp reproof
+as they began to take off Crozier's clothes.
+
+"Are you going to stay while we do it?" asked a maker of mineral waters,
+who whined at the prayer meetings of a soul saved and roared at his
+employees like a soul damned.
+
+"Oh, don't be a fool!" was the impatient reply.  "I've a grown-up girl
+and I've had a husband.  Don't pull at his vest like that.  Go away.  You
+don't know how.  I've had experience--my husband .  .  .  There, wait
+till I cut it away with the scissors.  Cover him with the quilt.  Now,
+then, catch hold of his trousers under the quilt, and draw them off
+slowly.  .  .  .  There you are--and nothing to shock the modesty of a
+grown-up woman or any other when a life's at stake.  What does the Young
+Doctor say?"
+
+"Hush!  He's coming to," interposed the banker.  It was as though the
+quiet that followed the removal of his clothes and the touch of Mrs.
+Tynan's hand on his head had called Crozier back from unconsciousness.
+
+The first face he saw was that of the banker.  In spite of the loss of
+blood and his pitiable condition, a whimsical expression came to his
+eyes.  "Lucky for you you didn't lend me the money," he said feebly.
+
+The banker shook his head.  "I'm not thinking of that, Mr. Crozier.  God
+knows, I'm not!"
+
+Crozier caught sight of Mrs. Tynan.  "It's hard on you to have me brought
+here," he murmured as she took his hand.
+
+"Not so hard as if they hadn't," she replied.  "That's what a home's for
+--not just a place for eating and drinking and sleeping."
+
+"It wasn't part of the bargain," he said weakly.
+
+"It was my part of the bargain."
+
+"Here's Kitty," said the maker of mineral waters, as there was the swish
+of a skirt at the door.
+
+"Who are you calling 'Kitty'?" asked the girl indignantly, as they
+motioned her back from the bedside.  "There's too many people here," she
+added abruptly to her mother.  "We can take care of him"--she nodded
+towards the bed.  "We don't want any help except--except from John
+Sibley, if he will stay, and you too," she added to the banker.
+
+She had not yet looked at the figure on the bed.  She felt she could not
+do so while all these people were in the room.  She needed time to adjust
+herself to the situation.  It was as though she was the authority in the
+household and took control even of her mother.  Mrs. Tynan understood.
+She had a great belief in her daughter and admired her cleverness, and
+she was always ready to be ruled by her; it was like being "bossed" by
+the man she had lost.
+
+"Yes, you'd all better go," Mrs. Tynan said.  "He wants all the air
+he can get, and I can't make things ready with all of you in the room.
+Go outdoors for a while, anyway.  It's summer and you'll not take cold!
+The Young Doctor has work to do, and my girl and I and these two will
+help him plenty."  She motioned towards the banker and the gambling
+farmer.
+
+In a moment the room was cleared of all save the four and Crozier, who
+knew that upon the coming operation depended his life.  He had been
+conscious when the Young Doctor said this was so, and he was thinking, as
+he lay there watching these two women out of his nearly closed eyes, that
+he would like to be back in Ireland at Castlegarry with the girl he had
+married and had left without a good-bye near five years gone.  If he had
+to die he would like to die at home; and that could not be.
+
+Kitty had the courage to turn towards him now.  As she caught sight of
+his face for the first time--she had so far kept her head turned away--
+she became very pale.  Then, suddenly, she gathered herself together.
+Going over to the bed, she took the limp hand lying on the coverlet.
+
+"Courage, soldier," she said in the colloquialism her father often used,
+and she smiled at Crozier a great-hearted, helpful smile.
+
+"You are a brick of bricks, Kitty Tynan," he whispered, and smiled.
+
+"Here comes the Young Doctor," said Mrs. Tynan as the door opened
+unceremoniously.
+
+"Well, I have to make an excursion," Crozier said, "and I mayn't come
+back.  If I don't, au revoir, Kitty."
+
+"You are coming back all right," she answered firmly.  "It'll take more
+than a horse-thief's bullet to kill you.  You've got to come back.
+You're as tough as nails.  And I'll hold your hand all through it--yes,
+I will!" she added to the Young Doctor, who had patted her shoulder and
+told her to go to another room.
+
+"I'm going to help you, doctor-man, if you please," she said, as he
+turned to the box of instruments which his assistant held.
+
+"There's another--one of my colleagues--coming I hope," the Young Doctor
+replied.
+
+"That's all right, but I am staying to see Mr. Crozier through.  I said
+I'd hold his hand, and I'm going to do it," she added firmly.
+
+"Very well; put on a big apron, and see that you go through with us if
+you start.  No nonsense."
+
+"There'll be no nonsense from me," she answered quietly.
+
+"I want the bed in the middle of the room," the Young Doctor said, and
+the others gently moved it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A STORY TO BE TOLD
+
+A great surgeon said a few years ago that he was never nervous when
+performing an operation, though there was sometimes a moment when every
+resource of character, skill, and brain came into play.  That was when,
+having diagnosed correctly and operated, a new and unexpected seat of
+trouble and peril was exposed, and instant action had to be taken.  The
+great man naturally rose to the situation and dealt with it coolly; but
+he paid the price afterwards in his sleep when, night after night, he
+performed the operation over and over again with the same strain on his
+subconscious self.
+
+So it was with Kitty Tynan in her small way.  She had insisted on being
+allowed to help at the operation, and the Young Doctor, who had a good
+knowledge of life and knew the stuff in her, consented; and so far as the
+operation was concerned she justified his faith in her.  When the banker
+had to leave the room at the sight of the carnage, she remained, and she
+and John Sibley were as cool as the Young Doctor and his fellow-
+anatomist, till it was all over, and Shiel Crozier was started again on a
+safe journey back to health.  Then a thing, which would have been amusing
+if it had not been so deeply human, happened.  She and John Sibley went
+out of the house together into the moonlit night, and the reaction seized
+them both at the same moment.  She gave a gulp and burst into tears, and
+he, though as tall as Crozier, also broke down, and they sat on the stump
+of a tree together, her hand in his, and cried like two children.
+
+"Never since I was a little runt--did I--never cried in thirty years--
+and here I am-leaking like a pail!"  Thus spoke John Sibley in gasps and
+squeezing Kitty's hand all the time unconsciously, but spontaneously, and
+as part of what he felt.  He would not, however, have dared to hold her
+hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to hold it, and wanting
+her also to share his not wholly reputed, though far from precarious,
+existence.  He had never got so far as to tell her that; but if she had
+understanding she would realise after to-night what he had in his mind.
+She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of his very vital palm,
+had her turn at explanation.  "I wouldn't have broke down myself--it was
+all your fault," she said.  "I saw it--yes--in your face as we left the
+house.  I'm so glad it's over safe--no one belonging to him here, and not
+knowing if he'd wake up alive or not--I just was swamped."
+
+He took up the misty excuse and explanation.  "I had a feeling for him
+from the start; and then that Logan Trial to-day, and the way he talked
+out straight, and told the truth to shame the devil--it's what does a man
+good!  And going bung over a horserace--that's what got me too, where I
+was young and tender.  Swatted that Burlingame every time--one eye, two
+eyes all black, teeth out, nose flattened--called him an 'outrageous
+lawyer'--my, that last clip was a good one!  You bet he's a sport--
+Crozier."
+
+Kitty nodded eagerly while still wiping her red eyes.  "He made the judge
+smile--I saw it, not ten minutes before his honour put on the black cap.
+You couldn't have believed it, if you hadn't seen it--
+
+"Here, let go my hand," she added, suddenly conscious of the enormity
+John Sibley was committing by squeezing it now.
+
+It is perfectly true that she did not quite realise that he had taken
+her hand--that he had taken her hand.  She was conscious in a nice,
+sympathetic way that her hand had been taken, but it was lost in the
+abstraction of her emotion.
+
+"Oh, here, let it go quick!" she added--"and not because mother's
+coming, either," she added as the door opened and her mother came out--
+not to spy, not to reproach her daughter for sitting with a man in the
+moonlight at ten o'clock at night, but--good, practical soul--to bring
+them each a cup of beef-tea.
+
+"Here, you two," she said as she hurried to them.  "You need something
+after that business in there, and there isn't time to get supper ready.
+It's as good for you as supper, anyway.  I don't believe in underfeeding.
+Nothing's too good to swallow."
+
+She watched them sip the tea slowly like two schoolchildren.
+
+"And when you've drunk it you must go right to bed, Kitty," she added
+presently.  "You've had your own way, and you saw the thing through; but
+there's always a reaction, and you'll pay for it.  It wasn't fit work for
+a girl of your age; but I'm proud of your nerve, and I'm glad you showed
+the Young Doctor what you can do.  You've got your father's brains and my
+grit," she added with a sigh of satisfaction.  "Come along--bed now,
+Kitty.  If you get too tired you'll have bad dreams."
+
+Perhaps she was too tired.  In any case she had dreams.  Just as the
+great surgeon performed his operation over and over in his sleep, so
+Kitty Tynan, through long hours that night, and for many nights
+afterwards, saw the swift knives, helped to staunch the blood, held the
+basin, disinfected the instruments which had made an attack on the man
+of men in her eyes, and saw the wound stitched up--the last act of the
+business before the Young Doctor turned to her and said, "You'll do
+wherever you're put in life, Miss Kitty Tynan.  You're a great girl.
+And now get some fresh air and forget all about it."
+
+Forget all about it!  So, the Young Doctor knew what happened after a
+terrific experience like that!  In truth, he knew only too well.  Great
+surgeons do surgery only and have innumerable operations to give them
+skill; but a country physician and surgeon must be a sane being to keep
+his nerve when called on to use the knife, and he must have a more than
+usual gift for such business.  That is what the Young Doctor had; but he
+knew it was not easy to forget those scenes in which man carved the body
+of fellow-man, laying bare the very vitals of existence, seeing "the
+wheels go round."
+
+It haunted Kitty Tynan in the night-time, and perhaps it was that which
+toned down a little the colour of her face--the kind of difference of
+colouring there is between natural gold and 14-carat.  But in the daytime
+she was quite happy, and though there was haunting, it was Shiel Crozier
+who, first helpless, then convalescent, was haunted by her presence.  It
+gave him pleasure, but it was a pleasure which brought pain.  He was not
+so blind that he had not caught at her romance, in which he was the
+central figure--a romance which had not vanished since the day he
+declared in the court-room that he was married, or had been married.
+Kitty's eyes told their own story, and it made him uneasy and remorseful.
+Yet he could not remember when, even for an instant, he had played with
+her.  She had always seemed part of a simple family life for which he and
+Jesse Bulrush and her mother and the nurse-Nurse Egan-were responsible.
+What a blessing Nurse Egan had been!  Otherwise, all the nursing would
+have been performed by Kitty and her mother, and it might well have
+broken them down, for they were determined to nurse him themselves.
+
+When, however, Nurse Egan came back, two days after the operation was
+performed, they included her in the responsibility, as one of the family;
+and as she had no other important case on at the time, fortunately she
+could give Crozier almost undivided attention.  She had been at first
+disposed to keep Kitty out of the sick-chamber, as no place for a girl,
+but she soon abandoned that position, for Kitty was not the girl ever to
+think of impropriety.  She was primitive and she had rather a before-the-
+flood nature, but she had not the faintest vulgar strain in her.  Her
+mind was essentially pure; nothing material in her had been awakened.
+Her greatest joy was to do the many things for the patient which a nurse
+must do--prepare his food, give him drink, adjust his pillows, bathe his
+face and hands, take his temperature; and on his part he tried hard to
+disguise from her the apprehension he felt, and to avoid any hint by word
+or look that he saw anything save the actions of a kind heart.  True, her
+views as to what was proper and improper might possibly be on a different
+plane from his own.  For instance, he had seen girls of her station in
+the West kiss young men freely--men whom they had no thought of marrying;
+and that was not the custom of his own class in his home-country.
+
+As he got well slowly, and life opened out before him again, he felt he
+had to pursue a new course, and in that course he must take account of
+Kitty Tynan, though he could not decide how.  He had a deep confidence in
+the Young Doctor, in his judgment and his character; and it was almost
+inevitable that he should tell his life-story to the man whose skill had
+saved him from death in a strange land, with all undone he wanted to do
+ere he returned to a land which was not strange.
+
+The thing happened, as such things do happen, in a quite natural way one
+day when he and the Young Doctor were discussing the probable verdict
+against the man who had shot him--the trial was to come on soon, and once
+again Augustus Burlingame was to be counsel for the defence, and once
+again Crozier would have to appear in a witness-box.
