Aleta Dey. Francis Marion Beynon This ebook available in following formats: Web version
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  ALETA DEY FRANCIS MARION BEYNON

 

PREFACE

Though the winds of popular caprice are almost as variable as those of nature it did not seem possible back in the dark days of military tyranny, when this book was written, that the day would come in the lifetime of any radical then living, when the tables would be turned over a large portion of a great continent.

But so it is to-day, and with the radicals in the saddle in several European countries, we see the sorry spectacle of history repeating itself and the oppressed becoming the oppressor. My mind refuses to make any distinction between the tyranny of radicals and the tyranny of conservatives. As I see it, tyranny wears many wigs, but he has only one complexion.

It is neither excuse nor palliation of this tendency to suppress conservative opinion to say that they are only getting their own back. Revenge is the meagre dream of little minds. It is like the remembered table delights of our childhood, which when repeated in maturity are flat and unpalatable.

Perhaps if the conservative mind would show that it had learned anything from this great upheaval the situation would be somewhat relieved. But regrettably it does not. It has not even sufficient honesty to face the fact that the anarchy it hates is the logical conclusion of the war which it loved.

The militarist felt that he had the pacifist in a difficult position when he asked him if he would stand by and see his mother murdered. And he had. It would have been conclusive were it not that the militarist was not one whit less willing to face the logical conclusion of war--which is that it is our duty to murder anyone whose conduct and opinions seem to us to be injurious to the state in which we live--that, indeed, we need only notify the Almighty that he is on our side to make it a religious obligation.

The New York alderman who said he would not hesitate to murder traitors to the flag was at least partially consistent; to be fully so he would have to admit that it was the duty of any other citizen, who felt his opinions were injurious, to murder him. Likely as not he would boggle at that.

And that is anarchy, if you please.

But as I did not believe in war, and the anarchistic methods of war governments, neither do I believe in revolution and the oppressive measures of revolutionary governments. It is not possible for any group of people in a country either to inspire or to feel the emotion of fear without spiritually degrading the whole. So it is imperative that the most rampant militarist, imperialist and royalist be protected in the right of every man to think his honest thoughts aloud, even if to insure this some of us, whom in their day of power they so ruthlessly suppressed have once again to take up the heavy burden of rowing against the tide of public opinion, sweeping along as furiously as before in the narrow channels of bigotry.

But only so can we ourselves be free, for whether we like it or not, our spirits are chained to the most craven in the country and the limitation of their dreams contracts our own horizon.

THE AUTHOR.

CHAPTER I. A COWARD.

I am a coward.

I think I was born to be free, but my parents, with God as one of their chief instruments of terror, frightened me into servility. Perhaps I owe it to the far horizons of my Canadian prairie birth-place; perhaps to the furious tempests that rocked our slim wooden dwelling, or it may be to the untrammelled migration of birds to distant lands that the shame of being a coward has survived their chastening. I know that these things have always beckoned to something in me that vainly beat its wings against the bars of life.

Mother and father began when Jean and I were barely out of the cradle to perform a task called "breaking our spirit," which seemed to them essential to our well-being. My mother did it reluctantly, from a stern sense of Christian duty, but my father seemed to take a solid satisfaction in the work.. Between them they succeeded so well that now when my employer rings for me my first sensation is always fear.

It is wonderful how early one can be made into a coward. I was one at five. I remember a golden summer morning when the milk pans were all about the kitchen and the flies were buzzing back and forth between them and the window. Jean was tugging at my hair and I slapped her hands and said, "Darn you, stop that."

Mother’s portly figure revolved until she was facing me.

"What did you say, Aleta? "she demanded sharply.

"Nothing," I answered, looking down at my copper-toed shoes.

"She said ’Darn you,’" Jean put in, with a self-righteous smirk.

Mother picked me up; set me in my high chair and promised to whip me at noon.

It was a long, long morning, and I spent most of it in bitter plans for revenge. If mother were one of those flies I’d stamp on her and squash her into nothing. I’d run away and drown myself in the big pond and then she’d be sorry, and I’d be glad if she was. So I thought and thought as I boiled internally with childish rage and impotence.

After a long time she took a strap down from a nail behind the door. All at once I ceased to be angry and became afraid. I did not want to be struck. Mother came over and set me down on the floor. I thought she looked very ugly as she stood over me with the strap in her hands.

"Hold out your right hand," she commanded. I hesitated. I did not want to, but I could see that she meant to strike me somewhere, so I held it out. She brought the strap down on it smartly twice, and I whimpered.

"Now the left."

She slapped that twice.

"Are you sorry you said darn?" she inquired in a threatening voice.

I thought a moment and found I was not, so I said nothing.

"You must not get stubborn," she insisted, and began slapping me harder and faster, and the harder she slapped, the less sorry I felt.

But she was determined to have the lie, so at last, when my hands were all red and stinging and I was choking with sobs, I whispered between catches in my breath, "I’m sorry," and she stopped. God knows I wouldn’t have done it only I was so very little and it was the only way to stop her.

But I was ashamed to meet the big wind when I went out to play, and I tried to show him I was not a coward by shaking my little fist at the house and shouting, "I’m not sorry, and I hate you--I hate you--I hate you."

I was not at all sure that I deceived the wind. I suspected that he knew all the time that I was a coward.

Having learned physical fear so young it is no wonder that I lacked the courage to commit suicide on the morning of my christening, which happened that autumn. Through a peculiar set of circumstances, long since forgotten, I had missed being christened in my infancy, so it was arranged that the Rev. Foster Forsyth, the Methodist minister, should come out on a certain day and rectify the omission.

"He’ll set you in the middle of the room and turn a bucket of water over you," declared Letty, our hired girl.

I was aghast and ran to mother to ask about it. She was not a cruel woman, and usually she did not allow us to be frightened, but I think she did not understand my alarm and mortification in this case. She just laughed and said nothing, either way.

I met our hired man John coming in from the barn and asked him about it, and he, too, laughed and said a bath would do me good.

John was a remittance man. In the beginning England sent her younger sons of great families to Canada, and her criminals to Australia, and judging by some of the results our cousin had an unfair advantage over us.

How we born Canadians detested those English remittance men! Mr. A. G. Gardiner mentions in one of his books the days when it was not disrespectful to speak of "the colonies," and by the tone of his remarks one feels that he cannot understand the resentment felt by the overseas dominions at the use of the expression.

If Mr. Gardiner could have heard John say to my father, as I did, "You colonials, what do you know? "he would begin to comprehend.

My father combed the chaff out of his beard and answered, "Well, my man, I know how to plough a straight furrow."

"And that is about all you do know," John retorted contemptuously.

It was not quite fair. My father was not an educated man in the Englishman’s sense of the word, but he took a deep interest in politics and kept himself well informed on the questions of the day. Moreover, we Canadians had a theory that it was a breach of the law of courtesy to tell people so bluntly of their shortcomings, and of the law of democracy to set oneself up as a judge of one’s fellow men. When help became more plentiful our advertisements, like those of most of our neighbours, used to read, "No Englishman need apply."

I am sorry for those English remittance men now, at a distance of years from contact with them. Our crude way of living must have been as distasteful to them as their avowed contempt for everything we did, thought and had was to us.

But I was too young then to philosophise, and John’s heartless laugh at my childish anxiety over my christening was, very unjustly, chalked up in my child mind against England.

I cannot explain the horror I felt at the thought of the public humiliation that had to be faced on the day of my christening. As the time approached my terror grew. On the night before it was to happen I found sleep impossible. I felt I could not lie awake in the dark and think of it, so I poked Jean in the side.

"Jean, Jean," I whispered.

Jean shut her mouth, turned her fair head the other way about on the pillow; opened her mouth and began to snore.

"Jean," I insisted, shaking her resolutely.

She opened her blue eyes and looked at me dreamily, "Is it morning?" she asked.

"Shssh!" I whispered. "It isn’t morning."

"Then what for did you waken me?"

I slipped my arm about her neck. "Jean, do you think they’ll pour a bucket of water over me to-morrow?"

"Letty said they would," she confirmed my terror.

I began to cry and Jean sat up in bed and put her arms around me in a motherly fashion, for she was a year my senior.

"Don’t cry, Aleta," she begged, "don’t cry. Maybe it won’t hurt much."

There was poor comfort in that and I wept more and more bitterly.

Presently Jean slipped out of bed and fumbled about the bureau. When she came back she pressed her string of amber beads into my hand.

"You can have my beads if you won’t cry," she promised. I slipped them under my pillow and we fell asleep locked in each other’s arms.

But I wakened with the consciousness of impending disaster, which in its fullest detail rushed back into my mind. I was going to be christened to-day.

As I have said I cannot explain the horror I felt at the prospect of being set in the midst of a roomful of adults and having a bucket of water poured over me. I was sure I could never be happy again if it happened.

After breakfast I stole away by myself to the big pond. The heavy dew on the grass made my feet sopping wet, as I went out alone to die. I had fully made up my mind to jump into the pond, but when I came to the edge and looked down I was afraid. The water looked cold and dirty. I did not want to die, especially when mother was making lemon pies for dinner. But I could not bear the thought of what was to happen after dinner.

I stopped beside a scrubby little bush we children called the snowberry, the fruit of which was reputed to be poisonous. We had been warned repeatedly that if we ate those berries we should die. Here was an easier way out than by jumping into the dirty slimy pond. I gathered a handful of the berries. They were little silvery grey white things, which looked harmless enough, and I shoved the whole handful into my mouth.

Then I became afraid. I spat them out upon the ground and ran as fast as I could to the house for a cup of water, which I took out behind the gooseberry bushes and used to rinse my mouth. All the rest of the day I spent listening for trouble internally, so that the dread of the approaching christening became secondary.

When it was over I said to Jean, "Huh, you thought the preacher was going to pour a bucket of water over my head."

This was too much for Jean’s patience. "You thought so, too," she insisted, "and you were awful scared." "I wasn’t scared," I contradicted her flatly.

We were playing in the sand-pile with Minnie Forsyth and Amy Cotter, whose mothers had brought them along to my christening. Minnie created a diversion at this juncture by announcing, "I heard my ma tell my pa your mother is going to have a baby."

Jean and I gasped.

"I know, the stork brings them," Amy explained.

Minnie sat back on her heels after having rounded off a mud pie, and said contemptuously, "Silly, that’s not the way babies come." And there, while we knelt open-mouthed around her in the sand-pile, she explained to us, with illustrations drawn from the farmyard, the main facts of procreation.

That night when mother was putting me to bed I asked abruptly, "Mother, where do babies come from?"

"The stork brings them," she answered, giving me a quick suspicious look.

"And where does the stork get them?" I persisted, in order to see if she would keep on lying.

Mother blushed. "In heaven," she snapped. "Don’t ask so many questions."

I looked at mother’s figure thoughtfully. I did not so much mind being a liar, now that I knew mother was one too. I wondered if God would let her go to heaven when she died. I hoped so, for I loved mother.

CHAPTER II. BABY BROTHER.

It was winter. The snow was piled higher than my head, in places higher than my father’s also, along the garden fence, and the windows were thick with frost. Mother used to take a flat iron from the stove and thaw them off, because it made the room dark. We slept with such heavy coverings on our bed that we wakened tired with the weight of them, and gathering up our clothes ran down to the kitchen stove to dress.

One day of that winter stands out alone in my memory. It was so cold that the kitchen door creaked ominously on its hinges when father went in or out to his chores. He was alone now, for John had gone to the town to work during the winter.

Mother went often to the window and looked out. She moved slowly, as if she were very tired. Once I tagged along and climbed up on a chair and looked out too. There was nothing to see but the snow drifting in big, loose white waves for miles upon miles, to where the level white fields met the blue rim of the sky.

Mother put her arm about me; drew me close to her side, and ran her cracked fingers through my curly red brown hair.

"If mother should have to go away and leave Aleta she would be a good girl, wouldn’t she?" she asked.

I put my arms about her neck and clung there desperately. "I’ll tell God not to let you go away," I remonstrated.

"Do you think it will be to-day"?" Letty asked, from the table, where she was making cookies.

"I don’t know," mother answered, and sighed a long weary shuddering sigh. "I hope not. It would be a terrible day for Jack to go for the doctor."

When she spoke again her voice was sharp and irritable. "Letty, do take that pot of feed off the stove. The smell of it makes me sick."

Jean and I were sewing for our dolls over in a corner, but when mother went to the window again, an hour or two later, I put down the doll’s frock and followed her.

All was changed outside. The sky had grown dark and the snow drifted past in solid white sheets, so that one could not see even the garden fence.

"You can’t go away," I said jubilantly, "look how it storms."

Mother raised my little brown hand to her lips and kissed it. "One would think she knew something was the matter," she murmured.

When I came back Jean said, "Why don’t you sit still and sew?"

"I hate sewing," I answered.

"You’re lazy," she said.

Perhaps she was right.

* * * * *

It was the middle of the night when I was wakened by a loud cry. I sat up in bed shaking. The cry came again--a fearful agonized sound. I do not know how I knew it was my mother crying. The screams died away into a sob that was even more unbearable to listen to.

I slipped out of bed and trotted into the hall in my bare feet. Letty was just coming out of mother’s room.

"Go back to bed right away, Aleta," she commanded me sharply.

"I want my mother," I whimpered.

"God help you, child; I’m afraid your mother is dying and your father is lost in the storm."

"Where’s father?" I asked.

"Gone for the doctor. Run back to bed quickly."

I pretended to start for my room, but when she had gone on downstairs with the kettle I tip-toed back and shoved mother’s door open a crack. I looked just once. I did not want to look any more. I ran back to bed, where I shivered and sobbed so hard I wakened Jean.

She started up in a fright. "What’s the matter?" she asked anxiously.

"Mother’s dying and father’s lost. Letty says so."

I tried three times to tell her of what I had seen in mother’s room, but could not. This is the first time in all these years that I have been able to speak of it.

Jean began to cry too, and I sobbed out, "Mother, mother, mother!" over and over again. Sometimes we both held our breath there in the dark and listened to the wind howling around the house and rattling the window panes.

I don’t know which of us fell asleep first, but our next consciousness was that it was morning and the sun was streaming in through our window. Nobody had come to waken us. Then we remembered about father and mother and got out of bed crying to ourselves; gathered our clothes together and started for the stairs.

As we passed mother’s door her voice called out to us, "Girls, come here."

Jean rushed in, but I was afraid to go.

"Come, Aleta," mother called again, and I went shyly in. She was lying in a nice clean bed, and on the pillow beside her there was a wee head.

"Kiss your baby brother," mother suggested.

I did and it made me feel very queer. "Let me hold him," I begged.

"You’re too small yet," mother said. "You’ll have more than you want of holding him," she added, with her dry cynicism.

She was wrong in that. I think if Barry could be questioned he would agree that her prophecy was never fulfilled.

A big strange man came into the room then, and we remembered about father. Mother told us he had reached home safely and sent us out of the room.

We went downstairs, and shortly afterwards father came in from the stable. He was a tall, stocky man with bushy whiskers. This morning he wore an air of great importance. He went round about to kick several chairs and Rover out of his way.

CHAPTER III. GOD IN THE STORM.

The following summer they sent me to Sunday School, but that did not improve my opinion of God. The being I heard about there was always angry at somebody about something, and I was afraid of him. There are good people who claim to have met the God of the big quiet places and the starry heavens in churches, but personally I never have. The God I met there wore an expression which I have since seen on the faces of stage policemen applying the third degree to a criminal.

But I met him one afternoon the summer I was nine, in the corner of the pasture field. Mother and father had gone to town, and while Jean sewed a rip in Barry’s shirt I went out in the strange brooding hush before a thunderstorm to find the cows.

From the blue black sky, resting evenly, like a bowl, upon the level floor of earth, filtered a weird shadowy twilight, and I looked east and west and north and south, and there was nothing but a few shacks between me and the far away edge of the world. I felt very tiny under that immense black dome, and I was glad even of the barbed wire fence which shut me in from those immeasurable distances.

The bluebells hung tense on their slender stems, and the last whisper had died away among the stunted poplar scrub. Over in the east a yellow snake of fire wriggled down the sky, followed by a crash that seemed to rock the world. A breeze came by. It stirred my hair, ran along the grass at my feet and set all the lilies and bluebells to nodding. Then all was still again and dark, but I felt as if I were riding on the wings of a bird. I know God passed by in that breeze, because for a little while I was not afraid of father or mother, or of anything in the whole world.

But perhaps that is not quite true, for I do not believe I would have had the courage to write in a composition at school any of the strange new things I thought as I drove the cattle home in that queer dark hush before the storm.

The next thing the world must evolve is protective coloration for souls, so that society and our public schools will not be able to pounce upon and trample into the mire of conventionality all the hopeful little buds of inspiration which spring up in children’s minds.

CHAPTER IV. LIGHTNING.

As I neared the house Jean came running to meet me. Her face was as white as chalk, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

"The house has been struck by lightning," she wailed," and--and I think--it’s killed Barry."

Everything that happened after that is like a dream. I vaguely remember running like the wind, with Jean panting beside me. I hardly glanced at the torn and blackened wall, but ran straight to the couch where Jean had dragged his limp little body. He was absolutely still. The little hand, with the dimpled knuckles hung over the side of the couch; the fair head was twisted awkwardly to one side.

I caught him in my arms and almost shook him as I cried, "Barry, Barry, waken up quick. Leta wants you."

The small limp figure lay quiet against my shoulder. He did not put the fat little arms about my neck and whisper, as usual, "Barry loves Leta."

Child though I was I can remember yet the sick thought that he would never do that again; that I would never waken up to find him sitting on my chest or poking his little fingers into my eyes and saying, "I sought you’d never waken up."

"Do you think he’s dead?" Jean whispered.

I could not speak, so I just nodded over Barry’s little fair head.

"I saw Mary White when she fainted at the Sunday School picnic," Jean said, "and they threw cold water on her face, and she got all right."

I put Barry down, and we both ran for the water pail. It was empty, but we took hold of the handle together and ran to the well. It was very dark now, and long wicked chains of lightning ran about the sky at intervals of seconds, while a white light played without intermission along the horizon, and the thunder grumbled continuously, breaking out occasionally into loud crashes. The chip-strewn yard, littered with farm machinery and hen coops, was lighted by a fitful glare. I noticed that all the fowls and animals had crowded into shelter.

Sobbing with terror of the thing that had happened to Barry and of the storm, we pumped and pumped until we had filled the pail, and then dragged it between us to the house, splashing the water over our slippers and little print skirts.

With shaking hands Jean filled the dipper and carried it to the couch. Barry was lying just as we had left him.

"Would you throw it all over him?" she whispered anxiously.

"I don’t know," I said; "what did they do to Mary?"

"I just forget," she answered, "but I think they threw a lot." Whereupon she turned the whole contents of the dipper over Barry’s face.

He lay as still as before.

I snatched the dipper and brought it full again and dashed it over him.

The limp little figure continued motionless, so I ran frantically for a third. Before I reached the bench, Jean gave a cry, the inflection of which stays with me to this moment. When I reached the couch Barry’s head was stirring on the pillow. Jean and I rubbed his hands and called to him, and presently he opened his dark blue eyes and began to cry.

We took him up out of the water, and Jean ran to get dry clothes to put on him. We were too much excited to think of the storm, which was roaring and threshing about our prairie dwelling.

By the time we had Barry undressed and into clean clothes the storm had passed. When he stood up on my lap and buried his damp fair head in the hollow of my neck I looked through the open door at the clean, newly-washed world, twinkling and laughing in the sunlight. I laughed, too, but that night I had dreams of losing Barry, and wakened over and over to clutch his warm little body.

CHAPTER V. SCHOOL IN TOWN.

We moved, I think it was the following spring, to a farm on the outskirts of a little village called Souris River. Jean and I were allowed to go on ahead with the first load of furniture on a pledge of good behaviour until mother arrived. We pranced up and down and promised anything she asked.

The roads were so bad that the wagon crept along, but the ploughed fields, freshly cleared of snow, were fragrant under the mid-March sun, and we were adventuring forth into a new life.

Always I have loved the up grade of the year, the thrill of a new awakening, even though it is at this season more than any other that I am conscious of that something within which struggles hopelessly to break the bonds of life and find its way to freedom.

The new home seemed to me quite wonderful. The house was big, very big, I thought, for it had a front hall, and there was an arch-way between the parlour and the dining room, and there was a big sunny L of a kitchen. I was particularly elated over the archway, for it was just like Minnie Forsyth’s and other places in town, and already I had begun to accept the world’s dictum that the usual is necessarily the beautiful.

Jean and I were sitting out on the front steps a week or two later when two little girls passed, staring very hard at us. We stared back at them. When they reached the end of the fence they turned about and marched up to the gate.

"How much is your gape seed a pound?" they inquired simultaneously. Then they took to their heels and ran as fast as they could towards town. We put down our dolls and ran after them.

When they reached the culvert over the ravine they halted, and stood digging the toes of their shoes into the loose black soil of the country road.

"What did you say that for?" Jean asked, when we had come within speaking distance.

The older girl laughed amiably. "Just for fun," she answered. "What’s your name?"

We exchanged names and ages and found that the strangers were May and Pauline Ransome, and that the former was a year older than Jean, and Pauline a year older than myself. Their father was a doctor, and they were Presbyterians. This last was a great blow, as it eliminated all hope of meeting them at Sunday School. It also, though this worried us little, put aside any chance of encountering them in heaven, for already I understood vaguely that Presbyterians, leaning on the false prop of fore-ordination, were heading straight for the burning fiery furnace.

"What grade are you in at school?" May asked.

Jean and I looked at each other uncomfortably. "We’ve only been to school two winters," Jean answered shyly.

The strangers made no attempt to conceal their amazement.

"You’ll have to go in the baby class," May said, "and everybody will laugh at you. I wouldn’t be in your place for anything."

I could feel my lip tremble as I thought of the unpleasantness ahead. Then Pauline leaned over and planted a kiss upon my forehead.