+
+"I think you ought to know, Crozier, that, in view of the trial,
+Burlingame has written to a firm of lawyers in Kerry to get full
+information about your past," the Young Doctor said.
+
+Crozier gave one of those little jerks of the head characteristic of
+him and said: "Why, of course; I knew he would do that after I gave my
+evidence in the Logan Trial."  He raised himself on his elbow.  "I owe
+you a great deal," he added feelingly, "and I can't repay you in cash or
+kindness for what you have done; but it is due you to tell you my whole
+story, and that is what I propose to do now."
+
+"If you think--"
+
+"I do think; and also I want both Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear my
+story.  Better, truer friends a man could not have; and I want them to
+know the worst and the best there is, if there is any best.  They and you
+have trusted me, been too good to me, and what I said at the trial is not
+enough.  I want to do what I've never done before.  I want to tell
+everything.  It will do me good; and perhaps as I tell it I'll see myself
+and everything else in a truer light than I've yet seen it all."
+
+"You are sure you want Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear?"
+
+"Absolutely sure."
+
+"They are not in your rank in life, you know."
+
+"They are my friends, and I owe them more than I can say.  There is
+nothing they cannot or should not hear.  I can say that at least."
+
+"Shall I ask them to come?"
+
+"Yes.  Give me a swig of water first.  It won't be easy, but--"
+
+He held out his hand, and the Young Doctor grasped it.
+
+Suddenly the latter said: "You are sure you will not be sorry?  That it
+is not a mood of the moment due to physical weakness?"
+
+"Quite sure.  I determined on it the day I was shot--and before I was
+shot."
+
+"All right."  The Young Doctor disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Anny man as is a man has to have one vice
+Her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios
+Law's delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed
+She looked too gay to be good
+They had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler
+
+
+
+
+
+
+YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK
+
+[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 2.
+
+
+VI.       "HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
+VII.      A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+VIII.     ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+IX.       NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+X.        "S. O. S."
+XI.       IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+"HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
+
+The stillness of a summer's day in Prairie Land has all the
+characteristics of music.  That is not so paradoxical as it seems.
+The effect of some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the senses,
+a suspension of motion and aggressive life; to reduce existence to mere
+pulsation.  It was this kind of feeling which pervaded that region of
+sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story.  The sounds that
+sprinkled the general stillness were in themselves sleepy notes of the
+pervasive music of somnolent nature--the sough of the pine at the door,
+the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding beat of the steam-thresher
+out of sight hard by, the purring of the cat in the arms of Kitty Tynan
+as, with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the tale of a life
+as distant from that which she lived as she was from Eve.
+
+She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on; it even seemed to
+her she was listening to a theme beyond her sphere, like some shameless
+eavesdropper at the curtains of a secret ceremonial.  Once or twice she
+looked at her mother and at the Young Doctor, as though to reassure
+herself that she was not a vulgar intruder.  It was far more impressive
+to her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene at the Logan Trial
+when a man was sentenced to death.  It was strangely magnetic, this
+tale of a man's existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the
+mantelpiece, as it mechanically ticked off the time, seemed only part of
+some mysterious machinery of life.  Once a dove swept down upon the
+window-sill, and, peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital
+with its deep contralto note, and then fled like a small blue cloud
+into the wide and--as it seemed--everlasting peace beyond the doorway.
+
+There was nothing at all between themselves and the far sky-line save
+little clumps of trees here and there, little clusters of buildings and
+houses--no visible animal life.  Everything conspired to give a dignity
+in keeping with the drama of failure being unfolded in the commonplace
+home of the widow Tynan.  Yet the home too had its dignity.  The engineer
+father had had tastes, and he had insisted on plain, unfigured curtains
+and wallpaper and carpets, when carpets were used; and though his wife
+had at first protested against the unfigured carpets as more difficult to
+keep clean and as showing the dirt too easily, she had come to like the
+one-colour scheme, and in that respect her home had an individuality rare
+in her surroundings.
+
+That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background; for what her
+bright colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes
+and "Axminsters," such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the
+imagination.  It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous
+surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been
+arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the
+story; and if it were not a true tale told just as it happened.
+
+
+Perhaps the tale was the more impressive because of Crozier's deep
+baritone voice, capable, as it was, of much modulation, yet, except when.
+he was excited, having a slight monotone like the note of a violin with
+the mute upon the strings.
+
+This was his tale:
+
+"Well, to begin with, I was born at Castlegarry, in Kerry--you know the
+main facts from what I said in court.  As a boy I wasn't so bad a sort.
+I had one peculiarity.  I always wanted 'to have something on,' as John
+Sibley would say.  No matter what it was, I must have something on it.
+And I was very lucky--worse luck!"
+
+They all laughed at the bull.  "I feel at home at once," murmured the
+Young Doctor, for he had come from near Enniskillen years agone, and
+there is not so much difference between Enniskillen and Kerry when it
+comes to Irish bulls.
+
+"Worse luck, it was," continued Crozier, "because it made me confident
+of always winning.  It's hard to say how early I began to believe I could
+see things that were going to happen.  By the hour I used to shake the
+dice on the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes
+shut the numbers about to come up.  Of course now and then I saw the
+right numbers; and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated the
+gift I'd be able to be right nearly every time.  When I went to a horse-
+race I used to fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see beforehand
+the number of the winner.  Again sometimes I was very right indeed, and
+that deepened my confidence in myself.  I was always at it.  I'd try and
+guess--try and see--the number of the hymn which was on the paper in the
+vicar's hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with myself on it.
+I would bet with myself or with anybody available on any conceivable
+thing--the minutes late a train would be; the pints of milk a cow would
+give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would
+be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes.
+I was out against the universe.  But it wasn't serious at all--just a
+boy's mania--till one day my father met me in London when I came down
+from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street.  There
+was the thing that finished me.  I was twenty-one, and restless-minded,
+and with eyes wide open.
+
+"Well, he took me to Thwaite's where I was to become a member, and
+after a little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the
+committee--he was a member of it.  He told me to make myself at home,
+and I did so as soon as his back was turned.  Almost the first thing with
+which I became sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a
+fascination for me.  The binding was very old, and the leather was worn,
+as you will see the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels like
+a nice soap.  That book brought me here."
+
+He paused, and in the silence the Young Doctor pushed a glass of milk and
+brandy towards him.  He sipped the contents.  The others were in a state
+of tension.  Kitty Tynan's eyes were fixed on him as though hypnotised,
+and the Young Doctor was scarcely less interested; while the widow
+knitted harder and faster than she had ever done, and she could knit very
+fast indeed.
+
+"It was the betting-book of Thwaite's, and it dated back almost to the
+time of the conquest of Quebec.  Great men dead and gone long ago--near
+a hundred and fifty years ago-had put down their bets in the book, for
+Thwaite's was then what it is now, the highest and best sporting club in
+the world."
+
+Kitty Tynan's face had a curious look, for there was a club in Askatoon,
+and it was said that all the "sports" assembled there.  She had no idea
+what Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street would look like; but that did
+not matter.  She supposed it must be as big as the Askatoon Court House
+at least.
+
+"Bets--bets--bets by men whose names were in every history, and the names
+of their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons; and all betting on the
+oddest things as well as the most natural things in the world.  Some of
+the bets made were as mad as the bets I made myself.  Oh!  ridiculous,
+some of them were; and then again bets on things that stirred the world
+to the centre, from the loss of America to the beheading of Louis XVI.
+
+"It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis
+whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government
+which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six
+months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is
+now the United States if they revolted.  This would be cheek-by-jowl with
+a bet that an heir would be born to one new-married pair before another
+pair.  The very last bet made on the day I opened the book was that Queen
+Victoria would make Lord Salisbury a duke, that a certain gentleman known
+as S. S. could find his own door in St. James's Square, blindfold, from
+the club, and that Corsair would win the Derby.
+
+"For two long hours I sat forgetful of everything around me, while I read
+that record--to me the most interesting the world could show.  Every line
+was part of the history of the country, a part of the history of many
+lives, and it was all part of the ritual of the temple of the great god
+Chance.  I was fascinated, lost in a land of wonders.  Men came and went,
+but silently.  At last there entered a gentleman whose picture I had so
+often seen in the papers--a man as well known in the sporting world as
+was Chamberlain in the political world.  He was dressed spectacularly,
+but his face oozed good-nature, though his eyes were like bright bits of
+coal.  He bred horses, he raced this, he backed that, he laid against the
+other; he was one of the greatest plungers, one of the biggest figures on
+the turf.  He had been a kind of god to me--a god in a grey frock-coat,
+with a grey top-hat and field-glasses slung over his shoulder; or in a
+hunting-suit of the most picturesque kind--great pockets in a well-
+fitting coat, splendid striped waistcoat.  Well, there, I only mention
+this because it played so big a part in bringing me to Askatoon.
+
+"He came up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful
+Adam's fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and
+said, 'Do you mind--for one minute?' and he reached out a hand for the
+book.
+
+"I made way for him, and I suppose admiration showed in my eyes, because
+as he hastily wrote--what a generous scrawl it was!--he said to me,
+'Haven't we met somewhere before?  I seem to remember your face.
+
+"Great gentleman, I thought, because it was certain he knew he had never
+seen me before, and I was overcome by the reflection that he wished to be
+civil in that way to me.  'It's my father's face you remember, I should
+think,' I answered.  'He is a member here.  I am only a visitor.  I
+haven't been elected yet.'  'Ah, we must see to that!' he said with a
+smile, and laid a hand on my shoulder as though he'd known me many a
+year--and I only twenty-one.  'Who is your father?' he asked.  When I
+told him he nodded.  'Yes, yes, I know him--Crozier of Castlegarry; but
+I knew his father far better, though he was so much older than me, and
+indeed your grandfather also.  Look--in this book is the first bet I ever
+made here after my election to the club, and it was made with your
+grandfather.  There's no age in the kingdom of sport, dear lad,' he
+added, laughing--'neither age nor sex nor position nor place.  It's the
+one democratic thing in the modern world.  It's a republic inside this
+old monarchy of ours.  Look, here it is, my first bet with your
+grandfather--and I'm only sixty now!'  He smoothed the page with his hand
+in a manner such as I have seen a dean do with his sermon-paper in a
+cathedral puplit.  'Here it is, thirty-six years ago.' He read the bet
+aloud.  It was on the Derby, he himself having bet that the Prince of
+Wale's horse would win.  'Your grandfather, dear lad,' he repeated, 'but
+you'll find no bets of mine with your father.  He didn't inherit that
+strain, but your grandfather and your great-grandfather had it--sportsmen
+both, afraid of nothing, with big minds, great eyes for seeing, and a
+sense for a winner almost uncanny.  Have you got it by any chance?  Yes,
+yes, by George and by John, I see you have; you are your grandfather to a
+hair!  His portrait is here in the club--in the next room.  Have a look
+at it.  He was only forty when it was done, and you're very like him; the
+cut of the jib is there.'  He took my hand.  'Good-bye, dear lad,' he
+said; 'we'll meet-yes, we'll meet often enough if you are like your
+grandfather.  And I'll always like to see you,' he added generously.
+
+"'I always wanted to meet you,' I answered.  'I've cut your pictures out
+of the papers to keep them--at Eton and Oxford.'  He laughed in great
+good-humour and pride.  'So so, so so, and I am a hero then, with one
+follower!  Well, well, dear lad, I don't often go wrong, or anyhow I'm
+oftener right than wrong, and you might do worse than follow me--but no,
+I don't want that responsibility.  Go on your own--go on your own.'
+
+"A minute more and he was gone with a wave of the hand, and in excitement
+I picked up the betting-book.  It almost took my breath away.  He had
+staked a thousand pounds that the favourite of the Derby would not win
+the race, and that one of three outsiders would.  As I sat overpowered by
+the magnitude of the bet the door opened, and he appeared with another
+man, not one with whose face I was then familiar, though as a duke and
+owner of great possessions, he was familiar to society.  'I've put it
+down,' he said.  'Sign it, if it's all in order.' This the duke did,
+after apologizing for disturbing me.  He looked at me keenly as he turned
+away.  'Not the most elevating literature in the library,' he said,
+smiling ironically.  'If you haven't got a taste for it beyond control,
+don't cultivate it.'  He nodded kindly, and left; and again, till my
+father came and found me, I buried myself in that book of fate--to me.
+I found many entries in my grandfather's name, but not one in my father's
+name.  I have an idea that when a vice or virtue skips one generation, it
+appears with increased violence or persistence in the next, for, passing
+over my father into my defenceless breast, the spirit of sport went mad
+in me--or almost so.  No miser ever had a more cheerful and happy hour
+than I had as I read the betting-book at Thwaites'.