"May and I won’t laugh," she promised, "and you’ll soon get ahead."

Jean’s face lighted up at that. "Oh, yes," she said, easily, "we’re very bright and we’ll soon catch up."

For my part I just squeezed Pauline’s hand very hard and said nothing, but I was greatly comforted. I had found a friend.

And I needed one. I have never forgotten the unpleasantness of those first few months at school. It was not being behind girls of my own age that made me unhappy, for my more mature mind made promotion come easily, but being hedged by a wall of unrelated don’ts.

One morning after the teacher had read a chapter from the Bible I put up my hand and was permitted to speak. "How did God learn to use such beautiful words?" I asked, accepting the Bible literally as the word of God. I can see that room to this day. The sunlight filtering in through the scrawny geraniums on the window sill lit up the rows of still little figures. I can hear yet the hush that followed my question.

Then the teacher laughed and the children tittered. Already the public school had taught us to titter when authority laughs, which is one of its great functions in society.

"That is a very foolish question, Aleta," the teacher said, dismissing it, and my fellow students looked at pityingly. I glanced across at Pauline. She was not laughing, but she looked shocked and troubled.

"Attention!" the teacher exclaimed, sharply.

We turned our heads straight to the front and put our feet evenly on the floor.

"Books out; one, two, three."

In three exactly uniform movements we placed our hands on each side of our exercise books, drew them towards us and slid them on to the desk. The day had begun.

All morning I worked away with an undercurrent of resentment that my wonder at the compelling beauty of the Biblical language should have been turned into an occasion for derision.

I cannot remember the time when the melodious measures of the old Hebrew poets did not delight my ear, although I understood only a sentence of two here and there.

When father was away from home mother used to read for prayers, always selecting some of those especially lilting passages from the Psalms, Isaiah or Ecclesiastes, particularly from the latter that magnificent picturesque chapter beginning, "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth..."

Father’s favourite passages were: "Honour thy father and thy mother," and "Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands." He never failed to read this advice of Paul’s when he and mother had had a quarrel.

CHAPTER VI. PUNISHMENT.

There was a big boy in Pauline’s class called Ned Grant, whom I liked. He never laughed at me for what the rest called my queer questions, which popped out sometimes in spite of myself, though at longer and longer intervals.

Ned Grant’s father was an American Socialist and agnostic, who, after losing his wife, had come west and taken a farm adjoining the one to which we moved.

Theoretically mother did not approve of him, but she enjoyed his conversation more than that of most of her neighbours, and she mended for him and his son, and made their bread. Her practical tolerance so far outran her theories of conduct that in spite of her narrow code of morality she counted her friends among all classes and sects.

So partly on account of my mother’s kindness; partly because of his own radical upbringing, I could always count on Ned’s support. I needed it less and less, however, as I learned through a long process of humiliation that one may ask questions at school about arithmetic, spelling, geography, and the dates of history, but one must not inquire and it is immoral to think about the genesis of life, God, except in certain set phrases, or the spirit of history.

Minnie Forsyth, who is now a missionary to the poor long suffering Chinese, had a knack of always asking the right kind of question. I recollect that she looked up in the teacher’s face one day and asked sweetly, "Please, teacher, does God love me?"

The teacher answered sanctimoniously, "Yes, dear, God loves everyone: only of course there are some who are naughty and have to be punished," she added quickly, as if God’s unmeasured love might be too great a license to happiness.

Minnie responded properly, "Thank you, teacher dear."

The Psalmist exclaimed in apparent surprise, "Why do the heathen rage?" I know one reason.

I, on the contrary, always asked the forbidden thing. Our teacher read a chapter one morning in which one of the prophets, in the name of the Lord, threatened a tribe with complete annihilation at the outset, and at the end assured them that the Lord had turned away his wrath from them.

When she had finished I inquired in all sincerity, "Teacher" (I could never be brought to use that servile form of address, "Please, teacher"), "does God often change His mind?"

She looked "the lake that burneth forever" at me. Immediately the class, taking its cue from her, fixed its eyes upon me with a "poor lost soul" expression.

"Aleta, you are a very irreverent little girl," she said, in a voice of awful solemnity. "God doesn’t love little girls who are irreverent."

Then she adjusted her spectacles over her pale blue eyes and went on with her work. I felt a poke at my elbow, and the girl behind handed me a note. It was from Ned Grant. He said, "You’re a brick, Aleta."

That evening Pauline, May and Ned walked home with Jean and me. It was a perfect June day. The sky was so brilliant one could not beat to look up at it, and the flower-dotted grass along the road allowance made a lovely fresco for the dark billowy fields of grain.

Much to my discomfort Ned deliberately brought up the question I had asked in the morning.

"Miss Black thinks she knows all about God and the Bible, doesn’t she?" he asked.

"Well, I think Aleta’s question was sort of disrespectful," Pauline said. "I don’t think you should ask questions like that about God." She swung along the dusty road decisively, a sombre, black-haired, dark-eyed, long-limbed girl.

"Why not?" Ned inquired. His voice was contemptuous, for there had long been a mutual dislike between him and Pauline.

"Because its wrong."

"How do you know it is?" Ned persisted.

Pauline flushed angrily, and was about to speak when May, who was in the room above ours, interrupted, "What are you talking about?" she questioned.

When she was told she disposed of the matter in a sentence. "The teacher ought to have spanked you, Aleta."

"No, she oughtn’t," said Jean. Then she changed the subject.

Barry came running out to meet us.

"Mother’s making lemon tarts," he called, "and she said you could bring Pauline and Ned and May in to have some."

He named our guests in the order of his own preference. Already he was standing in the circle of Pauline’s arms, giving her a "love."

"You’re Pauline’s boy, aren’t you?" she asked.

"I’m Leta’s boy first, then Jean’s and then Pauline’s," he answered.

We walked on, Pauline and I, each holding a moist, dirty little hand, except when Barry withdrew it to tuck the bottom of his blue duck blouse inside his little pants.

After the tarts we went out to play about the barn. This was always a treat to the village children, and we, who were poor and had so few things to show off with, were rather proud to have this advantage over them.

We were climbing up and sliding down a haystack when father came along. He had been very sullen since morning, when a man had come to see him about a mortgage. Now he flew into a terrible rage.

"What are you children doing there?" he roared.

We scrambled out of the haystack and stood before him, our hair and dresses full of straw.

"Who told you to bring these youngsters here?" he demanded, his eyes turning from Jean to me.

"Mother said we might," Jean answered, meekly.

"Your mother ought to know better then," he retorted fiercely. "Go on home with you," he continued, turning to our guests. "I’m not going to have a lot of kids tearing my haystack to pieces."

They went. And we stood trembling with rage and fear before him. I cannot express the bitter humiliation of having our guests dismissed in this way.

"I’ll teach you," he raged; "I’ll teach you to bring a lot of youngsters around here to destroy things."

He went around the corner of the barn and came back in a moment with a stick.

"Hold our your hand," he said to Jean. She did, and he made six dark welts on it with the stick. Jean screamed.

"Now the other one."

His fury and brutality were rising, and he brought the blood on this hand. Jean’s screams were terrible, and Barry ran wailing to the house.

I was sick with fear at the sight of this human creature, mad with the lust for physical conquest over anything that stood in his way. Had I been brave I would have defied him, but I was very little and terribly afraid. So I ran as fast as I could and crawled into a hole in the haystack. I did not know then that one should never run from an infuriated animal unless one is sure one can faster.

Father ran after me and dragged me out by the foot. He was pale, and his face was working horribly. He did not wait to ask that I hold out my hand, but struck furiously and indiscriminately with the stick.

"Are you sorry you’ve been a bad girl?" he kept demanding hoarsely, between blows.

Sorry! The one thought in my mind at that moment was murder. There is no more horrible spectacle than that of a human being drunk with the desire for victory over the body of another human being. The revolting thing is that in reverting himself to the emotions of the jungle he drags his victim down with him to the level of a beast of prey. We, the attacker and the attacked, were for the time being on the spiritual plane of the tiger and the ape.

"Are you sorry?" he roared.

Still I said nothing. I was too much of a coward to defy him, but he had overdone the brutality, and even my craven heart was roused to a passive resistance.

I screamed at the top of my voice, and presently mother came from the house and said, "Jack, you must stop whipping that child."

"You go away and mind your business," father snapped, but in a wavering voice.

Mother came up and looked him straight in the eye. Then she took the stick from him and threw it as far as she could throw. I remember how her tight black alpaca waist slipped up away from her skirt, as she raised her plump brown arm, on which the sleeve was rolled up to the elbow. She was a little roly poly woman with plain features, of which mine are a duplicate, but at that moment she was magnificent. A soul had come into the jungle.

Jean and I had been wrought up to such a pitch of nervous excitement that we sobbed short, dry sobs all the evening, and lay staring into the dark long after we had finished our lessons and gone to bed.

Suddenly there flashed into my mind a picture of father getting down on his knees after supper, as he always did, and praying. I saw him very vividly, with a hand on each side of a well-scrubbed kitchen chair, and his beard tilted toward the ceiling, as he thanked God for keeping from sin during the day.

"Did you hear him praying to God?" I whispered to Jean.

"And after he’d been such a pig," Jean agreed.

"If he goes to heaven I don’t want to; I’d rather go to hell," I exclaimed, growing more reckless, and yet secretly hoping that the devil wasn’t listening, and would not take too prompt an advantage of my preference.

Barry sat up in his cot and looked about him. Then there was a patter of little bare feet on the floor, as he climbed up and cuddled his warm little body against mine.

"Never mind, Leta," he whispered; "when I’m a man I’ll get a gun and shoot him dead, so I will."

"No, Barry dear, you can’t do that," I whispered back regretfully, "because they would put you in jail or hang you."

"What are you children talking about?" father’s voice came sharply from the door, where he had come to spy upon us. It was a peculiarity of his that he wanted the sensual satisfaction of a physical victory together with the respect which belongs to a spiritual one.

CHAPTER VII. THE SPIRITUAL X-RAY.

From around the corner of the barn one evening in my twelfth summer Jean and I saw Mr. Elton, the Methodist minister, drive into the yard. We watched mother come out to speak to him, rolling down her sleeves as she came; watched him get down from the seat and begin to unhitch his long-haired bay horse from the shabbily respectable buggy, which so well matched his dingy black ministerial coat. Then we effaced ourselves from the landscape.

"Let’s go and play in the willows beside the pond," Jean suggested.

I looked up into her round, rosy-cheeked face, with its halo of golden hair, and we laughed.

As fast as we could we ran for the willows.

"Do you supposed we could hear her now if she called?" I asked.

Jean’s answer was not as irrelevant as it sounded. "She’ll likely get me to set the table, and make some muffins, and send you in to talk to him," she reflected aloud with satisfaction.

I stood up, holding a bunch of white anemones I had just gathered in my hand and rubbed the yellow pollen against my nose, as I asked shyly, "Jean, what do you say when he looks at you so hard and asks if you are right with God?"

"I say ’yes’ every time," Jean answered, "and then he stops worrying me, but I don’t like him to do it."

"Neither do I," I agreed. "How does anyone know whether they are right with God?"

"I don’t know."

"Do you suppose anybody, even Mr. Elton, really knows?" I questioned.

Mother’s voice calling, "Girls, girls," interrupted us.

Reluctantly we turned our feet houseward. When we entered the big grey-painted kitchen, with the flourishing red geraniums in the window, mother, who was bustling about getting tea, stopped and said, "Aleta, go into the parlour and talk to Mr. Elton."

"I showed him all the photos last time," I objected.

"Then just talk to him, dear," she answered, and her blue eyes twinkled as she bent and kissed my forehead.

When mother asked me that way to do anything I was helpless to resist. I would have faced a regiment of Eltons.

While Mr. Elton pumped my hand up and down he gave me a deep, silent, searching look, which made me squirm inwardly.

"How is Minnie?" I asked desperately, resolved to ward off the spiritual inquisition as long as possible. Minnie Forsyth was boarding with the Eltons in order to continue at a good school, her father having been moved by the Methodist Board to a less desirable town. I seized upon her eagerly as a plausible subject of conversation. "Minnie is very well, but the question is, how is Aleta?" he said pointedly.

I understood his meaning perfectly, but pretended not to. "I’m fine," I answered, "but I had an awfully sore throat on Monday and one of my tonsils is swelled up yet."

He stared at me in funeral silence.

"Would you like to look at it," I offered amiably.

He waived aside the invitation to explore my throat. "It wasn’t your body I was asking about, child; it was your immortal soul."

He had taken a seat on the horsehair sofa, and I sat forward on the prickly edge of a horsehair chair, one small hand on each knee, and looked at him solemnly.

He did not see, as I did, a big housefly, which, sighting his tempting bald crown from a distance, had come swooping across the room singing the Hallelujah Chorus. It circled round and round, like a hawk over a chicken, and just as he asked about my immortal soul it settled. He jumped up and rubbed it off.

"I’ll run and get a piece of paper to kill it," I offered eagerly.

"Never mind, child," he called after me, but I was gone.

When I returned I chased that fly, or another, mercilessly. At first Mr. Elton looked on coldly and disapprovingly. Then he began to watch the fly and point it out to me. Finally he sprang up and snatched the swatter from my hand. Just as he flattened it against the window pane with a sharp slap mother appeared in the doorway and announced supper. My immortal soul had, for the time being, escaped the microscope.

Supper over, Mr. Elton asked for a Bible, and after reading a Psalm, he knelt down and prayed. He prayed for us all, but for me in particular, advising God that he might need to keep an especial watch over me, as I had a tendency to an undisciplined spirit. There was a desperate earnestness in his voice, and when he went on to ask the Heavenly Father to surround us all with His loving protection he brought the tears to my eyes. I peeked through my fingers at him, and his face was shining with a strange light. He had opened a pathway to his God--a narrow-minded, bigoted, dogmatic God, it is true, for his very limited intelligence was not capable of drawing a great and splendid picture of God--but his God.

The next Wednesday evening at prayer meeting he took up the lesson of the foolish virgins and pointed out that they obviously symbolized by the Presbyterians, Baptists and Church of England members. He did not bother to mention the Roman Catholics, for nobody in Souris River seriously expected them to go to heaven.

We had only one Roman Catholic family in the district, and it did seem to me hard that Mrs. Fagan should go straight down to hell when she got through raising her family, nursing her neighbours, and being jolly and kind to all us youngsters. But so they said it was written. She did the right things, but the poor woman did not believe the right things. Hence her lost condition.

One the way home from meeting I said to father, as we walked along the deep-rutted road in the moonlight, "Did you ever hear of such a thing as Mr. Elton calling the other churches foolish virgins?"

Father stroked his beard with placid satisfaction as he declared, "You’ve got to be converted and born again before you go to heaven, and they don’t believe in it."

I looked over the shadowy rustling fields of grain and then up to the eternal stars, and said something which I intended to be very personal, while appearing casual. "Some of them are very kind to their families and pleasant in their homes," I hinted.

Father gave a grunt of annoyance. "You don’t know what you’re talking about," he said shortly.

But I did, in a way. There must have been a time, for I was no intellectual prodigy, when I did not resent the assumption of infallibility on the part of any individual or group of individuals, but I cannot remember it. Among my earliest recollections is the resentment I felt at the self-complacency of the holiness Methodists, who visited our home, and at my father’s extreme partisanship in politics.

CHAPTER VIII. NED IS EXPELLED.

It was the second summer of the Boer War, and public feeling was inflamed with that peculiar national hysteria war breeds. I was in my fifteenth year, and Ned, eighteen and full grown, was studying for his second-class certificate. On a certain spring day, at the last recess, Ned, Pauline, Jean and I were sitting together in a group talking, when Pauline put her hand down on Ned’s desk and picked up a copy of an American history, which Ned’s father had brought with him from the land of his birth.

She tossed it disdainfully aside. "That book is full of lies," she declared contemptuously.

Ned flushed, but he merely reached over and took up his English history. "So is this," he said quietly.

I was dumbfounded. I had questioned my parents and the Bible, but up to that moment it had never occurred to me to doubt the English history.

Pauline grew purple. "How dare you say such a thing," she flashed at him.

"For the same reason that you dared to say the American history is full of lies; because it’s true. All histories give a one-sided report of things."

I looked from one to the other of them uneasily. Ned’s fair face was quiet and composed, but his grey eyes were flashing fire. Pauline beat a large, substantially shod foot excitedly on the floor. Her dark sombre face was flushed from neck to brow.

"You ought to be put in jail for saying things like that," she stammered in the excess of her agitation.

"No matter whether it is true or not," Ned said. "That’s the way with you tories; you’re always wanting to put somebody in jail--as if that proved anything."

"But it isn’t true," Pauline declared.

Ned was provokingly cool. "How do you know?" he asked quietly.

"Because it isn’t."

"That’s a fine reason," he sneered.

Pauline threw up her head. "I suppose you know better than the man who wrote the history, and the Board of Education, and all the teachers," she said crushingly.

The other students who had been idling about the room now gathered around to listen to the quarrel.

"I wouldn’t accept the word of any Board of Education or a million teachers," Ned said. "I’d read both sides of the question myself, and form my own conclusions. My father says that if the histories were any good they would give us translations from the leading historians in every country on international events, and leave us to judge for ourselves as to the facts."

"Your father is--"

We never heard what Ned’s father was, for at that moment Mr. Magrath entered the room.

"What’s all this noise about?" he demanded abruptly.

Silence fell upon us. Pauline always fought in the open. She was no tattle tale, but Minnie Forsyth spoke up. "Ned and Pauline were quarrelling because Ned said the English history was full of lies, and Pauline said it wasn’t."

Magrath turned to Pauline. "Is that true?" he demanded, his squatty figure trembling with passion and his thick neck scarlet.

Pauline shoved a pencil up and down between her long fingers in silence. In her rage she had threatened Ned with jail, but when it came to the test she was unwilling, much as she disliked him, to reveal his shortcoming to the super-patriot Magrath.

"Is this true, Pauline?" Magrath repeated.

"Yes, sir," Pauline answered, "but--but I don’t think he meant it," she added generously.

"Yes, I did," Ned said quietly.

Magrath turned pale. "Ned," he thundered, "take your books and go home. You’re expelled."

Ned did not move.

"Did you hear me?" Magrath shouted.

"Certainly," Ned answered.

"Then why don’t you obey me?"

"Because you have no authority to expel me from the school," Ned replied. It was uncanny the instinct Ned and his father had for law. They always knew to a nicety how far authority could go.

Magrath swallowed quickly. Then he turned on his heel and went to the desk. When he came back he carried an ugly black strap in his hand.

"There is something I have the authority to do," he hissed. "I can give you a good thrashing for dishonouring our country, you young American upstart.

I never saw Ned so cool and dignified as he was that afternoon. He looked Magrath straight in the eye. "Put that thing down," he said in a quiet, powerful tone, "you can’t prove with that thing that the English history is true."

Magrath wavered. I have no doubt that he was restrained partly by Ned’s supple young muscles; partly by the fear that Tom Grant would go to the law with him, for Tom Grant could plead a case so wittily and persuasively before a jury that everyone avoided meeting him in court.

At any rate he hesitated. Then he threw back his shoulders and laughed. It was not a very good laugh, but is served as a back paddle in the argument.

"Very well, my smart young Socialist, I’ll leave it to the trustees to decide whether you’re to be allowed to contaminate the minds of the other students by making seditious speeches," And away he strutted and replaced the strap in his desk.

Ned took his seat, the object of the cold glances of all his associates. He turned to me. I looked down at my book. I admired Ned, and nearly always agreed with him, but being a coward, I felt sometimes that I did not like to be associated with him in the minds of my friends.

The moment it happened I was ashamed, and tried to catch his eye, but he did not glance my way until about four o’clock, when he gave me a cold, hard look. I felt like one of those shrivelled little peas at the end of a pod.

He stalked off by himself when school was over, and left me to walk home alone, even though he knew Barry was at home sick, and Jean was spending the night in town with May.

When I reached home mother was sewing in a low rocker by the south kitchen window, and on the white oil cloth covered tabled there was ranged a quantity of fragrant yellow loaves of bread.

"There’s a pan of buns there, Aleta," she said, glancing up as I came back from carrying my books into the dining-room.

I helped myself to a bun and spread it with yellow butter. Then I brought a stool and sat down beside mother’s knee and told her about the quarrel between Ned and Pauline.

"What do you think, mother?" I asked.

She was holding the needle between her teeth while she took a new thread. "I don’t know," she mumbled.

Then she took the needle from her mouth, licked the end of the thread, and holding them at arm’s length brought them together.

To my surprise she continued. "I don’t know but Ned was right. It seems to me very likely that histories are prejudiced. They may not say what is actually untrue, but they perhaps give a colour or implication to events that is not warranted, in order to make our country seem more perfect than it is."

Then I told her about having refused to look at Ned and how mean I felt.

Mother put down her sewing and patted my red brown head gently. "I’ll tell you what you had better do, Aleta," she said after a little. "Put some of those buns in a bag and take them down to Ned and his father for supper, and tell Ned you’re sorry."

I jumped up with alacrity. "And you might take along a bottle of that maple syrup," she called, when I was in the pantry hunting up a bag.

Father always grumbled that mother would give away everything we had, and certainly nearly half this consignment of maple syrup from Uncle Frank’s farm in Ontario had gone in this way.

I went to the door. At the step I turned and looked at mother. Her round face, with its three-tier chin, was clearly outlined against the green foliage of the geraniums, and the sunlight, checkered by the leaves, fell across her sloping lap on to the grey-painted floor.

I went back and set my parcel on the table. Mother turned in surprise: "Did you forget something, Aleta?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, smiling, and I put my hands on either side of her face and kissed her forehead. She looked both pleased and abashed. That evening I found she had made one of my favourite dishes, a baked custard for my supper.