+
+"I became a member of Thwaite's soon after I left Oxford.  As some men go
+to the Temple, some to the Stock Exchange, some to Parliament, I went to
+Thwaite's.  It was the centre of my interest, and I took chambers in Park
+Place, St. James's Street, a few steps away.  Here I met again constantly
+the great sportsman who had noticed me so kindly, and I became his
+follower, his disciple.  I had started with him on a wave of prejudice in
+his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had
+staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could get
+with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred
+pounds.  What he won--to my youthful eyes-was fabulous.  There's no use
+saying what you think--you kind friends, who've always done something in
+life--that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to the
+turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport.  You must
+remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin
+of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in any
+generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the younger
+son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary for
+livelihood.  If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman, had
+lived, it's hard to tell what I should have become; for steered aright,
+given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have become
+ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another.  But there it
+was, she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me.  At Eton,
+at Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business of life.
+And when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left me, I had
+only one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman.  I had a name as
+a cricketer--"
+
+"Ah--I remember, Crozier of Lammis !" interjected the Young Doctor
+involuntarily.  "I'm a north of Ireland man, but I remember--"
+
+"Yes, Lammis," the sick man went on.  "Castlegarry was my father's place,
+but my mother left me Lammis.  When I got control of it, and of the
+securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn't long in
+making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader.
+He gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed
+horses of my own.  But the luck went against him at last, and then, of
+course, against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws
+the cash out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw
+also the whole internal economy out of your body--a ghastly, empty,
+collapsing thing."
+
+Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh.  She had once put two hundred dollars in
+a mine--on paper--and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in the
+lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more.  When she read a fatal
+telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty,
+collapsing feeling.
+
+Pausing for a moment, in which he sipped some milk, Crozier then
+continued: "At last my leader died, and the see-saw of fortune began for
+me; and a good deal of my sound timber was sawed into logs and made into
+lumber to build some one else's fortune.  When things were balancing
+pretty easily, I married.  It wasn't a sordid business to restore my
+fortunes--I'll say that for myself; but it wasn't the thing to do,
+for I wasn't secure in my position.  I might go on the rocks; but was
+there ever a gambler who didn't believe that he'd pull it off in a big
+way next time, and that the turn of the wheel against him was only to
+tame his spirit?  Was there ever a gambler or sportsman of my class who
+didn't talk about the 'law of chances,' on the basis that if red, as it
+were, came up three times, black stood a fair chance of coming up the
+fourth time?  A silly enough conclusion; for on the law of chances
+there's no reason why red shouldn't come up three hundred times; and so I
+found that your run of bad luck may be so long that you cannot have a
+chance to recover, and are out of it before the wheel turns in your
+favour.  I oughn't to have married."
+
+His voice had changed in tone, his look become most grave, there was
+something very like reverence in his face, and deprecating submission in
+his eyes.  His fingers fussed with the rug that covered his knees.
+
+"God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!" remarked the Young
+Doctor to himself, not erroneously reading the expression of Crozier's
+face and the tone of his voice.  "There's nothing so unnerving."
+
+"No, I oughtn't to have done it," Crozier went on.  "But I will say again
+it wasn't a sordid marriage, though she had great expectations, but not
+immediate; and she was a girl of great character.  She was able and
+brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and she knew her own mind,
+and was radiantly handsome."
+
+Kitty Tynan almost sniffed.  Through a whole fortnight she had, with a
+courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation
+for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what his
+wife was like.  She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman,
+delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw in
+the picture-papers.  She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat, with
+a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief
+crossed on her breast, holding a basket of flowers, while a King
+Charles spaniel gambolled at her feet.
+
+This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
+Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
+exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
+afraid of stepping on her train.  Was it strange she should think that?
+She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons according
+to her kind and from what she knew of life.  So she imagined Crozier's
+wife to have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who swept up the
+dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at all to the
+children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower than their
+ankles.  She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a man like
+Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in the witness-
+box as he did; who took the bullet of the assassin with such courage; who
+broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech on a filly's
+flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who, anyhow, couldn't
+be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn't a hand like a piece of
+steel and the skin of an antelope.  It was enough to make a cat laugh,
+or a woman cry with rage.
+
+"Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly handsome!"
+There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing woman, in
+velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and overbearing, like
+grey poplin.  Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the mirror-the half-
+length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her hands clench and her
+bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive calico frock, a thing
+for Chloe, not for Juno.
+
+She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
+deprecating homage, that "Hush-she-is-coming" in his eyes.  What a fool a
+man was where a woman was concerned!  Here she had been fighting herself
+for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the
+world, fit to command an array of giants; and she saw him now almost
+breathless as he spoke of a great wild-cat of a woman who ought to be by
+his side now.  What sort of a woman was she anyhow, who could let him go
+into exile as he had done and live apart from her all these years, while
+he "slogged away"--that was the Western phrase which came to her mind--to
+pull himself level with things again?  Her feet shuffled unevenly on the
+floor, and it would have been a joy to shake the in valid there with
+the rapt look in his face.  Unable to bear the situation without some
+demonstration, she got to her feet and caught up the glass of brandy
+and milk with a little exclamation.
+
+"Here," she said, holding the glass to his lips, "here, courage, soldier.
+You don't need to be afraid at a six-thousand-mile range."
+
+The Young Doctor started, for she had said what was in his own mind, but
+what he would not have said for a thousand dollars.  It was fortunate
+that Crozier was scarcely conscious of what she was saying.  His mind was
+far away.  Yet, when she took the glass from him again, he touched her
+arm.
+
+"Nothing is good enough for your friends, is it?" he said gratefully.
+
+"That wouldn't be an excuse for not getting them the best there was at
+hand," she answered with a little laugh, and at least the Young Doctor
+read the meaning of her words.
+
+Presently Crozier, with a sigh, continued: "If I had done what my wife
+wanted from the start, I shouldn't have been here.  I'd have saved what
+was left of a fortune, and I'd have had a home of my own."
+
+"Is she earning her living too?" asked Kitty softly, and Crozier did not
+notice the irony under the question.
+
+"She has a home of her own," answered Crozier almost sharply.  "Just
+before the worst came to the worst she inherited her fortune--plenty of
+it, as I got near the end of mine.  One thing after another had gone.
+I was mortgaged up to the eyes.  I knew the money-lenders from Newry to
+Jewry and Jewry to Jerusalem.  Then it was I promised her I'd bet no
+more--never again: I'd give up the turf; I'd try and start again.  Down
+in my soul I knew I couldn't start again--not just then.  But I wanted
+to please her.  She was remarkable in her way; she had one of the most
+imposing intelligences I have ever known.  So I promised.  I promised
+I'd bet no more."
+
+The Young Doctor caught Kitty Tynan's eyes by accident, and there was the
+same look of understanding in both.  They both knew that here was the
+real tragedy of Crozier's life.  If he had had less reverence for his
+wife, less of that obvious prostration of soul, he probably would never
+have come to Askatoon.
+
+"I broke my promise," he murmured.  "It was a horse--well, never mind.
+I was as sure of Flamingo as that the sun would rise by day and set by
+night.  It was a certainty; and it was a certainty.  The horse could win,
+it would win; I had it from a sure source.  My judgment was right, too.
+I bet heavily on Flamingo, intending it for my last fling, and, to save
+what I had left, to get back what I had lost.  I could get big odds on
+him.  It was good enough.  From what I knew, it was like picking up a
+gold-mine.  And I was right, right as could be.  There was no chance
+about it.  It was being out where the rain fell to get wet.  It was just
+being present when they called the roll of the good people that God
+wished to be kind to.  It meant so much to me.  I couldn't bear to have
+nothing and my wife to have all.  I simply couldn't stand--"
+
+Again the Young Doctor met the glance of Kitty Tynan, and there was, once
+more, a new and sudden look of comprehension in the eyes of both.  They
+began to see light where their man was concerned.
+
+After a moment of struggle to control himself, Crozier proceeded: "It
+didn't seem like betting.  Besides, I had planned it, that when I showed
+her what I had won, she would shut her eyes to the broken promise, and
+I'd make another, and keep it ever after.  I put on all the cash there
+was to put on, all I could raise on what was left of my property."
+
+He paused as though to get strength to continue.  Then a look of intense
+excitement suddenly possessed him, and there--passed over him a wave of
+feeling which transformed him.  The naturally grave mediaeval face became
+fired, the eyes blazed, the skin shone, the mouth almost trembled with
+agitation.  He was the dreamer, the enthusiast, the fanatic almost, with
+that look which the pioneer, the discoverer, the adventurer has when he
+sees the end of his quest.
+
+His voice rose, vibrated.  "It was a day to make you thank Heaven the
+world was made.  Such days only come once in a while in England, but when
+they do come, what price Arcady or Askatoon!  Never had there been so big
+a Derby.  Everybody had the fever of the place at its worst.  I was
+happy.  I meant to pouch my winnings and go straight to my wife and say,
+'Peccavi,' and I should hear her say to me, 'Go and sin no more.'  Yes,
+I was happy.  The sky, the green of the fields, the still, home-like,
+comforting trees, the mass of glorious colour, the hundreds of horses
+that weren't running and the scores that were to run, sleek and long, and
+made like shining silk and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to me--
+a horse-race heaven on earth.  There you have the state of my mind in
+those days, the kind of man I was."
+
+Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom
+Downs before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that
+bore him down.  He was terribly, exhaustingly alive.  Something possessed
+him, and he possessed his hearers.
+
+"It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away from
+the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
+ahead.  It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it
+to be for me.  The race was all Flamingo's own, and the mob was going
+wild, when all of a sudden a woman--the widow of a racing-man gone
+suddenly mad--rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle
+with a shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey
+came, a melee of crushed humanity.  And that was how I lost my last two
+thousand five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial."
+
+"Oh!  Oh!" said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns,
+her hands wringing.  "Oh, that was--oh, poor Flamingo!" she added.
+
+A strange smile shot into Crozier's face, and the dark passion of
+reminiscence fled from his eyes.  "Yes, you are right, little friend," he
+said.  "That was the real tragedy after all.  There was the horse doing
+his best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on
+him, stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon,
+feeling the psalm of success in his heart--yes, he knows, he knows what
+he has done, none so well!--and out comes a black, hateful thing against
+him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run.  I felt exactly as
+you do, and I felt that before everything else when it happened.  Then I
+felt for myself afterwards, and I felt it hard, as you can think."
+
+The break went from his voice, but it rang with reflective, remembered
+misery.  "I was ruined.  One thing was clear to me.  I would not live on
+my wife's money.  I would not eat and drink what her money bought.  No,
+I would not live on my wife.  Her brother, a good enough, impulsive lad,
+with a tongue of his own and too small to thresh, came to me in London
+the night of the race.  He said his sister had been in the country-down
+at Epsom--and that she bitterly resented my having broken my promise and
+lost all I had.  He said he had never seen her so angry, and he gave me a
+letter from her.  On her return to town she had been obliged to go away
+at once to see her sister taken suddenly ill.  He added, with an
+unfeeling jibe, that he wouldn't like the reading of the letter himself.
+If he hadn't been such a chipmunk of a fellow I'd have wrung his neck.
+I put the letter her letter-in my pocket, and next day gave my lawyer
+full instructions and a power of attorney.  Then I went straight to
+Glasgow, took steamer for Canada, and here I am.  That was near five
+years ago."
+
+"And the letter from your wife?" asked Kitty Tynan demurely and slyly.
+
+The Young Doctor looked at Crozier, surprised at her temerity, but
+Crozier only smiled gently.  "It is in the desk there.  Bring it to me,
+please," he said.
+
+In a moment Kitty was beside him with the letter.  He took it, turned it
+over, examined it carefully as though seeing it for the first time, and
+laid it on his knee.
+
+"I have never opened it," he said.  "There it is, just as it was handed
+to me."
+
+"You don't know what is in it?" asked Kitty in a shocked voice.  "Why,
+it may be that--"
+
+"Oh, yes, I know what is in it!" he replied.  "Her brother's confidences
+were enough.  I didn't want to read it.  I can imagine it all."
+
+"It's pretty cowardly," remarked Kitty.
+
+"No, I think not.  It would only hurt, and the hurting could do no good.
+I can hear what it says, and I don't want to see it."
+
+He held the letter up to his ear whimsically.  Then he handed it back to
+her, and she replaced it in the desk.
+
+"So, there it is, and there it is," he sighed.  "You have got my story,
+and it's bad enough, but you can see it's not what Burlingame suggested."