I remember with singular distinctness every detail of that walk to the Grant’s. It was May; that is to say it was intoxicating. There is a secret urge in Spring everywhere. Even in languid humid climes it is the season of matings and revolutions. But Spring in the north! Air like champagne; a deluge of sunlight pouring down from cloudless blue skies; life bursting forth everywhere with an instinctive knowledge of the need for speed if it is to run its course and reproduce its kind before the early autumn frost overtakes it. It is life on the gallop to out-distance death. One stands in awe before the spectacle of this almost indecent hurry to survive.

As I followed the footpath along the barbed wire fence, which enclosed the pasture field, I thought with deep disgust of what had happened at school. Why couldn’t I follow straight and swiftly my own opinions as the yellow buttercups at my feet went without self-consciousness to their goal? Why did I find myself apologetic when I did not agree with the majority? When I was given a mind that questioned everything, why was I not given a spirit that feared nothing? Since minds came into being that questioned things it seemed the world needed that kind of mind. Then why be ashamed of it? So I reasoned fruitlessly, for the wings of my soul had been clipped in my infancy. I had lost the power to fly while retaining the will to rise above the clouds of bigotry and prejudice.

* * * * *

The yard about the Grant’s cottage was alive with high-stepping speckled Plymouth Rock hens, scratching backward, now and again, and pecking daintily. One was even reconnoitring the kitchen though the partly open door.

The bright sunshine in the room increased the dreariness of its aspect. The greasy stove had a pot of porridge on the back. Pans were set out on chairs around the room, and the table was full of dirty dishes.

I rolled up my sleeves and set to work to make a fire. Then I began to wash up the dishes, expecting every moment that Ned would come in, but I had finished them, and swept and mopped the floor, and still there was no sign of Ned.

I was determined to see him and make it up, so I began to get supper. I had just finished setting the table when I heard his step at the door.

He stopped short when he saw me. "Hello, Aleta," he exclaimed in surprise.

It was my turn to be amazed. "Then you’re not angry with me?" I asked shyly.

Ned twisted his cap in his hands. "I was at first," he admitted, "but afterward when I thought it over I saw that you had not been thinking about that matter of the histories the way I had. You couldn’t be expected to see it at once."

I was silent while a struggle when on inside. At last I spoke. "I hate to tell you, Ned," I said, "but it wasn’t because I minded about the history that I didn’t look at you." I picked up a knife and made trails on the red damask cloth with it. "Just for a minute I--I--was ashamed," I confessed with chagrin.

Ned was silent.

Without raising my eyes I went on. "You won’t understand. You’re fearless. You don’t mind what people think of you. But I do; I don’t like being against people."

Still Ned was silent.

I looked up and saw him smiling. "I know," he said, "I’ve sometimes been ashamed of dad, and of his being a Socialist."

"And your dad such a dear old man," I exclaimed, in a shocked voice.

Then we both laughed.

"We’re in the same boat, Aleta," Ned said, "we’ll always be against the popular side, so we may as well make up our minds to stand by each other."

He came up close to me, slipped his arm about my shoulders and looked down into my eyes with a queer expression.

I was startled. I looked Ned over with a new vision, from his boots to his smoothly parted silkily dark hair. His upper lip was blue. He had begun to shave. Ned was a man.

I looked down and giggled. It had flashed upon me all at once that I was a woman.

Ned closed his short-fingered, work-roughened hand over mine.

A great scraping was heard at the door. It was Ned’s father come home from work. We blushed and sprang apart.

That night when I was going to bed I spent a long time sitting before my mirror. The person reflected there was not very satisfactory: short, stubby, a round sallow face with irregular features, and tanned. But there was my hair, long silky curls of red brown clustering about my head, and my dark brown eyes, which some people told me were beautiful. I brushed my hair until it crackled and stood about my head in a shining cloud.

The next morning, as I was helping mother get the breakfast, I said: "Do you know anything that will take off tan?"

Mother looked at me long and hard, almost resentfully, I thought.

"Buttermilk," she answered shortly.

* * * * *

They expelled Ned from school, thereby proving the accuracy of the English history, and his father planned to send him, for the balance of his term, to Winnipeg, where he meant to enter law school in the autumn anyway.

Ned came the evening before he left to say good-bye to us. He stayed only a little while. Father and Jean had never been particularly friendly to him, but even mother was a little cool, which I thought was queer, since she had said she thought Ned was probably right.

But Barry brought him his greatest treasure, a knife with a corkscrew, several broken blades, and a good one. He put it diffidently into Ned’s hand.

"What’s this?" Ned asked quickly.

Barry blushed and rubbed his close-cropped head up and down against Ned’s arm. "It’s for you," he answered proudly.

"Why, thanks old man, that’s awfully good of you, but I think you’ll be needing it more than I will and you’d better keep it."

Barry took it quietly and slipped it into the back pocket of his funny little overalls.

I frowned. I knew that Ned’s motive was kindly, for he knew how much Barry prized the knife, but the refusal of the gift seemed indelicate.

When Ned had said his farewells and I walked out with him to the gate, he said, "Wasn’t it nice of the kid to offer me his knife? But of course I couldn’t take it, he’s so stuck on it himself."

"I think you made a mistake, Ned," I objected.

"Do you think so, Aleta?" he asked quickly. "I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you. I seem to have got in wrong all round. I suppose there are lots of things a fellow doesn’t get on to when he grows up without a mother or sisters."

Ned was a very little boy at the moment and very sorry for himself, but there was something infinitely appealing about him. I glimpsed faintly what it meant for a boy to start out in the world without any woman to pet him and fuss over him.

So I held out both my hands. "Haven’t I been almost as good as a sister to you, Ned?"

He took my hands in his and looked at me with the expression his face had worn the week before.

"Better," he said, decidedly. "I’m awfully glad you’re not my sister."

"Why?" I asked, provocatively.

"Will you kiss me, Aleta?" he demanded, suddenly.

I drew my hands away and shook my head. I wanted to kiss him, too, but something held me back. The puritanical may be inclined to put it down to maidenly modesty, but I think myself it was prudishness.

* * * * *

When I was sitting brushing my hair that night, Barry came in in his nighty. I saw that he carried in his hand his rejected gift.

"I guess it’s not much good of a knife," he suggested, anxiously, disillusion dimming the smiling brightness of his dear blue eyes.

I held open my arms. "Come here, sonny," I said.

When he had come and cuddled against me, I said: "Did you think Ned didn’t like your knife, Barry?"

Barry turned his back to me and dug his little pink toes into the rag carpet. "Uh-huh."

"You were wrong then, for Ned told me outside that he didn’t take it because he knew you liked it so much."

"Then you think it’s a good knife."

"Of course."

"Would you like to have it?"

"Would I like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?"

Barry clapped his hands jubilantly. "Then I’ll give it to you."

After a thoughtful pause he suggested, "I suppose you wouldn’t mind lending it to me now and again?"

"Not a bit," I agreed readily. "I’ll leave it on this table and we can both use it."

So I did, and often it disappeared, but was always returned in the evening. Sometimes, to this day, when I put my hand down to the bottom of a certain old workbox it touches that knife, and my heart goes still, and a black cloud settles down upon my spirit.

CHAPTER IX. THE STORM WIND AGAIN.

It was a winter night; not unlike the one on which Barry came into the world. Our house trembled and creaked as the north wind, charged with snow, came roaring down the road allowance and broke, with an impotent shriek, against the rattling windows.

But this time there was no long wait for the doctor. He had been in the house since morning. Barry lay very still on the bed, except for the heavy breathing of pneumonia. Mostly he lay in a stupor, but whenever he grew brighter he asked for mother and me, so we stayed near at hand.

The still excitement of a serious sickness makes a queer halting place in one’s experience. All the usual things give place to the unusual. That day we spoke with hushed voices, and walked softly even in the kitchen, where we could not possibly have disturbed Barry.

Mother was dark about the eyes and quiet; father was silent, and Jean pale. As for me, something had happened that morning that had completely upset me. Perhaps that day would have been less awful if I had shared it with the others. I tried several times, but my lips refused to do my bidding.

I had been left alone with Barry for a few minutes when he roused up and asked for some water. I put my arm around him and raised him up, for he was very weak. As I laid him back on the pillow he whispered something.

"What is it Barry?" I asked.

He repeated it, and this time I caught the words, "Does it hurt much to die?"

"No," I answered, my voice trembling, "but you’re not going to die." Then I was seized with panic, and repeated wildly, "You’re not going to die; you’re not going to die. You wouldn’t leave Aleta, would you, Barry?"

He was sinking again into a stupor, but I think he answered "No."

Mother came in just then with a bottle of medicine in her hand. "Mother," I said, drawing in a long sobbing breath. She laid a plump hand on my arm. "What is it, dear?" she asked anxiously.

I shook my head, went to the window, and stood looking through a clear spot at the top of a thickly frosted pane upon the flat white desolation, which spread out unbroken to meet the distant cold sky.

What had made the child think of death, I questioned, and could find no answer. Nobody would have spoken to him about it. Was it intuition? Was it premonition? I did not weep, but the landscape seemed completely blotted out. I saw before me, instead of the brilliant winter world, a long, dark avenue, where neither the sun nor the moon nor the stars did shine, and where there was only a dim grey gate at the end leading into the garden of death. That was life as it looked without Barry.

The doctor came at eleven. He took Barry’s temperature, felt his pulse, and shook his head.

"I believe the crisis will come some time to-day or this evening," he replied, when questioned, and announced his intention of staying.

I had not noticed until that day that Jean was a woman. It came to me when I saw the doctor, who was young and single, give her an admiring glance, which passed her by unnoticed. She was quite unconscious of his approval, as her thoughts were all with the little brother battling for his life upstairs.

She was a great comfort to everyone at that time. A born housekeeper, she took things into her own hands; tidied the house, as usual, prepared tempting hot meals, and coaxed us one after another to eat them. It is a blessed thing in the house of sickness to have someone about who translates sorrow into service.

As for me, I hardly know how I spent that day. It seems to me I moved about in a dark shadow made deeper by the storm that over-spread the sky in the late afternoon, and that before me there moved always that pathetic little question, "Does it hurt much to die?"

When night settled in, and the storm, grown to a blizzard, roared and shrieked about the house, a superstitious fear took possession of me. Barry had come into the world in a blizzard. Had the storm wind come back for him?

The hours crept away, and as the evening wore on, Dr. Graham stayed continuously at Barry’s side, looking anxious and feeling his pulse very frequently.

About ten o’clock he laid the little hand back on the bed and looked at us strangely.

* * * * *

The sun streaming in through the thickly-frosted window and turning it into a sheet of glittering diamonds, looked cheerful. I sat up in bed briskly. I had had an awful dream. It had been that Barry was gone. A terrible dream.

I caught my breath suddenly. Did I remember, or was it a nightmare, the little hand being laid back on the bed, and that I walked the floor for the rest of the night, and all the next day tearless and silent, until they had sent for the doctor, who had given me a glass of milk with a queer taste.

I remembered.

After that for a long time I beat the wings of my will, which would not have it so, against the absolute fact that it was so. What seemed hours later I put on my clothes and crept downstairs. As I was passing the parlour door I saw something white standing by the window. I stopped short; went on again; turned back and drew near to that small white box. Barry’s face, waxy and still, smiled up at me. His question was answered. It does not hurt to die--only to live.