+
+"Burlingame--but Burlingame's beneath notice," rejoined Kitty.  "Isn't
+he, mother?"
+
+Mrs. Tynan nodded.  Then, as though with sudden impulse, Kitty came
+forward to Crozier and leaned over him.  The look of a mother was in her
+eyes.  Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than this man
+with the heart of a boy, who was afraid of his own wife.
+
+"It's time for your beef-tea, and when you've had it you must get your
+sleep," she said, with a hovering solicitude.
+
+"I'd like to give him a threshing first, if you don't mind," said the
+Young Doctor to her.
+
+"Please let a little good advice satisfy you," Crozier remarked ruefully.
+"It will seem like old times," he added rather bitterly.
+
+"You are too young to have had 'old times,'" said Kitty with gentle
+scorn.  "I'll like you better when you are older," she added.
+
+"Naughty jade," exclaimed the Young Doctor, "you ought to be more
+respectful to those older than yourself."
+
+"Oh, grandpapa!" she retorted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
+
+The harvest was over.  The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved
+like a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose
+in innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye.  The ground appeared
+bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could
+take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn
+sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert.  The land now, all stubble,
+still looked good for anything.  If bare, it did not seem starved.  It
+was naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down
+after the fight.  Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it
+was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed the
+fibre of its being to no disadvantage.  And overhead the joy of the
+prairie grew apace.
+
+September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and
+shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come into
+the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of nature
+recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength, a
+battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and
+energy.  Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must
+strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
+evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those
+colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his eyes.
+There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of pensiveness--
+the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian summer soon to
+come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to the past and
+forget that to-morrow was all in all.
+
+Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than
+elsewhere.  Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself
+in the delicate contentment of the sunset.  There were many who took it
+all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something
+from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at all,
+save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose
+solicitous friend is the sun.  These heeded it little, even though a
+good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north
+Atlantic and the German Ocean.  From Erin and England and the land o'
+cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity
+as to the permanency of such conditions, and then settled down to take it
+as it was, endless days of sunshine and stirring vivacious air--as though
+they had always known it and had it.
+
+There were exceptions, and these had joy in what they saw and felt
+according to the measure of their temperament.  Shiel Crozier saw and
+felt much of it, and probably the Young Doctor saw more of it than any
+one; stray people here and there who take no part in this veracious tale
+had it in greater or less degree; fat Jesse Bulrush was so sensitive to
+it that he, as he himself said, "almost leaked sentimentality" and Kitty
+Tynan possessed it.  She was pulsing with life, as a bird drunken with
+the air's sweetness sings itself into an abandonment of motion.
+
+Before Crozier came she had enjoyed existence as existence, wondering
+often why it was she wanted to spring up from the ground with the idea
+that she could fly, if she chose to try.  Once when she was quite a
+little girl she had said to her mother, "I'm going to ile away," and her
+mother, puzzled, asked her what she meant.  Her reply was, "It's in the
+hymn."  Her mother persisted in asking what hymn; and was told with
+something like scorn that it was the hymn she herself had taught her only
+child--"I'll away, I'll away to the Promised Land."
+
+Kitty had thought that "I'll away" meant some delicious motion which was
+to ile, and she had visions of something between floating and flying as
+being that blessed means of transportation.
+
+As the years grew, she still wanted to "ile away" whenever the spirit of
+elation seized her, and it had increased greatly since Shiel Crozier
+came.  Out of her star as he was, she still felt near to him, and as
+though she understood him and he comprehended her.  He had almost at once
+become to her an admired mystery, which, however, at first she did not
+dare wish to solve.  She had been content to be a kind of handmaiden to a
+generous and adored master.  She knew that where he had been she could in
+one sense never go, and yet she wanted to be near him just the same.
+This was intensified after the Logan Trial and the shooting of the man
+who somehow seemed to have made her live in a new way.
+
+As long ago as she could recall she had, in a crude, untutored way, been
+fond of the things that nature made beautiful; but now she seemed to see
+them in a new light, but not because any one had deliberately taught her.
+Indeed, it bored her almost to hear books read as Jesse Bulrush and Nurse
+Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his operation, to
+help him pass away the time.  The only time she ever cared to listen--
+at school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for the printed
+page--was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or recited.  Then
+she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but by the music of
+the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying feeling; and she
+got something out of it which had in one sense nothing to do with the
+verses themselves or with the conception of the poet.
+
+Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read.  He was a
+born sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to Kitty
+during Crozier's illness.  Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse
+contrived to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too;
+for he was a picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and
+clean linen--he always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and
+he had a taste in ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought by
+the yard.  He was, in fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for
+material things, as he had shown in the land proposal on which Shiel
+Crozier's fortunes hung, but with no gift for carrying them out, having
+neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose.  Yet he was an
+agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found
+himself "an old bach," as he called himself, in love at last with a
+middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent
+eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.
+
+Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
+volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
+the bedside of the wounded man.  Jesse had been away so much in different
+parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
+had a real chance to make permanent impression.  By accident, however,
+his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at the
+moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer
+feelings.
+
+It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened to
+his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville, and
+Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest.  His content
+was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was lovely,
+as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their cordial,
+ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the divine
+lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice rising
+and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse; though it meant
+nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound was using it
+on her behalf.
+
+This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty
+understood.  Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a
+mistress of his heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did not
+talk.  That, to him, was the best thing of all.  She was a superb
+listener, and he was a prodigious talker--was it not all appropriate?
+
+One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little
+knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made
+a pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point.  He found her in her
+usual place, with a look almost pensive on her face.  He did not notice
+that, for he was excited and elated.
+
+"I want to read you something I've written," he said, and he drew from
+his pocket a paper.
+
+"If it's another description of the timber-land you have for sale-please,
+not to me," she answered provokingly, for she guessed well what he held
+in his hand.  She had seen him writing it.  She had even seen some of the
+lines scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing careful if not
+swift and skillful manufacture.  One of these crumpled-up bits of paper
+she had in her pocket now, having recovered it that she might tease him
+by quoting the lines at a provoking opportunity.
+
+"It's not that.  It's some verses I've written," he said, with a wave of
+his hand.
+
+"All your own?" she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and
+he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of
+aloes on her tongue.
+
+"Yes.  Yes.  I've always written verses more or less--I write a good many
+advertisements in verse," he added cheerfully.  "They are very popular.
+Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses in
+commerce as in affairs of the heart.  But if you'd rather not, if it
+makes you tired--"
+
+"Courage, soldier, bear your burden," she said gaily.  "Mount your horse
+and get galloping," she added, motioning him to sit.
+
+A moment later he was pouring out his soul through a pleasing voice, from
+fat lips, flanked by a high-coloured healthy cheek like a russet apple:
+
+              "Like jewels of the sky they gleam,
+               Your eyes of light, your eyes of fire;
+               In their dark depths behold the dream
+               Of Life's glad hope and Love's desire.
+
+              "Above your quiet brow, endowed
+               With Grecian charm to crown your grace,
+               Your hair in one soft Titian cloud
+               Throws heavenly shadows on your face."
+
+"Well, I've never had verses written to me before," Kitty remarked
+demurely, when he had finished and sat looking at her questioningly.
+"But 'dark depths'--that isn't the right thing to say of my eyes!  And
+Titian cloud of hair--is my hair Titian?  I thought Titian hair was
+bronzy-tawny was what Mr. Burlingame called it when he was spouting,"
+--her upper lip curled in contempt.
+
+"It isn't you, and you know it," he replied jerkily.  She bridled.
+"Do you mean to say that you come and read to me without a word of
+explanation, so that I shouldn't misunderstand, verses written for
+another?  Am I to be told now that my eyes aren't eyes of light and eyes
+of fire, that I haven't got a Grecian brow?  Do you dare to say those
+verses don't fit me--except for the Titian hair and heavenly shadows?
+And that I've got no right to think they're meant for me?  Is it so, that
+a man that's lived in my mother's house for years, eating at the same
+table with the family, and having his clothes mended free, with supper to
+suit him and no questions asked--is it so, that he reads me poetry, four
+lines at a stretch, and a rhyme every other line, and then announces it
+isn't for me!"
+
+Her eyes flashed, her bosom palpitated, her hand made passionate
+gestures, and she really seemed a young fury let loose.  For a moment he
+was deceived by her acting; he did not see the lurking grin in the depths
+of her eyes.
+
+Her voice shook with assumed passion.  "Because I didn't show what I felt
+all these years, and only exposed my real feelings when you read those
+verses to me, do you think any man who was a gentleman wouldn't in the
+circumstances say, 'These verses are for you, Kitty Tynan'?  You betrayed
+me into showing you what I felt, and then you tell me your verses are for
+another girl!"
+
+"Girl! Girl! Girl!" he burst out.  "Nurse is thirty-seven--she told me
+so herself, and how could I tell that you--why, it's absurd!  I've only
+thought of you always as a baby in long skirts"--she spasmodically drew
+her skirts down over her pretty, shapely ankles, while she kept her eyes
+covered with one hand--"and you've seen me makin' up to her ever since
+Crozier got the bullet.  Ever since he was operated on, I've--"
+
+"Yes, yes, that's right," she interrupted.  "That's manly!  Put the blame
+on him--him that couldn't help himself, struck by a horse-thief's bullet
+in the dark; him that's no more to blame for your carryings on while
+death was prowling about the door there--"
+
+"Carryings on!  Carryings on!" Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and
+indignant.  The little devil, to put him in a hole like this!  "Carryings
+on!  I've acted like a man all through--never anything else in your
+house, and it's a shame that I've got to listen to things that have
+never been said of me in all my life.  My mother was a good, true woman,
+and she brought me up--"
+
+"Yes, that's it, put it on your mother now, poor woman!  who isn't here
+to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two
+girls so placed they couldn't help themselves--just doing kind acts for a
+sick man."  Suddenly she got to her feet.  "I tell you, Jesse Bulrush,
+that you're a man--you're a man--"
+
+But she could keep it up no longer.  She burst out laughing, and the
+false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: "That
+you're a man after my own heart.  But you can't have it, even if you are
+after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in
+there!"  She tossed a hand towards the house.
+
+By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting.  "Well, you wicked
+little rip--you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up
+like that!  Why, never on the stage was there such--!"
+
+"It's the poetry made me do it.  It inspired me," she gurgled.  "I felt
+--why, I felt here"--she pressed her hand to her heart "all the pangs of
+unrequited love--oh, go away, go back to the house and read that to her!
+She's in the sitting-room, and my mother's away down-town.  Now's your
+chance, Claude Melnotte."
+
+She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
+towards the house.  "You're good enough for anybody, and if I wasn't so
+young and daren't leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
+I'm thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!"  She laughed till the tears came into her
+eyes.  "This is as good as--as a play."
+
+"It's the best acted play I ever saw, from 'Ten Nights in a Bar-room' to
+'Struck Oil,'" rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed yet
+beaming.  "But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses worth
+anything?  Do you think she'll like them?"
+
+Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read
+deepened in her eyes.  "Nurse 'll like them--of course she will," she
+said gently.  "She'll like them because they are you.  Read them to her
+as you read them to me, and she'll only hear your voice, and she'll think
+them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh a
+thousand pounds.  It doesn't matter to a woman what a man's saying or
+doing, or whether he's so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that
+under everthing he's saying, 'I love you.'  A man isn't that way, but a
+woman is.  Now go."  Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.
+
+"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" he said admiringly.
+
+"Then be a father to me," she said teasingly.
+
+"I can't marry both your mother and nurse."
+
+"P'r'aps you can't marry either," she replied sarcastically, "and I know
+that in any case you'll never be any relative of mine by marriage.  Get
+going," she said almost impatiently.
+
+He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, "I'll let you
+hear some of my verses one day when you're more developed and can
+understand them."
+
+"I'll bet they beat mine," he called back.
+
+"You'll win your bet," she answered, and stood leaning against a tree
+with a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes.  When he had
+disappeared, sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper,
+unfolded it, and laid it on her knee.  "It is better," she said.  "It's
+not good poetry, of course, but it's truer, and it's not done according
+to a pattern like his.  Yes, it's real, real, real, and he'll never see
+it--never see it now, for I've fought it' all out, and I've won."
+
+Then she slowly read the verses aloud:
+
+"Yes, I've won," she said with determination.  So many of her sex have
+said things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their
+decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never,
+never, never do.  Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a
+new force awakened in her character.
+
+For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the
+little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house.  She was
+thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom
+in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social
+pale.  Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world
+beyond this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the
+conscience of a man or woman was the only law.  She was not lawless in
+mind or spirit.  She was only rebelling gainst a situation in which she
+was bound hand and foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive
+desire, if she wished to do so.
+
+Here was a man who was married, yet in a real sense who had no wife.
+Suppose that man cared for her, what a tragedy it would be for them to be
+kept apart!  This man did not love her, and so there was no tragedy for
+both.  Still all was not over yet--yes, all was "over and over and over,"
+she said to herself as she sprang to her feet with a sharp exclamation of
+disgust--with herself.
+
+Her mother was coming hurriedly towards her from the house.  There was a
+quickness in her walk suggesting excitement, yet from the look in her
+face it was plain that the news she brought was not painful.  "He told me
+you were here, and--"
+
+"Who told you I was here?"
+
+"Mr. Bulrush."
+
+"So it's all settled," she said, with a little quirk of her shoulders.
+
+"Yes, he's asked her, and they're going to be married.  It's enough to
+make you die laughing to see the two middle-aged doves cooing in there."
+
+"I thought perhaps it would be you.  He said he would like to be a father
+to me."
+
+"That would prevent me if nothing else would," answered the widow of
+Tyndall Tynan.  "A stepfather to an unmarried girl, both eyeing each
+other for a chance to find fault--if you please, no thank you!"
+
+"That means you won't get married till I'm out of the way?" asked Kitty,
+with a look which was as much touched with myrrh as with mirth.
+
+"It means I wouldn't get married till you are married, anyway," was the
+complacent answer.
+
+"Is there any one special that--"
+
+"Don't talk nonsense.  Since your father died I've only thought of his
+child and mine, and I've not looked where I might.  Instead, I've done my
+best to prove that two women could live and succeed without a man to earn
+for them; though of course without the pension it couldn't have been done
+in the style we've done it.  We've got our place!"
+
+There is a dignity attached to a pension which has an influence quite its
+own, and in the most primitive communities it has an aristocratic
+character which commands general respect.  In Askatoon people gave Mrs.
+Tynan a better place socially because of her pension than they would have
+done if she had earned double the money which the pension brought her.
+
+"Everybody has called on us," she added with reflective pride.
+
+"Principally since Mr. Crozier came," added Kitty.  "It's funny, isn't
+it, how he made people respect him before they knew who he was?"
+
+"He would make Satan stand up and take off his hat, if he paid Hades a
+visit," said Mrs. Tynan admiringly.  "Anybody'd do anything for him."
+
+Kitty eyed her mother closely.  There was a strange, far-away, brooding
+look in Mrs. Tynan's eyes, and she seemed for a moment lost in thought.
+
+"You're in love with him," said Kitty sharply.
+
+"I was, in a way," answered her mother frankly.  "I was, in a way, a kind
+of way, till I knew he was married.  But it didn't mean anything.  I
+never thought of it except as a thing that couldn't be."
+
+"Why couldn't it be?" asked Kitty, smothering an agitation rising in her
+breast.
+
+"Because I always knew he belonged to where we didn't, and because if he
+was going to be in love himself, it would be with some girl like you.
+He's young enough for that, and it's natural he should get as his profit
+the years of youth that a young woman has yet to live."
+
+"As though it was a choice between you and me, for instance!"
+
+Mrs. Tynan started, but recovered herself.  "Yes.  If there had been any
+choosing, he'd not have hesitated a minute.  He'd have taken you, of
+course.  But he never gave either of us a thought that way."
+
+"I thought that till--till after he'd told us his story," replied Kitty
+boldly.
+
+"What has happened since then?" asked her mother, with sudden
+apprehension.
+
+"Nothing has happened since.  I don't understand it, but it's as though
+he'd been asleep for a long time and was awake again."
+
+Mrs. Tynan gravely regarded her daughter, and a look of fear came into
+her face.  "I knew you kept thinking of him always," she said; "but you
+had such sense, and he never showed any feeling for you; and young girls
+get over things.  Besides, you always showed you knew he wasn't a
+possibility.  But since he told us that day about his being married and
+all, has--has he been different towards you?"
+
+"Not a thing, not a word," was the reply; "but--but there's a difference
+with him in a way.  I feel it when I go in the room where he is."
+
+"You've got to stop thinking of him," insisted the elder woman
+querulously.  "You've got to stop it at once.  It's no good.  It's bad
+for you.  You've too much sense to go on caring for a man that--"
+
+"I'm going to get married," said Kitty firmly.  "I've made up my mind.
+If you have to think about one person, you should stop thinking about
+another; anyhow, you've got to make yourself stop.  So I'm going to
+marry--and stop."
+
+"Who are you going to marry, Kitty?  You don't mean to say it's John
+Sibley !"
+
+"P'r'aps.  He keeps coming."
+
+"That gambling and racing fellow!"
+
+"He owns a big farm, and it pays, and he has got an interest in a mine,
+and--"
+
+"I tell you, you shan't," peevishly interjected Mrs. Tynan.  "You shan't.
+He's vicious.  He's--oh, you shan't!  I'd rather--"
+
+"You'd rather I threw myself away--on a married man?" asked Kitty
+covertly.
+
+"My God--oh, Kitty!" said the other, breaking down.  "You can't mean it
+--oh, you can't mean that you'd--"
+
+"I've got to work out my case in my own way," broke in Kitty calmly.
+"I know how I've got to do it.  I have to make my own medicine--and take
+it.  You say John Sibley is vicious.  He has only got one vice."
+
+"Isn't it enough?  Gambling--"
+
+"That isn't a vice; it's a sport.  It's the same as Mr. Crozier had.
+Mr. Crozier did it with horses only, the other does it with cards and
+horses.  The only vice John Sibley's got is me."
+
+"Is you?" asked her mother bewilderedly.
+
+"Well, when you've got an idea you can't control and it makes you its
+slave, it's a vice.  I'm John's vice, and I'm thinking of trying to cure
+him of it--and cure myself too," Kitty added, folding and unfolding the
+paper in her hand.
+
+"Here comes the Young Doctor," said her mother, turning towards the
+house.  "I think you don't mean to marry Sibley, but if you do, make him
+give up gambling."
+
+"I don't know that I want him to give it up," answered Kitty musingly.
+
+A moment later she was alone with the Young Doctor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
+
+"What's this you've been doing?" asked the Young Doctor, with a
+quizzical smile.  "We never can tell where you'll break out."
+
+"Kitty Tynan's measles!" she rejoined, swinging her hat by its ribbon.
+"Mine isn't a one-sided character, is it?"
+
+"I know one of the sides quite well," returned the Young Doctor.
+
+"Which, please, sir?"
+
+The Young Doctor pretended to look wise.  "The outside.  I read it like a
+book.  It fits the life in which it moves like the paper on the wall.
+But I'm not sure of the inside.  In fact, I don't think I know that at
+all."
+
+"So I couldn't call you in if my character was sick inside, could I?"
+she asked obliquely.
+
+"I might have an operation, and see what's wrong with it," he answered
+playfully.
+
+Suddenly she shivered.  "I've had enough of operations to last me
+awhile," she rejoined.  "I thought I could stand anything, but your
+operation on Mr. Crozier taught me a lesson.  I'd never be a doctor's
+wife if I had to help him cut up human beings."
+
+"I'll remember that," the Young Doctor replied mockingly.
+
+"But if it would help put things on a right basis, I'd make a bargain
+that I wasn't to help do the carving," she rejoined wickedly.  The Young
+Doctor always incited her to say daring things.  They understood each
+other well.  "So don't let that stand in the way," she added slyly.
+
+"The man who marries you will be glad to get you without the anatomy," he
+returned gallantly.
+
+"I wasn't talking of a man; I was talking of a doctor."
+
+He threw up a hand and his eyebrows.  "Isn't a doctor a man?"
+
+"Those I've seen have been mostly fish."
+
+"No feelings--eh?"
+
+She looked him in the eyes, and he felt a kind of shiver go through him.
+"Not enough to notice.  I never observed you had any," she replied.  "If
+I saw that you had, I'd be so frightened I'd fly.  I've seen pictures of
+an excited whale turning a boat full of men over.  No, I couldn't bear to
+see you show any feeling."
+
+The dark eyes of the Young Doctor suddenly took on a look which was a
+stranger to them.  In his relations with women he was singularly
+impersonal, but he was a man, and he was young enough to feel the Adam
+stir in him.  The hidden or controlled thing suddenly emerged.  It was
+not the look which would be in his eyes if he were speaking to the woman
+he wanted to marry.  Kitty saw it, and she did not understand it, for she
+had at heart a feeling that she could go to him in any trouble of life
+and be sure of healing.  To her he seemed wonderful; but she thought of
+him as she would have thought of her father, as a person of authority and
+knowledge--that operation showed him a great man, she thought, so
+skillful and precise and splendid; and the whole countryside had such
+confidence in him.
+
+She regarded him as a being apart; but for a moment, an ominous moment,
+he was almost one with that race of men who feed in strange pastures.
+She only half saw the reddish glow which came swimming into his eyes, and
+she did not realise it, for she did not expect to find it there.  For an
+instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of woman
+life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material being,
+the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence.  It was the emergence
+of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he had never
+married and had never dallied!  But in a moment it was gone again--driven
+away.
+
+"What a wicked little flirt you are!" he said, with a shake of the head.
+"You'll come to a bad end, if you don't change your ways."
+
+"Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what's the matter with
+me," she retorted.  "Sometimes in operating for one disease we come on
+another, and then there's a lot of thinking to be done."
+
+The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive
+gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing.  "If you were going to
+operate on me, what would it be for?" she asked more flippantly than her
+face showed.
+
+"Well, it's obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike
+for the cancer love," he answered, with a direct look.
+
+She flushed and changed on the instant.  "Is love a cancer?" she asked.
+All at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something very
+like anger quickened in her.
+
+"Unrequited love is," he answered deliberately.  "How do you know it is
+unrequited?" she asked sharply.
+
+"Well, I don't know it," he answered, dismayed by the look in her face.
+"But I certainly hope I'm right.  I do, indeed."
+
+"And if you were right, what would you do--as a surgeon?" she
+questioned, with an undertone of meaning.
+
+"I would remove the cause of the disease."
+
+She came close and looked him straight in the eyes.  "You mean that he
+should go?  You think that would cure the disease?  Well, you are not
+going to interfere.  You are not going to manoeuvre anything to get him
+away--I know doctors' tricks.  You'd say he must go away east or west to
+the sea for change of air to get well.  That's nonsense, and it isn't
+necessary.  You are absolutely wrong in your diagnosis--if that's what
+you call it.  He is going to stay here.  You aren't going to drive away
+one of our boarders and take the bread out of our mouths.  Anyhow, you're
+wrong.  You think because a girl worships a man's ability that she's in
+love with him.  I adore your ability, but I'd as soon fall in love with a
+lobster--and be boiled with the lobster in a black pot.  Such conceit men
+have!"
+
+He was not convinced.  He had a deep-seeing eye, and he saw that she was
+boldly trying to divert his belief or suspicion.  He respected her for
+it.  He might have said he loved her for it--with a kind of love which
+can be spoken of without blushing or giving cause to blush, or reason for
+jealousy, anger, or apprehension.
+
+He smiled down into her gold-brown eyes, and he thought what a real woman
+she was.  He felt, too, that she would tell him something that would give
+him further light if he spoke wisely now.
+
+"I'd like to see some proof that you are right, if I am wrong," he
+answered cautiously.
+
+"Well, I'm going to be married," she said, with an air of finality.
+
+He waved a hand deprecatingly.  "Impossible--there's no man worth it.
+Who is the undeserving wretch?"
+
+"I'll tell you to-morrow," she replied.  "He doesn't know yet how happy
+he's going to be.  What did you come here for?  Why did you want to see
+me?" she added.  "You had something you were going to tell me.  Hadn't
+you?"
+
+"That's quite right," he replied.  "It's about Crozier.  This is my last
+visit to him professionally.  He can go on now without my care.  Yours
+will be sufficient for him.  It has been all along the very best care he
+could have had.  It did more for him than all the rest, it--"
+
+"You don't mean that," she interrupted, with a flush and a bosom that
+leaped under her pretty gown.  "You don't mean that I was of more use
+than the nurse--than the future Mrs. Jesse Bulrush?"
+
+"I mean just that," he answered.  "Nearly every sick person, every sick
+man, I should say, has his mascot, his ministering angel, as it were.