I knelt down beside that little white coffin, laid my head on it and wept. Presently I felt two arms slipped about me, and my head was gently moved from the hard coffin to a friendly shoulder. I looked up into Pauline’s kind, brown eyes. She did not tell me, as Minnie Forsyth had tried to do the day before, that Barry was better dead--poor comfort that when the heart was crying out for him. We wept quietly together, and the memory of that morning beside Barry’s coffin keeps Pauline from quite hating me now, and me from hating her. We would not have believed then that the day would ever come when we would look the other way when we met on the street.

Everyone went out to the graveyard, and when we came back the chairs were all in rows, as they had been for the service; the fire was out, and some of the men who had come to the funeral had missed the ashpan of the kitchen stove and spat on the floor around it. In this dreary house, and on that cold winter day, I started life all over again at sixteen without Barry.

CHAPTER X. AGNOSTICISM.

When Ned came home from Winnipeg the next June we made a great discovery. It was on a Sunday evening after church. All we girls walked out of the service with downcast eyes, in spite of which we managed to see the youths who detached themselves from their fellows, and proudly yet nervously approached us with uplifted hats.

Ned joined us, and after the custom of the village we turned to stroll down the most densely maple shaded street, for the long norther summer evening has only well begun at eight o’clock.

When we had adjusted our pace to that of the couples fore and aft so as to be out of earshot of both, Ned turned to me and asked, "What do you think of Christianity, Aleta?"

"I think it is perhaps the purest system of morals the world has yet evolved," I answered patly, greatly to his surprise and my own, for I was hardly conscious that I had been thinking about Christianity at all.

Then we held what the Indians would call a pow-wow over our unbelief. We went step by step along that path that had led us to our present conclusions, and to our great delight found them to be identical. In half an hour we had disposed of the inspiration of the Bible, the Divinity of Christ, and put a big blue question mark over the immortality of the soul. We felt that we had done a good night’s work and went home in a highly elated mood.

I said good-night to Ned and went in past Jean and Dr. Graham, who were standing at the gate talking. An hour or two later I glanced out of the window and saw them kissing in the moonlight. I was disgusted.

When Jean mentioned Dr. Graham the next day I said: "I think he is horribly soft and very homely."

Jean flushed angrily. "He’s much better looking than Ned, at any rate," she declared.

"Well, I don’t think I ever said Ned was good looking, did I?" was my reply, and Jean was baffled.

After that I was mean enough never to miss a chance of saying something unpleasant about Dr. Graham, for I was furious at the idea that Jean might get married and I would be shut out from her life.

* * * * *

The next Sunday night I declined to go to church. "Why not?" mother asked.

I was on the point of telling her how foolish it all was, but something held me back. I could blast anybody’s faith but mother’s. Insufferable little egoist that I was to suppose that the walls of my mother’s faith, which had stood through all the storms of life, would fall at one puny blast from my trumpet. But I really thought I was sparing her a great disillusionment by answering merely that I was tired.

Ned came over later and we sat on the verandah steps and wordily patronised people who attended churches.

Ned was sitting in the sunlight, and I where the shadows of the house fell over my white muslin dress and black Oxford shoes. In one of the pauses of the conversation I studied him thoughtfully. His strong, medium-sized figure had filled out wonderfully during the past year, and since he had been to Winnipeg he was always clean and neatly dressed.

My concentrated gaze made him turn his rugged face towards me, and he smiled, revealing a row of large white teeth.

"It’s wonderful how well we suit each other, isn’t it, Aleta?" he asked, sidling over nearer me on the steps.

I sidled a little away, I couldn’t just say why. But he kept coming closer. He took my hand and pressed it and looked at me with far other thoughts than of religion shining in his eyes. I squirmed and drew my hand away, for the woman in me was still sound asleep, and that look of the man seeking his mate, which I saw in Ned’s eyes, made me uncomfortable.

"Don’t you like me, Aleta?" he questioned.

"Why, yes," I answered, "but we’re too young for that. I want to do ever so many things before--" I broke off abruptly and studied the clear horizon flushed by the sunset.

"What’s the use of starting a lot of things and having to give them up when you get married?" Ned objected.

"Maybe I wouldn’t give them up," I said.

"You’d have to," he returned flatly.

I frowned. I was very inmature, and had thought very little about the marriage relationship, but this speech of Ned’s grated unpleasantly upon me.

CHAPTER XI. MCNAIR.

It was twelve years later that I was riding home to Winnipeg, one winter afternoon, on a train that crept slowly over the creaking frosty rails. From my chair in the parlor car I watched the smooth fields of snow slip past the train windows, the while I enlarged upon the points I had not made in an address I had delivered upon woman suffrage in an outlying village the evening before.

While I was adding wit and grace retrospectively to a speech which had been dull enough in reality, the train slowed down with a harsh grinding sound, jerked us nearly out of our seats, and stopped.

A huge man unfolded himself from the seat next mine, rose up to a prodigious height and breadth; shook his brown tweed trouses down over his tan boots; walked with a slow, echoless tread to the door, and went out.

When he returned he was carrying in his hand one of the city papers. He spread it out on his knee and we began to read it. I had covered the headings of the big murder trial, and was into the latest political scandal when he turned over.

He insists to this day that I gave a sharp exclamation of annoyance, which is, of course, absurd. I did nothing of the kind, but however that may be he looked up, our eyes met, and we smiled.

"Did I turn too soon?" he asked mildly, but with a twinkle in his eye.

"Just three more lines," I said laughing, and he turned back and let me see them. So we shared the paper between us, and from that we went on to talk of books, plays and the like, and he dug about in his capacious pockets and brought out several little scrap books with poems and snatches of philosophy. While I read them he watched me with eager grey eyes, which in their boyishness belied his otherwise mature appearance. He seemed oddly anxious that I should not think them foolish.

On one of these excursions into an inside pocket he brought out a photograph with the book he was after, hesitated a moment, then handed it to me with a smile. "That’s my boy Colin," he said pridefully, and watched my face harder than ever for approval.

My heart sank. It was a shock to me to find that the stranger was married.

"He’s a nice boy," I said coldly, "but he doesn’t look much like you."

As if in answer to my thoughts the stranger explained quickly, "I am only his guardian, but I could not think more of him if he were my own son."

"He’s a manly looking little chap," I amended cordially, and I smiled at the photograph of a grave little lad of about thirteen years.

The stranger went on to explain about him. "His mother died when he was born, and his father when he was three, and when his father, who was my dearest friend, was dying he sent for me and said, ’McNair, I’m going to leave Colin to you, to raise like your own son.’

"That was back in Scotland," he concluded. "I suppose you guessed I was a Scotchman."

I smiled. "Guessed?" And the man had been filling the car with burrs ever since he had begun to speak.

But what had I heard about some McNair lately? Memory came in a flash. "Would you be the Mr. McNair who has come up from the East to edit the Rural Review?" I asked.

"The same," he admitted, surprised.

"Then you and I are sworn enemies. I’m on the Country Register."

Memory came to his aid also. "You wouldn’t be Miss Aleta Dey?" he suggested, hesitatingly, as one unwilling to accuse anybody unjustly.

I nodded assent, and I never saw a more disappointed looking man. "Then you’re a suffragette."

"Gist," I corrected, gently but firmly.

He paid no attention to the distinction, which was swallowed up in the general disaster, but sat silently glowering into the dusk, his face drawn down into deep haggard lines as he chewed away at the amber stem of his unlighted pipe.

At last he turned to me, and his face brightened with a most engaging smile. "Anyway, you’ve good notions about books," he said, dwelling charitably upon my one redeeming quality. "Let’s go and have a bite to eat, and by that time we’ll be in the city," and he stuffed the pipe in his pocket and led the way to the dining car.

When we parted at the station he put out his big hand and I laid my wee one in it, and I cannot tell you how it happened, but a thrill, such as I had never experienced in my life before, passed up my right arm and down my left side, and I knew, without looking at the great man, who was standing there holding my hand as if it was a parcel I had given him for keeps, that he felt the thrill, too.

"I’d be glad to have the pleasure of your acquaintance, if I may," he was saying in his quaint old-fashioned manner.

I took my hand away at last, being driven to it by a sense of decency, and searched in my handbag for a card, which I gave him.

"You may call on me some evening at that address, if you care to," I said. And so we parted.

Had my father been alive he would have been scandalised to see me go home and hurry straight to the rouge pot, which was requisitioned only on such state occasions as came when I was all tired out and looking my worst. I applied it unsparingly, and then dabbed myself with powder until even mother would have been shocked if she had been present, which luckily she was not, having gone, after father’s death, to help nurse the babies of Jean and Dr. Graham, who were married and settled in Souris River, next door to May Ransome and her husband.

I looked at myself critically in the glass. It was a great improvement on Nature’s handiwork, but it wouldn’t do. The improvement was too obvious. So I went out to Mrs. Fleming’s sink and scrubbed my face clean of the mess. When I came back to my parlour bedroom I looked my wardrobe over carefully and found I had not a decent dress to put on. I decided to get myself a new one the very next day, which I did.

CHAPTER XII. A TILT ABOUT SOCIALISM.

When I was considering the new dress, Pauline hailed me from the aisle and hastened to join me. She was a tall young woman now, and head of the children’s department of the public library.

"Isn’t this luck?" she exclaimed. "Something’s burst in the steam plant, so we are closed up, and I was looking for somebody to play with. Let’s go .. and ... have .... some ..... tea."

The last sentence died out, as I have tried to indicate, when her glance fell upon the dresses the clerk had ranged before me.

"Why, Aleta," she exclaimed, "you’re not buying a summer dress at this season of the year, are you?"

I did not want to explain to Pauline that there are occasions, even during the cold weather, when such a dress is useful, especially if light colours are more becoming to one than dark; for example, when one is receiving a caller informally in the evening

But I merely said, "It’s the last day of February, Pauline."

"Yes; but, my dear, you’ll not get any wear out of a dress like that before June, and then they will be less expensive. Come and look at these silks."

I had great respect for Pauline’s opinion about clothes, for she is twice as clever as I in the matter of dress, so I followed her. She tried to foist a sober blue and black thing upon me, but I would have none of it, and stood out for a warm Burgundy, which Pauline thought too dear, but as I was paying for it I had my way. And the next day I went back and bought the pink muslin, too, though I would not like Pauline to find that out. She thinks I do not save enough.

When we had completed the purchase of the taffeta dress, Pauline and I hunted up one of those pretty little tea rooms, which make Winnipeg a decent place in which to live.

"Well, how did you get along at your meeting?" she asked, as she finished writing the order on the tiny pad.

"I made a great speech on the train coming home," I admitted, with a laugh.

Pauline laughed, too, as she threw aside her furs. She was an ardent suffragist. In our outlook upon public life that was the one point of contact between us.

"There were a couple of Socialists there who got up and fired questions at me about the capitalist system, which I was not in a position to answer," I said.