+It's a kind of obsession, and it often means life or death, whether the
+mascot can stand the strain of the situation.  I knew an old man--down by
+Dingley's Flat it was, and he wanted a boy--his grand-nephew-beside him
+always.  He was getting well, but the boy took sick and the old man died
+the next day.  The boy had been his medicine.  Sometimes it's a
+particular nurse that does the trick; but whoever it is, it's a great
+vital fact.  Well, that's the part you played to Mr. Shiel Crozier of
+Lammis and Castlegarry aforetime.  He owes you much."
+
+"I am glad of that," she said softly, her eyes on the distance.
+
+"She is in love with him in spite of what she says," remarked the Young
+Doctor to himself.  "Well," he continued aloud, "the fact is, Crozier's
+almost well in a way, but his mind is in a state, and he is not going to
+get wholly right as things are.  Since things came out in court, since he
+told us his whole story, he has been different.  It's as though--"
+
+She interrupted him hastily and with suppressed emotion.  "Yes, yes, do
+you think I've not noticed that?  He's been asleep in a way for five
+years, and now he's awake again.  He is not James Gathorne Kerry now; he
+is James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, and--oh, you understand: he's back again
+where he was before--before he left her."
+
+The Young Doctor nodded approvingly.  "What a little brazen wonder you
+are!  I declare you see more than--"
+
+"Yet you won't have me?" she asked mockingly.  "You're too clever for
+me," he rejoined with spirit.  "I'm too conceited.  I must marry a girl
+that'd kneel to me and think me as wise as Socrates.  But he's back
+again, as you say, and, in my view, his wife ought to be back again
+also."
+
+"She ought to be here," was Kitty's swift reply, "though I think mighty
+little of her--mighty little, I can tell you.  Stuckup, great tall stork
+of a woman, that lords it over a man as though she was a goddess.  Wears
+diamonds in the middle of the day, I suppose, and cold-blooded as--as a
+fish."
+
+"She ought to have married me, according to your opinion of me.  You said
+I was a fish," remarked the Young Doctor, with a laugh.
+
+"The whale and the catfish!"
+
+"Heavens, what spite!" he rejoined.  "Catfish--what do you know about
+Mrs. Crozier?  You may be brutally unjust--waspishly unjust, I should
+say."
+
+"Do I look like a wasp?" she asked half tearfully.  She was in a strange
+mood.
+
+"You look like a golden busy bee," he answered.  But tell me, how did you
+come to know enough about her to call her a cat?"
+
+"Because, as you say, I was a busy golden bee," she retorted.
+
+"That information doesn't get me much further," he answered.
+
+"I opened that letter," she replied.
+
+"'That letter'--you mean you opened the letter he showed us which he had
+left sealed as it came to him five years ago?" The Young Doctor's face
+wore a look of dismay.
+
+"I steamed the envelope open--how else could I have done it!  I steamed
+it open, saw what I wanted, and closed it up again."
+
+The Young Doctor's face was pale now.  This was a terrible revelation.
+He had a man's view of such conduct.  He almost shrank from her, though
+she stood there as inviting and innocent a specimen of girlhood as the
+eye could wish to see.  She did not look dishonourable.
+
+"Do you realise what that means?" he asked in a cold, hard tone.
+
+"Oh, come, don't put on that look and don't talk like John the
+Evangelist," she retorted.  "I did it, not out of curiosity, and not to
+do any one harm, but to do her good--his wife."
+
+"It was dishonourable--wicked and dishonourable."
+
+"If you talk like that, Mr. Piety, I'm off," she rejoined, and she
+started away.
+
+"Wait--wait," he said, laying firm fingers on her arm.  "Of course you
+did it for a good purpose.  I know.  You cared enough for him for that."
+
+He had said the right thing, and she halted and faced him.  "I cared
+enough to do a good deal more than that if necessary.  He has been like a
+second father to me, and--"
+
+Suddenly a light of humour shot into the eyes of both.  Sheil Crozier as
+a "father" to her was too artificial not to provoke their sense of the
+grotesque.
+
+"I wanted to find out his wife's address to write to her and tell her to
+come quick," she explained.  "It was when he was at the worst.  And then,
+too, I wanted to know the kind of woman she was before I wrote to her.
+So--"
+
+"You mean to say you read that letter which he had kept unopened and
+unread for five long years?"  The Young Doctor was certainly disturbed
+again.
+
+"Every word of it," Kitty answered shamelessly, "and I'm not sorry.  It
+was in a good cause.  If he had said, 'Courage, soldier,' and opened it
+five years ago, it would have been good for him.  Better to get things
+like that over."
+
+"It was that kind of a letter, was it--a catfish letter?"
+
+Kitty laughed a little scornfully.  "Yes, just like that, Mr. Easily
+Shocked.  Great, showy, purse-proud creature!"
+
+"And you wrote to her?"
+
+"Yes--a letter that would make her come if anything would.  Talk of tact
+--I was as smooth as a billiard-ball.  But she hasn't come."
+
+"The day after the operation I cabled to her," said the Young Doctor.
+
+"Then you steamed the letter open and read it too?" asked Kitty
+sarcastically.
+
+"Certainly not.  Ladies first-and last," was the equally sarcastic
+answer.  "I cabled to Castlegarry, his father's place, also to Lammis
+that he mentioned when he told us his story.  Crozier of Lammis, he was."
+
+"Well, I wrote to the London address in the letter," added Kitty.
+"I don't think she'll come.  I asked her to cable me, and she hasn't.  I
+wrote such a nice letter, too.  I did it for his sake."
+
+The Young Doctor laid his hands on both her shoulders.  "Kitty Tynan, the
+man who gets you will get what he doesn't deserve," he remarked.
+
+"That might mean anything."
+
+"It means that Crozier owes you more than he can guess."
+
+Her eyes shone with a strange, soft glow.  "In spite of opening the
+letter?"
+
+The Young Doctor nodded, then added humorously: "That letter you wrote
+her--I'm not sure that my cable wouldn't have far more effect than your
+letter."
+
+"Certainly not.  You tried to frighten her, but I tried to coax her, to
+make her feel ashamed.  I wrote as though I was fifty."
+
+The Young Doctor regarded her dubiously.  "What was the sort of thing you
+said to her?"
+
+"For one thing, I said that he had every comfort and attention two
+loving women and one fond nurse could give him; but that, of course, his
+legitimate wife would naturally be glad to be beside him when he passed
+away, and that if she made haste she might be here in time."
+
+The Young Doctor leaned against a tree shaking with laughter.
+
+"What are you smiling at?" Kitty asked ironically.  "Oh, she'll be sure
+to come--nothing will keep her away after being coaxed like that!" he
+said, when he could get breath.
+
+"Laughing at me as though I was a clown in a circus!" she exclaimed.
+"Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she--the cat--wrote
+that fiendish letter to is in trouble."
+
+"It was a fiendish letter, was it?" he asked, suddenly sobered again.
+"No, no, don't tell me," he added, with a protesting gesture.  "I don't
+want to hear.  I don't want to know.  I oughtn't to know.  Besides, if
+she comes, I don't want to be prejudiced against her.  He is troubled,
+poor fellow."
+
+"Of course he is.  There's the big land deal--his syndicate.  He's got a
+chance of making a fortune, and he can't do it because--but Jesse Bulrush
+told me in confidence, so I can't explain."
+
+"I have an idea, a pretty good idea.  Askatoon is small."
+
+"And mean sometimes."
+
+"Tell me what you know.  Perhaps I can help him," urged the Young Doctor.
+"I have helped more than one good man turn a sharp corner here."
+
+She caught his arm.  "You are as good as gold."  "You are--impossible,"
+he replied.
+
+They talked of Crozier's land deal and syndicate as they walked slowly
+towards the house.  Mrs. Tynan met them at the door, a look of excitement
+in her face.  "A telegram for you Kitty," she said.
+
+"For me!" exclaimed Kitty eagerly.  "It's a year since I had one."
+
+She tore open the yellow envelope.  A light shot up in her face.  She
+thrust the telegram into the Young Doctor's hands.
+
+"She's coming; his wife's coming.  She's in Quebec now.  It was my
+letter--my letter, not your cable, that brought her," Kitty added
+triumphantly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
+
+It was as though Crozier had been told of the coming of his wife, for
+when night came, on the day Kitty had received her telegram, he could not
+sleep.  He was the sport of a consuming restlessness.  His brain would
+not be still.  He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and
+make it vacuous.  It would not relax.  It seized with intentness on each
+thing in turn, which was part of his life at the moment, and gave it an
+abnormal significance.  In vain he tried to shake himself free of the
+successive obsessions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging
+him after them, a slave lashed to the wheels of a chariot of flame.
+
+At last it was the land deal and syndicate on which his future depended,
+and the savage fate which seemed about to snatch his fortune away as it
+had done so often before; as it had done on the day when Flamingo went
+down near the post at the Derby with a madwoman dragging at the bridle.
+He had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would
+have enabled him to pass the crisis of his life.  Wife, home, the old
+fascinating, crowded life--they had all vanished because of that vile
+trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the
+wilderness through years that brought no fruit of his labours.  Yet here
+was his chance, his great chance, to get back what he had and was in the
+old misspent days, with new purposes in life to follow and serve; and it
+was all in cruel danger of being swept away when almost within his grasp.
+
+If he could but achieve the big deal, he could return to wife and home,
+he could be master in his own house, not a dependent on his wife's
+bounty.  That very evening Jesse Bulrush, elated by his own good fortune
+in capturing Cupid, had told him as sadly as was possible, while his own
+fortunes were, as he thought, soaring, that every avenue of credit seemed
+closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan company, would
+let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him to hold his place
+in the syndicate; while each of the other members of the clique had
+flatly and cheerfully refused, saying they were busy carrying their own
+loads.  Crozier had commanded Jesse not to approach them, but the fat
+idealist had an idea that his tongue had a gift of wheedling, and he
+believed that he could make them "shell out," as he put it.  He had
+failed, and he was obliged to say so, when Crozier, suspecting, brought
+him to book.
+
+"They mean to crowd you out--that's their game," Bulrush had said.
+"They've closed up all the ways to cash or credit.  They're laying to do
+you out of your share.  Unless you put up the cash within the four days
+left, they'll put it through without you.  They told me to tell you
+that."
+
+And Crozier had not even cursed them.  He said to Jesse Bulrush that it
+was an old game to get hold of a patent that made a fortune for a song
+while the patentee died in the poor-house.  Yet that four days was time
+enough for a live man to do a "flurry of work," and he was fit enough to
+walk up their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when
+a man was out for war.
+
+Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and
+in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little and
+big things to torture him--remembrances of incidents when debts and
+disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the
+elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face.  It
+was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but
+one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years.  It
+was the first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the
+operation which saved his life--the face of Kitty Tynan.
+
+And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face
+had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence.  Kitty
+had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after
+he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was
+startlingly true.  It was as though, while he was living under an assumed
+name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the
+far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry.  His wife and
+the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived out,
+which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the present.
+Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her had
+seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of his own
+name and the telling if his story had produced a complete psychological
+change in him mentally and bodily.  The impersonal feeling which had
+marked his relations with the two women of this household, and with all
+women, was suddenly gone.  He longed for the arms of a woman round his
+neck--it was five years since any woman's arms had been there, since he
+had kissed any woman's lips.  Now, in the hour when his fortunes were
+again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a fair
+race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another face
+came between.
+
+All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife was
+living, came to him.  He had never for an instant thought of her as dead,
+but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him.  If his wife was
+living!  Living?  Her death had never been even a remote possibility to
+his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death.  Beneath
+all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a romancist to
+whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.
+
+It was impossible to sleep.  He tossed from side to side.  Once he got up
+in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought
+of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a
+sudden impulse seized him.  He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went to
+the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out.  With the
+feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he knew,
+ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any cruelty,
+of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of the candle
+when he thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of his room
+gently closing.  Laying the letter down, he went to the door and opened
+it.  There was no one stirring.  Yet he had a feeling as though some one
+was there in the darkness.  His lips framed the words,
+
+"Who is it?  Is any one there?" but he did not utter them.
+
+A kind of awe possessed him.  He was Celtic; he had been fed on the
+supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable
+experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry,
+and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical.  It is hard to
+tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness of
+the other room-the living-room of the house.  He was in a state of
+trance, almost, a victim of the night.  But as he closed the door softly
+the words of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he
+found her brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain.  The last
+two verses of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was
+swayed by the superstition of bygone ancestors:
+
+         "Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
+          Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
+          Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown
+          Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
+
+         "When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
+          Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
+          I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
+          'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"
+
+He went to bed again, but sleep would not come.  The verses of the lament
+kept singing in his brain.  He tossed from side to side, he sought to
+control himself, but it was of no avail.  Suddenly he remembered the bed
+of boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her
+meeting with the Young Doctor the previous day.  Before he was shot he
+used to sleep in the open in the summer-time.  If he could get to sleep
+anywhere it would be there.
+
+Hastily dressing himself in flannel shirt and trousers, and dragging a
+blanket from the bed, he found his way to the bedroom door, went into the
+other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open into the
+night.  All at once he was conscious of another presence in the room, but
+the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved himself for
+succumbing to fantasy.  Finding the front door in the dark, he opened it
+and stepped outside.  There was no moon, but there were millions of stars
+in the blue vault above, and there was enough light for him to make his
+way to the place where he had slept "hereaway and oft."
+
+He knew that the bed of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his,
+and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet,
+infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth.
+He found the place and threw himself down.  Why, here were green boughs
+under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there!  Kitty--it
+was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing,
+thinking that he might want to sleep in the open again after his illness.
+Kitty--it was she who had so thoughtfully served him; Kitty, with the
+instinct of strong, unselfish womanhood, with the gift of the outdoor
+life, with the unpurchasable gift of friendship.  What a girl she was!
+How rich she could make the life of a man!
+
+         "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
+          Held my hand, and laid his cheek warm against my brow,
+          Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies
+          Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"
+
+How different she was, this child of the West, of Nature, from the woman
+he had left behind in England, the sophisticated, well-appointed, well-
+controlled girl; too well-controlled even in the first days of married
+life; too well-controlled for him who had the rushing impulses of a
+Celtic warrior of olden days.  Delicate, refined, perfectly poised, and
+Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope!  Mona--Kitty,
+the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life, each in her own
+way, as none others had done, they floated before his eyes till sight and
+feeling grew dim.  With a last effort he strove to eject Kitty from his
+thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the race of life, and he
+must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly, even in exile from her,
+run straight, even with that unopened, bitter, upbraiding letter in the--
+
+He fell asleep, and soon and slowly and ever so dimly the opal light of
+the prairie dawn crept shyly over the landscape.  With it came stealing
+the figure of a girl towards the group of trees where lay the man of
+Lammis on the bed of green boughs which she had renewed for him.  She had
+followed him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through
+the night--near him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him and
+the kind, holy night before the morrow came which belonged to the other
+woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to any man
+in whose arms she ever had lain.  And the pity and the tragedy of it was
+that he loved his wife--the catfish wife.  The sharp, pitiless instinct
+of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come of late to
+him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near him now, was
+only the reflection of what he felt for his wife.  She knew the
+unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet what
+she must put away from herself after to-morrow.  Those verses she wrote
+--they were to show that she had conquered herself.  Yet, but a few hours
+after, here she was kneeling outside his door at night, here she was
+pursuing him to the place where he slept.  The coming of the other woman
+--she knew well that she was something to this man of men--had roused in
+her all she had felt, had intensified it.
+
+She trembled, but she drew near, accompanied by the heavenly odours of
+the freshened herbs and foliage and the cool tenderness of the river
+close by.  In her white dress and loosened hair she was like some spirit
+of a new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home.  It
+was all so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the
+bushes and the night.  Noiselessly she stole over the grass and into the
+shadows of the trees where he lay.  Again and again she paused.  What
+would she do if he was awake and saw her?  She did not know.  The moment
+must take care of itself.  She longed to find him sleeping.
+
+It was so.  The hazy light showed his face upward to the skies, his
+breast rising and falling in a heavy, luxurious sleep.
+
+She drew nearer and nearer till she was kneeling beside him.  His face
+was warm with colour even in the night air, warmer than she had ever seen
+it.  One hand lay across his chest and one was thrown back over his head
+with the abandon of perfect rest.  All the anxiety and restlessness which
+had tortured him had fled, and his manhood showed bold and serene in the
+brightening dusk.
+
+A sob almost broke from her as she gazed her fill, then slowly she leaned
+over and softly pressed her lips to his--the first time that ever in love
+they had been given to any man.  She had the impulse to throw her arms
+round him, but she mastered herself.  He stirred, but he did not wake.
+His lips moved as she withdrew hers.
+
+"My darling!" he said in the quick, broken way of the dreamer.
+
+She rose swiftly and fled away among the trees towards the house.
+
+What he had said in his sleep--was it in reality the words of
+unconsciousness, or was it subconscious knowledge?--they kept ringing
+in her ears.
+
+"My darling!" he had said when she kissed him.  There was a light of joy
+in her eyes now, though she felt that the words were meant for another.
+Yet it was her kiss, her own kiss, which had made him say it.  If--but
+with happy eyes she stole to her room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+"S. O. S."
+
+At breakfast next morning Kitty did not appear.  Had it been possible she
+would have fled into the far prairie and set up a lonely tabernacle
+there; for with the day came a reaction from the courage possessing her
+the night before and in the opal wakening of the dawn.  When broad
+daylight came she felt as though her bones were water and her body a wisp
+of straw.  She could not bear to meet Shiel Crozier's eyes, and thus it
+was she had an early breakfast on the plea that she had ironing to do.
+She was not, however, prepared to see Jesse Bulrush drive up with a buggy
+after breakfast and take Crozier away.  When she did see them at the gate
+the impulse came to cry out to Crozier; what to say she did not know, but
+still to cry out.  The cry on her lips was that which she had seen in the
+newspaper the day before, the cry of the shipwrecked seafarers, the
+signal of the wireless telegraphy, "S. O. S."--the piteous call, "Save
+Our Souls!"  It sprang to her lips, but it got no farther except in an
+unconscious whisper.  On the instant she felt so weak and shaken and
+lonely that she wanted to lean upon some one stronger than herself; as
+she used to lean against her father, while he sat with one arm round her
+studying his railway problems.  She had been self-sufficient enough all
+her life,--"an independent little bird of freedom," as Crozier had called
+her; but she was like a boat tossed on mountainous waves now.
+
+"S. O. S.!-Save Our Souls!"
+
+As though she really had made this poignant call Crozier turned round in
+the buggy where he sat with Jesse Bulrush, pale but erect; and, with a
+strange instinct, he looked straight to where she was.  When he saw her
+his face flushed, he could not have told why.  Was it that there had
+passed to him in his sleep the subconscious knowledge of the kiss which
+Kitty had given him; and, after all, had he said "My darling" to her and
+not to the wife far away across the seas, as he thought?  A strange
+feeling, as of secret intimacy, never felt before where Kitty was
+concerned, passed through him now, and he was suddenly conscious that
+things were not as they had ever been; that the old impersonal
+comradeship had vanished.  It disturbed, it almost shocked him.
+Whereupon he made a valiant effort to recover the old ground, to get out
+of the new atmosphere into the old, cheering air.
+
+"Come and say good-bye, won't you?" he called to her.
+
+"S. O. S.--S. O. S.--S. O. S.!" was the cry in her heart, but she called
+back to him from her lips, "I can't.  I'm too busy.  Come back soon,
+soldier."
+
+With a wave of the hand he was gone.  "Not a care in the world she has,"
+Crozier said to Jesse Bulrush.  "She's the sunniest creature Heaven ever
+made."
+
+"Too skittish for me," responded the other with a sidelong look, for he
+had caught a note in Crozier's voice which gave him a sudden suspicion.
+
+"You want the kind you can drive with an oatstraw and a chirp--eh, my
+friend?"
+
+"Well, I've got what I want," was the reply.  "Neither of us 'll kick
+over the traces."
+
+"You are a lucky man," replied Crozier.  "You've got a remarkably big
+prize in the lottery.  She is a fine woman, is Nurse Egan, and I owe her
+a great deal.  I only hope things turn out so well that I can give her a
+good fat wedding-present.  But I shan't be able to do anything that's
+close to my heart if I can't get the cash for my share in the syndicate."
+
+"Courage, soldier, as Kitty Tynan says," responded Jesse Bulrush
+cheerily.  "You never know your luck.  The cash is waiting for you
+somewhere, and it'll turn up, be sure of that."
+
+"I'm not sure of that.  I can see as plain as your nose how Bradley and
+his clique have blocked me everywhere from getting credit, and I'd give
+five years of my life to beat them in their dirty game.  If I fail to get
+it at Aspen Vale I'm done.  But I'll have a try, a good big try.  How far
+exactly is it?  I've never gone by this trail."
+
+Bulrush shook his head reprovingly.  "It's too long a journey for you to
+take after your knock-out.  You're not fit to travel yet.  I don't like
+it a bit.  Lydia said this morning it was a crime against yourself, going
+off like this, and--"
+
+"Lydia?--oh yes, pardonnez-moi, m'sieu'!  I did not know her name was
+Lydia."
+
+"I didn't either till after we were engaged."  Crozier stared in blank
+amazement.  "You didn't know her name till after you were engaged?  What
+did you call her before that?"
+
+"Why, I called her Nurse."  answered the fat lover.  "We all called her
+that, and it sounded comfortable and homelike and good for every day.
+It had a sort of York-shilling confidence, and your life was in her hands
+--a first-class you-and-me kind of feeling."
+
+"Why don't you stick to it, then?"
+
+"She doesn't want it.  She says it sounds so old, and that I'd be calling
+her 'mother' next."
+
+"And won't you?" asked Crozier slyly.  "Everything in season," beamed
+Jesse, and he shone, and was at once happy and composed.  Crozier
+relapsed into silence, for he was thinking that the lost years had been
+barren of children.  He turned to look at the home they had left.  It was
+some distance away now, but he could see Kitty still at the corner of the
+house with a small harvest of laundered linen in her hand.
+
+"She made that fresh bed of boughs for me--ah, but I had a good sleep
+last night!" he added aloud.  "I feel fit for the fight before me."  He
+drew himself up and began to nod here and there to people who greeted
+him.
+
+In the house behind them at that moment Kitty was saying to her mother,
+"Where is he going, mother?"
+
+"To Aspen Vale," was the reply.  "If you'd been at breakfast you'd have
+heard.  He'll be gone two days, perhaps three."
+
+Three days!  She regretted now that she had not said to herself,
+"Courage, soldier," and gone to say good-bye to him when he called to
+her.  Perhaps she would not see him again till after the other woman--
+till after the wife-came.  Then--then the house would be empty; then the
+house would be so still.  And then John Sibley would come and--
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER
+
+Three days passed, but before they ended there came another telegram from
+Mrs. Crozier stating the time of her expected arrival at Askatoon.  It
+was addressed to Kitty, and Kitty almost savagely tore it up into little
+pieces and scattered it to the winds.  She did not even wait to show it
+to the Young Doctor; but he had a subtle instinct as to why she did not;
+and he was rather more puzzled than usual at what was passing before his
+eyes.  In any case, the coming of the wife must alter all the relations
+existing in the household of the widow Tynan.  The old, unrestrained,
+careless friendship could not continue.  The newcomer would import an
+element of caste and class which would freeze mother and daughter to the
+bones.  Crozier was the essence of democracy, which in its purest form is
+akin to the most aristocratic element and is easily affiliated with it.
+He had no fear of Crozier.  Crozier would remain exactly the same; but
+would not Crozier be whisked away out of Askatoon to a new fate,
+reconciled to being a receiver of his wife's bounty.
+
+"If his wife gets her arms round his neck, and if she wants to get them
+there, she will, and once there he'll go with her like a gentleman," said
+the Young Doctor sarcastically.  Admiring Crozier as he did, he also had
+underneath all his knowledge of life an unreasonable apprehension of
+man's weakness where a woman was concerned.  The man who would face a
+cannon's mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could
+crumple with one hand.
+
+The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and Kitty
+met the train.  The local operator had not divulged to any one the
+contents of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators
+on the platform.  As the great express stole in almost noiselessly, like
+a tired serpent, Kitty watched its approach with outward cheerfulness.
+She had braced herself to this moment, till she looked the most buoyant,
+joyous thing in the world.  It had not come easily.  With desperation she
+had fought a fight during these three lonely days, till at last she had
+conquered, sleeping each night on Crozier's star-lit bed of boughs and
+coming in with the silver-grey light of dawn.  Now she leaned forward
+with heart beating fast; but with smiling face and with eyes so bright
+that she deceived the Young Doctor.
+
+There was no sign of inward emotion, of hidden troubles, as she leaned
+forward to see the great lady step from the train--great in every sense
+was this lady in her mind; imposing in stature, a Juno, a tragedy queen,
+a Zenobia, a daughter of the gods who would not stoop to conquer.  She
+looked in vain, however, for the Mrs. Crozier she had imagined made no
+appearance from the train.  She hastened down the platform still with
+keen eyes scanning the passengers, who were mostly alighting to stretch
+their legs and get a breath of air.