"They make me sick," Pauline declared, "with their everlasting ’Capitalist System’ and ’Class conscious workers.’ A lot of ignorant beggars, too lazy to get out and earn a decent living for themselves, so they want to grab what honest people make."

"There’s more to Socialism than that, Pauline," I objected. "Some of those people are poor because they have been so weakened by malnutrition in their youth, and so hampered by the lack of an education that they haven’t a chance in the struggle for existence."

"I don’t believe it," Pauline said, flatly.

I looked at her with a feeling of hopelessness.

"Have you no imagination," I asked, indignantly, "that you seem incapable of sympathising with any injustice except this matter of woman suffrage, which touches you personally. Do you intend to go through life saying, ’I don’t believe it’ about everything it would make you uncomfortable to face?"

Pauline’s face took on that patronising, supercilious expression, which always made Ned want to strangle her, and she said, "Don’t give me one of Ned’s lectures secondhand, Aleta. It’s bad enough to have to endure the first edition when one can’t escape it."

Perhaps it was Pauline’s commanding physical presence which enabled her to seem to put me completely in the wrong, when the only answer she could make to any facts I offered for her consideration was, "I don’t believe it."

She was the most perfect type I have ever known of established authority, frequently benevolent, always unimaginative, and so sure of herself that if such a thing as a dispute between herself and God were possible she would know that God was mistaken.

I, on the other hand, had often the unpleasant aggressiveness of timidity; the self-assertion which frequently arises from being driven by an unknown urge to defy authority of which one stands in awe.

I have always felt that I owe that fear of authority to my stern upbringing, to my father’s cruel chastisements in particular, and I have never conquered my resentment of it. So when my father died I shed no tears. It would have been black hypocrisy to weep for the man who whipped my spirit into servility. I suppose there is no unpardonable sin, but if there were I am sure it would be this, for authority so to enchain a man’s soul with fear that he loses the power "to draw the Thing as he sees it, for the God of the Things as they are."

CHAPTER XIII. A VISITOR.

It was a week later that I was called to the telephone, and a deep, rich voice said over the wire, "This is McNair speaking."

I beamed upon that telephone and said, "Oh, yes, Mr. McNair."

"I was thinking that if you were going to be disengaged this evening I would call upon you," he continued.

I cancelled in intention a walk I had planned to take, and assured him I was quite free and would be delighted to see him.

As I went home in the sharp frosty darkness I gathered up tasty things for refreshments on the way, and arrived there I hunted out a pair of white silk stockings, and swept and dusted the room till it shone, and laid a fire in the grate, and bathed and put on my finest and daintiest things.

After dinner, of which Mrs. Fleming complained that I ate hardly a mouthful, I slipped into my own room and donned the white silk stockings and my white kid pumps, and lastly the delicate rose muslin frock which set off my dark hair and complexion to the best possible advantage.

At last I sat down to wait and looked about the room with a feeling of genuine satisfaction. Little by little I had eliminated Mrs. Fleming from the place. At the last house cleaning I had persuaded her to let me have a warm buff kalsomine on the walls instead of the brightly medallioned paper she had in mind, and a plain brown grass rug in exchange for the bright green leaves and pink flowers of the tapestry, which fitted the measure of her purse. And one by one I had carried up to the back bedroom the ugly plush-covered chairs and substituted for them cretonned-cushioned rockers and easy chairs of willow.

So that to-night as I looked about the room, fragrant with pots of crocus, and blue, pink and heliotrope hyacinths, which filled the sills of the windows at the side of the room, and overflowed on to the top of the bookcase and table, I had a feeling of genuine pride in this little place, which was all I had of home in the world.

I rose and moved the tea table up beside the fire, and took the copper tray, filled with dull green dishes, from the top of the bookcase and set it on the table. Then I stood back to admire the effect. At that moment the bell rang. I touched a match to the firewood in the grate and hurried to the door.

There was McNair, bigger than I had remembered him. Again my little palm was laid against his huge one, and again a thrill went through me as he closed his fingers over mine.

He stooped his head to enter the doorway of my room, and looked about him in pleased surprise. "You’re very cosy here, aren’t you?" he remarked, and I cannot say how gratified I was that he thought my place pretty.

I watched him, smiling to myself, as he let himself down circumspectly into the biggest and strongest of my chairs, which at that was a poor fit for him.

As it groaned under his weight he gave me an apprehensive look, and inquired anxiously, "Do you think it will hold?"

I expressed my confidence in the furniture and he leaned back in the chair; stretched his long legs out to the fire; put his hand instinctively into the pocket of his coat, and brought it quickly away empty, remembering his manners in the nick of time.

"Wouldn’t you like to smoke?" I asked, rightly interpreting the action.

He beamed on me, drew out his pipe and filled it, dribbling the tobacco carelessly on the rug, as a man is apt to do when he has been a bachelor too long, and had women paid to run around after him and keep silent about the trouble he makes.

He puffed hard at his pipe for a few seconds; took it from his mouth; watched the smoke curl slowly ceilingward. Then he turned to me with that winning smile of his, "You’re sure you don’t mind?" he asked.

"Not in the least," I lied cheerfully. As a matter of fact tobacco smoke does not agree with me very well, giving me a headache if taken in too large quantities, but I wouldn’t have had him know that for any consideration. I wanted him to like me, and I knew that if it were a choice between that pipe and me I wouldn’t have a chance in the world. The lies we women tell at such times! But God knows we have to or we would never get ourselves mates, so He overlooks it.

And now, being thoroughly comfortable, McNair turned to me, and I knew that he was aware that I was looking very well in my rose gown, and very likely he was thinking what a sensible little woman I was to buy such simple dainty things. I could have told him, if I’d had a mind to, that the more simple a woman’s clothes look the harder her husband is going to have to work to pay for them, but as The Preacher says, "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

I had planned before he came that I would talk to McNair about sensible things like politics (at that time I believed politics to be a rational subject) and let him see how intelligent I was, so I was amazed to hear myself saying, "How do you like my new dress?"

It was all wrong. I did not want McNair to know it was a new dress, in the first place lest he should think I had bought it on his account, which I had, and in the second because it was frivolous. But from the moment we met in the train McNair and I fitted together so comfortably that all the proprieties of a new acquaintanceship fell away from us naturally.

He looked surprised and oddly pleased at the question.

"I was just thinking what a pretty gown it is," he answered gravely, "though I don’t know much about women’s things. I was left an orphan when I was a little shaver and went to work young. About all the education I ever got was at night school, and through reading books I picked up by myself."

With this glimpse of his past I began to understand the secret of McNair’s charm as well as his shy diffidence about the queer medley of things he liked, and his boyish eagerness to share them with someone.

"And since I’ve grown up," McNair began again, paused, drew his mouth down gloomily at the corners, and stared silently into the fire. It struck me that he had one of the saddest faces I had ever seen.

At last he raised his head and looked at me with a deep melancholy in his gentle grey eyes. "I may be obliged to explain to you some day why I have had so little to do with women since I have grown up," he said. "Perhaps I ought to do so now, but I don’t see that it would do any good."

"Mr. McNair," I returned, in answer to the implied question of his tone, "there is nothing about you which I am not willing to take on trust."

He looked exceedingly pleased and grateful. "That is very good of you," he said, in a deep rich voice.

I could not see that it was, since it seemed to me that the whole atmosphere of the man breathed a clean, wholesome outlook upon life. That is still my opinion, though I now know the two things that he had in mind when he asked the question.

He now reached down into his pocket and brought out one of the old classics and read me a passage from it, and that started an argument, and then McNair, being Scotch, was in his element. We chased each other up hill and down dale with words, and whenever I pursued him too hotly he would put his fingers together thoughtfully, look at me with a smile and say, "I wonder."

In which circumstances there was nothing to be done but smile back, and maybe give him another cup of tea or a sandwich, which last he would wave in my face by way of emphasizing a point.

CHAPTER XIV. NED AGAIN.

On a certain unlucky night Ned met McNair at my room. Several times they had missed each other by an hour or two, but at last they came together. And they clashed immediately. An election was imminent and Ned was working night and day for an independent candidate, while McNair was throwing all his influence on the side of the Conservatives. After I had introduced them there was a pause for a moment before Ned turned to me with the question:

"Did you see that article about Fraser in this morning’s ’Times’?"

As it happened I had not seen it.

McNair chuckled. "I think that was the wittiest bit of writing I have seen in a long time," he declared. "I wonder who did it?"

I looked anxiously at Ned’s dark frowning face as he glared with dilating nostrils at McNair.

When he spoke his voice trembled with suppressed temper. "You thought it witty, did you? I thought it the most contemptible example of mud-slinging we’ve had in the campaign, and I can’t say any worse of it than that."

So they began a sharply contested battle on the political situation, Ned appealing to me several times, for support, which I gave unequivocally. It seemed to me that no one but an intense partisan would support the side McNair was advocating, and I did not hesitate to say so. It is true I loved McNair and I wanted him to love me, but I could not pretend to be other than I was to gain that end.

I noticed that the first time Ned called me Aleta, McNair looked quickly from him to me, and from that time forward he was more sarcastic in his arguments than I had ever known him to be. Altogether it was a most unpleasant hour before McNair, who had an engagement at the office, rose to leave.

I went to the outside door with him, and when I gave him my hand to say good-night he pressed it very gently, releasing it with a caressing touch of each finger, which brought a flood of colour to my face.

When I returned to the room Ned exclaimed in a tone of deep disgust, "Did you ever see such a hopeless reactionary? How do you stand him?"

"We need some brakes on the wheel of progress, Ned," I apologised for McNair.

He yawned contemptuously behind his hand. "It’s not much of a job, though, for a full-sized man. He might leave that to women."

"Why, Ned," I exclaimed indignantly, "I thought you were a feminist." Ned was a leading light in our suffrage organisation.

He had the grace to blush. "So I am," he protested quickly; "don’t be cross, Aleta."

"But I am cross," I answered. "Theoretically you believe in the equality of the sexes, but practically you do not feel that we are equal any more than McNair does. If you had a wife you would bully her with the worst of them."

Ned was sitting stooped over, with his knees spread out and his hands clasped between them. At that he turned and gave me a straight look with his piercing grey eyes. "I wish you would give me a chance to prove that you are wrong in that, Aleta," he said quietly, but with a deep seriousness.

"Please don’t--Ned," I stammered, twisting my handkerchief in my hands. "I--I don’t want to hurt you again."

"All right," he replied, with a quick intake of his breath, "I’ll just wait until you do learn to care for me."

He must have read something in my face, for he stopped short.

"Unless," he suggested, "unless you have learned to care for someone else?"

The colour mounted to my forehead, as I nervously smoothed the handkerchief on my lap.

"Is it McNair?"

The words fell upon the silence with such a queer hoarse sound that I turned anxiously to look at Ned. His face was I blanched, and there was a drawn look about his lips.

Another wave of colour surged over my face as I nodded my head slowly.

After a long silence Ned cleared his throat and asked, "Do you know anything about this man’s life, Aleta?"

"Very little," I answered, "and I am not willing to know any more than he is prepared to tell me himself."