+
+"She's not here," she said at last darkly to the Young Doctor who had
+followed her.
+
+Then suddenly she saw emerge from a little group at the steps of a car
+a child in a long dress--so it seemed to her, the being was so small and
+delicate--and come forward, having hastily said good-bye to her fellow-
+passengers.  As the Young Doctor said afterwards, "She wasn't bigger than
+a fly," and she certainly was as graceful and pretty and piquante as a
+child-woman could be.
+
+Presently, with her alert, rather assertive blue eyes she saw Kitty, and
+came forward.  "Miss Tynan?" she asked, with an encompassing look.
+
+Now Kitty was idiomatic in her speech at times, and she occasionally used
+slang of the best brand, but she avoided those colloquialisms which were
+of the vocabulary of the uneducated.  Indeed, she had had no inclination
+to use them, for her father had set her a good example, and she liked to
+hear good English spoken.  That was why Crozier's talk had been like
+music to her; and she had been keen to distinguish between the rhetorical
+method of Augustus Burlingame, who modelled himself on the orators of all
+the continents, and was what might be called a synthetic elocutionist.
+Kitty was as simple and natural as a girl could be, and as a rule had
+herself in perfect command; but she was so stunned by the sight of this
+petite person before her that, in reply to Mrs. Crozier's question, she
+only said abruptly
+
+"The same!"
+
+Then she came to herself and could have bitten her tongue out for that
+plunge into the vernacular of the West; and forthwith a great prejudice
+was set up in her mind against Mona Crozier, in whose eyes she caught a
+look of quizzical criticism or, as she thought, contemptuous comment.
+That for one instant she had been caught unawares and so had put herself
+at a disadvantage angered her; but she had been embarrassed and
+confounded by this miniature goddess, and her reply was a vague echo of
+talk she heard around her every day.  Also she could have choked the
+Young Doctor, whom she caught looking at her with wondering humour, as
+though he was trying to see "what her game was," as he said to her
+afterwards.
+
+It was all due to the fact that from the day of the Logan Trial, and
+particularly from the day when Shiel Crozier had told his life-story,
+she had always imagined his wife as a stately Amazonian being with the
+carriage of a Boadicea.  She had looked for an empress in splendid
+garments, and--and here was a humming-bird of a woman, scarcely bigger,
+than a child, with the buzzing energy of a bee, but with a queer sort of
+manfulness too; with a square, slightly-projecting chin, as Kitty came to
+notice afterwards; together with some small lines about the mouth and at
+the eyes, which came from trouble endured and suffering undergone.  Kitty
+did not notice that, but the Young Doctor took it in with his embracing
+glance, as the wife saluted Kitty with her inward comment, which was:
+
+"So this is the chit who wrote to me like a mother!"  But Mona Crozier
+did not underestimate Kitty for all that, and she wondered why it was
+that Kitty had written as she did.  One thing was quite clear: Kitty had
+had good intentions, else why have written at all?
+
+All these thoughts had passed through the mind of each, with a good many
+others, while they were shaking hands; and the Young Doctor summoned his
+man to carry Mona's hand-luggage to the extra buggy he had brought to the
+station.  One of the many other thoughts that were passing through three
+active minds was Kitty's unspoken satire:
+
+"Just think; this is the woman he talked of as though she was a moving
+mountain which would fall on you and crush you, if you didn't look out!"
+
+No doubt Crozier would have repudiated this description of his talk, but
+the fact was he had unconsciously spoken of Mona with a sort of hush in
+his voice; for a woman to him was something outside real understanding.
+He had a romantic mediaeval view, which translated weakness and beauty
+into a miracle, and what psychologists call "an inspired control."
+
+"She's no bigger than--than a wasp," said Kitty to herself, after the
+Young Doctor had assured Mrs. Crozier that her husband was almost well
+again; that he had recovered more quickly than was expected, and had
+gained strength wonderfully after the crisis was passed.
+
+"An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you," was Kitty's
+further inward comment, "and that's why he was always nervous when he
+spoke of her."  Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed
+the tiny lines about the tiny mouth, and the fine-spun webs about the
+bird-bright eyes.
+
+The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward
+suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward
+fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more
+offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most,
+spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey--and this, a
+journey across a continent.  Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and
+fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold
+of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the
+decision of every step and gesture.  Kitty noticed all this, and she said
+to herself,
+
+"Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo," and she instinctively felt the
+little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she ever
+wore, or had ever worn.
+
+"Sensible of her not to bring a maid," commented the Young Doctor
+inwardly.  "That would have thrown Kitty into a fit.  Yet how she manages
+to look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is
+beyond me--and Crozier so rather careless in his ways.  Not what you
+would call two notes in the same key, she and Crozier," he reflected as
+he told her she need not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of
+the checks for it.
+
+"My husband--is--is he quite better now?" Mrs. Crozier asked with sharp
+anxiety, as the two-seated "rig" started away with the ladies in the back
+seat.
+
+"Oh, better, thanks to him," was Kitty's reply, nodding towards the Young
+Doctor.
+
+"You have told him I was coming?"
+
+"Wasn't it better to have a talk with you first?" asked Kitty meaningly.
+
+Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried,
+then she looked Kitty in the eyes.
+
+"You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it," was
+her enigmatical reply.  "And of course you will tell me.  You did not let
+him know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?"
+
+"Oh, you got his cable?" questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph
+in her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor.  It did reach
+him, and he replied to the question.
+
+"We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country planned
+his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did not,
+unfortunately, take you into account."
+
+The little lady blushed, or flushed.  "May I ask how you know this to be
+so, if it is so?" she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in
+her tone, as it seemed to Kitty.
+
+"The Logan Trial--I mentioned it in my letter to you," interposed Kitty.
+"He was shot for the evidence he gave at the trial.  Well, at the trial
+a great many questions were asked by a lawyer who wanted to hurt him,
+and he answered them."
+
+"Why did the lawyer want to hurt him?" Mona Crozier asked quickly.
+
+"Just mean-hearted envy and spite and devilry," was Kitty's answer.
+"They were both handsome men, and perhaps that was it."
+
+"I never thought my husband handsome, though he was always distinguished
+looking," was the quiet reply.
+
+"Ah, but you haven't seen him at all for so long!" remarked Kitty, a
+little spitefully.
+
+"How do you know that?" Mrs. Crozier was nettled, though she did not
+show it; but Kitty felt it was so, and was glad.
+
+"He said so at the Logan Trial."
+
+"Was that the kind of question asked at the trial?" the wife quickly
+interjected.
+
+"Yes, lots of that kind," returned Kitty.
+
+"What was the object?"
+
+"To make him look not so distinguished--like nothing.  If a man isn't
+handsome, but only distinguished"--Kitty's mood was dangerous--"and you
+make him look cheap, that's one advantage, and--"
+
+Here the Young Doctor, having observed the rising tide of antagonism in
+the tone of the voices behind him, gently interposed, and made it clear
+that the purpose was to throw a shadow on the past of her husband in
+order to discredit his evidence; to which Mrs. Crozier nodded her
+understanding.  She liked the Young Doctor, as who did not who came in
+contact with him, except those who had fear of him, and who had an idea
+that he could read their minds as he read their bodies.  And even this
+girl at her side--Mona Crozier realised that the part she had played was
+evidently an unselfish one, though she felt with piercing intuition that
+whatever her husband thought of the girl, the girl thought too much of
+her husband.  Somehow, all in a moment, it made her sorry for the girl's
+sake.  The girl had meant well by her husband in sending for his wife,
+that was certain; and she did not look bad.  She was too sedately and
+reservedly dressed, in spite of her auriferous face and head and her
+burnished tone, to be bad; too fearless in eye, too concentrated to be
+the rover in fields where she had no tenure or right.
+
+She turned and looked Kitty squarely in the eyes, and a new, softer look
+came into her own, subduing what to Kitty was the challenging alertness
+and selfish inquisitiveness.
+
+"You have been very good to Shiel--you two kind people," she said, and
+there came a sudden faint mist to her eyes.
+
+That was her lucky moment, and she spoke as she did just in time, for
+Kitty was beginning to resent her deeply; to dislike her far more than
+was reasonable, and certainly without any justice.
+
+Kitty spoke up quickly.  "Well, you see, he was always kind and good to
+other people, and that was why--"
+
+"But that Mr. Burlingame did not like him?"  The wife had a strange
+intuition regarding Mr. Burlingame.  She was sure that there was a woman
+in the case--the girl beside her?
+
+"That was because Mr. Burlingame was not kind or good to other people,"
+was Kitty's sedate response.  There was an undertone of reflection in the
+voice which did not escape Mrs. Crozier's senses, and it also caught the
+ear of the Young Doctor, to whom there came a sudden revelation of the
+reason why Burlingame had left Mrs. Tynan's house.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Crozier enigmatically.  Presently, with suppressed
+excitement as she saw the Young Doctor reining in the horses slowly, she
+added: "My husband--when have you arranged that I should see him?"
+
+"When he gets back--home," Kitty replied, with an accent on the last
+word.
+
+Mrs. Crozier started visibly.  "When he gets back home-back from where?
+He is not here?" she asked in a tone of chagrin.  She had come a long
+way, and she had pictured this meeting at the end of the journey with a
+hundred variations, but never with this one--that she should not see
+Shiel at once when the journey was over, if he was alive.  Was it hurt
+pride or disappointed love which spoke in her face, in her words?  After
+all, it was bad enough that her private life and affairs should be
+dragged out in a court of law; that these two kind strangers, whom she
+had never seen till a few minutes ago, should be in the inner circle of
+knowledge of the life of her husband and herself, without her self-esteem
+being hurt like this.  She was very woman, and the look of the thing was
+not nice to her eyes, while it must belittle her in theirs.  Had this
+girl done it on purpose?  Yet why should she--she who had so appealed to
+her to come to him--have sought to humiliate her?
+
+Kitty was not quite sure what she ought to say.  "You see, we expected
+him back before this.  He is very exact!"
+
+"Very exact?" asked Mrs. Crozier in astonishment.  This was a new phase
+of Shiel Crozier's character.  He must, indeed, have changed since he had
+caused her so much anxiety in days gone by.
+
+"Usen't he to be so?" asked Kitty, a little viciously.  "He is so very
+exact now," she added.  "He expected to be back home before this"--how
+she loved to use that word home--"and so we thought he would be here when
+you arrived.  But he has been detained at Aspen Vale.  He had a big
+business deal on--"
+
+"A big business deal?  Is he--is he in a large way of business?" Mona
+asked almost incredulously.  Shiel Crozier in a large way of business,
+in a big business deal?  It did not seem possible.  His had ever been the
+game of chance.  Business--business?
+
+"He doesn't talk himself, of course; that wouldn't be like him,"--Kitty
+had joy in giving this wife the character of her husband," but they say
+that if he succeeds in what he's trying to do now he will make a great
+deal of money."
+
+"Then he has not made it yet?" asked Mrs. Crozier.
+
+"He has always been able to pay his board regularly, with enough left for
+a pew in church," answered Kitty with dry malice; for she mistook the
+light in the other's eyes, and thought it was avarice; and the love
+of money had no place in Kitty's make-up.  She herself would never have
+been influenced by money where a man was concerned.
+
+"Here's the house," she quickly added; "our home, where Mr. Crozier
+lives.  He has the best room, so yours won't be quite so good.  It's
+mother's--she's giving it up to you.  With your trunks and things, you'll
+want a room to yourself," Kitty added, not at all unconscious that she
+was putting a phase of the problem of Crozier and his wife in a very
+commonplace way; but she did not look into Mrs. Crozier's face as she
+said it.
+
+Mrs. Crozier, however, was fully conscious of the poignancy of the
+remark, and once again her face flushed slightly, though she kept outward
+composure.
+
+"Mother, mother, are you there?" Kitty called, as she escorted the wife
+up the garden walk.
+
+An instant later Mrs. Tynan cheerfully welcomed the disturber of the
+peace of the home where Shiel Crozier had been the central figure for so
+long.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+And I was very lucky--worse luck!
+God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!
+Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK":
+
+And I was very lucky--worse luck!
+Anny man as is a man has to have one vice
+God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!
+He saw what he wished to see, which is the way of man
+Her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios
+Law's delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed
+Searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
+Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
+She looked too gay to be good
+Telling the unnecessary truth
+They had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler
+What isn't never was to those that never knew
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK, ENTIRE ***
+
+********** This file should be named gp11510.txt or gp11510.zip ***********
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, gp11511.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gp11510a.txt
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
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