I think that speech, more than anything I could have said, convinced Ned of my infatuation for McNair. He went away shortly, and from that time forward came to see me less often.

That night as I lay in bed I was filled with wonder at the criss-crosses of life. I agreed with Ned’s opinions on most things, nearly everything, in fact, and I knew him to be one of the most upright men God ever made. A seer of visions, he went more than half way to meet progress, so that as a citizen he far outshone McNair, but--but--well, I had never found myself measuring how far my head would come up supposing I stood within the circle of his arms, or trembling at the imagined pressure of his lips on mine. I have never stood in McNair’s arms either, but if I had I know that my head would hardly have come to the level of his heart.

CHAPTER XV. COLIN REFUSES TO COME.

It happened that Mrs. Fleming, who was a widow and childless, had an invalid cousin, with whom she took tea every Sunday evening, and that left me alone to get tea for myself, so I arranged to have McNair come for this meal, and I asked him to bring the boy Colin along.

The first Sunday night he said the boy had a toothache, and the next a headache, and the third a toe so sore he could not get his boot on, and I knew by the way McNair told me of these disablements that he took them all in good faith.

"Why, McNair," I said the third night, "he doesn’t want to come."

McNair opened his eyes very wide and drew his face down solemnly, "Do you think not?" he asked. "Why do you say that?"

"Because they are all my old Sunday school excuses," I laughed.

McNair frowned; put his table napkin on the cloth, squeezing it all in a bunch under his big hand, and rose from the table.

"Where are you going?" I asked, as he marched with that slow stately step of his out into the hall.

He did not answer, so I got up and ran after him and caught him just as he was going out of the door with his hat jammed down on his head.

"Where are you going?" I asked again, catching him by the coat and holding him.

"I’m going to fetch the young rascal. He’ll not insult your hospitality like that."

"If you do I’ll lock you both out when you come back," I threatened.

"Why?"

"Come indoors, so that the neighbours won’t see me trying to keep you here against your will, and I’ll tell you."

When we were seated I rested my chin in the palm of my hand and looked across the table at McNair, who with his stiff, lightish hair all awry was stirring his cup of tea violently.

"Don’t you know you couldn’t have brought Colin?" I asked. "No, you couldn’t." I insisted, as he opened his mouth to protest. "You might have used your great physical force, or your power as his guardian to bring Colin’s body, but his goodwill would have escaped you. That would likely have been turned to hatred towards me for having been, indirectly, the cause of this outrage against his personal liberty."

I told him of the cruel punishments to which I had been subjected as a child, and how I had learned from them that real power over the mind of anyone is in inverse ratio to the use of physical force. He listened sympathetically, for McNair is that rare member of the human species, a person who listens with enthusiasm.

"And so I don’t want you to bring Colin by force," I concluded, "for I want your boy to love me."

As I said it I blushed and looked down and took up a spoon from beside my plate and began to make lines on the cloth with it.

McNair was silent so long that I looked up, and was surprised to see him sitting in a tense attitude, sideways to the table, his right hand closed upon a crumpled napkin, his left clenched on his knee, and his face drawn down into deep haggard lines, while he stared our of the window with that sad expression I had often surprised in his eyes.

He must have felt my eyes upon him, for he turned to me with a wistful smile and said gently, "I was taking for granted that he wouldn’t be able to help it when he came to know you."

Then indeed I blushed furiously, and waited breathlessly for him to say more. But he only took his pipe from his pocket, lit it and puffed gloomily into the twilight. However, as I went about the task of clearing up I felt that his eyes often followed me.

Before he went home that evening we had made a plan for capturing Colin. The next Sunday evening he was not to come to tea, but I would meet them on the street going to the restaurant for dinner, and be asked to join them.

They were to be coming up the north side of Portage Avenue, between Garry and Hargrave Streets at ten minutes to six.

"Mind you’re not late," was McNair’s parting injunction.

CHAPTER XVI. WOOING COLIN.

Sunday came, a bright April day, but raw. I watched the time carefully so that I should not have to wait long on the street and yet should not miss them.

And I walked slowly and then fast, and the jeweller’s clock said ten to six and then five to six, and still there was no sign of McNair and the boy. I had worn my spring coat, because it was more becoming than my fur one, and I was nearly perishing.

Suddenly I was hailed from across the street, and there was McNair beckoning to me. And he was alone.

"Woman," he exclaimed indignantly, when I had come within speaking distance, "don’t you know the difference between the north and the south side of a street?"

McNair was blue with cold, too, and very angry with me, but I had no time to think of that yet. "Where’s Colin?" I asked, deeply disappointed that he was not there.

"I sent him back for a pocket handkerchief I did not want," McNair said, "and if you’ll go around that corner and down one block and back, I think we’ll meet according to plan."

So it turned out all right in spite of my mistake and I met Colin.

When McNair said, "This is my boy Colin, of whom I’ve been speaking to you," I put out my hand and he touched his cap, and allowed me to hold a limp, cold, unresponsive fist for a fraction of a minute before he drew it away and thrust it into the pocket of his bloomer trousers.

As McNair asked me in his best imitation of an off-hand manner to have tea with them, I noticed a disappointed expression pass over the boy’s face as if he had been counting on having McNair to himself this evening. Yet I was selfish enough to go.

At first I talked mostly to McNair, but afterwards I turned to the boy, a lad tall for his thirteen years, and with a dour Scotch face. I tried to discover what he liked, and experimented with boating, baseball and tennis, but he would merely answer ’yes’ and ’no’ to my questions and look down again at his plate.

At last I gave him up in despair, and, turning again to McNair, I began to speak of an historical pageant that was to be given the next week at the exhibition grounds, and of the aviator who was going to take part in it.

Colin put down his knife and leaned forward.

"Are you interested in aviation, Colin?" I asked, turning to him quickly.

"A--a--little," he stammered, taken unawares.

"So am I," I said heartily. Then a great inspiration came to me.

"Colin," I suggested, "would you take me out to the exhibition to see the flying? Mr. McNair can’t go with me," I added, quickly to forestall the suggestion I saw trembling on his lips.

Even so, he did not fully grasp the situation, and was about to protest when I glared at him and he subsided into silence, while Colin awkwardly consented to be my squire.

"Why wouldn’t you let me go to the show?" McNair asked when we had parted from Colin and were on our way to my place.

"Because people get acquainted in twos, not in threes," I replied, "and I want you to be good and leave me alone to woo your boy in my own way."

"Very well," he agreed quietly.

"And, McNair," I added, "you’re to give the lad plenty of money to pay his way and mine, for I want him to feel he is taking care of me that day."

"Do you, indeed!" he exclaimed in a tone of assumed indignation. "You make nothing at all of ordering a man to stay at home and pay the bills."

He did not refer to the matter again until we were saying good-night at the gate, an hour or two later. As we shook hands he looked down at me with a twinkle in his eye and asked, "Must I make allowance for an ice-cream cone, too?"

"Surely," I agreed, laughing.

He pressed my hand very gently: "I’m thinking you are wonderfully wise in the weaknesses of we men folk, and the way you exploit them is scandalous."

* * * * *

So Colin and I went to the pageant, and he paid my way everywhere, for McNair had been more than liberal. I could see that he was proud to be able to ask me to go into whatever booth took our fancy.

"Now, Miss Dey, let’s go up to the grandstand and see the flying," he suggested, as we came away from having our fortunes told.

I agreed, and we watched, from the best of seats, the thrilling performance, and every little while Colin would exclaim, "Did you see that now, Miss Dey?"

When it was over, and some other phase of the pageant had begun, I rose and said to Colin, "Come along, laddie," and he came along but mutinously, looking very glum as we made our way down from the grandstand and along the fence.

When we were a little way out of the crowd I stopped and explained: "I’ve an appointment to interview the aviator, Colin, and I thought you might like to meet him."

Such a look of awed gladness flashed into his face that I was more than repaid for all the trouble it had cost me to make the arrangement. And, anyway, wasn’t he McNair’s boy, and didn’t we have to be friends?

The aviator was a pleasant young chap, and finding that Colin asked intelligent questions he answered him man to man fashion, and allowed him to sit in the machine and showed him how it worked.

I think I never saw a boy so happy. All the way home his face wore a rapt expression, as if he found life too wonderful to be true. When he left me at my gate, and I thanked him for a delightful afternoon, he said, with boyish frankness, "Thank ye, too, Miss Dey, for introducing me to the flying man. Won’t the kids at school be jealous, though?"

* * * * *

So the ice was broken and Colin came with McNair to tea the next Sunday night and all the Sunday nights that followed. He would take a book, throw himself into a chair, with his legs dangling over the arm, and read.

One Sunday evening McNair came solemnly in from the garden seat under the maple tree by the gate, and asked, "May I send the boy to help wash up?" He had helped me himself once, but he did it so badly that I ordered him off to his pipe.

"You may no," I answered firmly.

"I thought as much," he growled at me between puffs. "It’s terrible the way you bully me, young woman, even about my own lad." And he marched slowly back, with his heavy echoless tread, to the garden seat, where I usually joined him when I had finished my work.

But it occurred to me that perhaps Colin felt left out, so this evening I went in to my sitting room, where he was draped loosely over the big stuffed chair I had bought since McNair became a regular visitor.

My heart was touched at the thought that his boy had never known any mothering, though, to be sure, the affection between him and McNair was the most beautiful think I had ever seen in my life. Still they were both Scotch, poor tings, and something told me the lad needed mothering. I perched on the arm of the chair and began to talk to him about "The Three Guardsmen," which he was reading. From that I went to lay my hand on his head and run my fingers through his hair.

"What are you doing there?" he asked turning his head back and looking up at me with his bright brown eyes. The words sounded cross, but there was something in the tone which encouraged me to continue.

"I was pretending you were my little brother," I answered, and I told him about Barry.

There are few things more touching than the way a young person responds to a simple, sincere confidence given without condescension.

"Gee, you must have felt awful bad when he died," he said, sympathetically, and leaned his head without reserve against my shoulder. I stooped and pressed my lips very gently to his forehead. From that moment I began to love Colin for his own sake, and not because he ws McNair’s laddie. He must have felt the difference, I imagine, for he permitted me after this to mother him in secret to my heart’s content. The next Sunday night he came and offered to help me with the dishes, and we had long talks about things, not important enough to be set down here. Altogether we three were so happy that I might have known it could not last.

CHAPTER XVII. THE QUARREL.

McNair and I quarrelled. It happened this way. Our suffrage organisation had decided to have a parade to awaken a slothful public to the importance of our propaganda. I cannot convey any idea of how distasteful the thing was to me; of how I shrank from the unpleasant conspicuousness of walking down a street lined with spectators. We were to be dressed in white and to wear large orange sashes across our shoulders bearing the legend, "Votes for Women."

On a certain evening, a week before the parade, I was contemplating, with a feeling of nausea of which I was deeply ashamed, this outfit lying over the back of a chair, when McNair came in.

"What trumpery is this?" he inquired, superciliously, noticing it almost immediately, and grasping the significance of it as promptly.

I told him that it was my costume for the parade, and because I hated it so much and was so ashamed of myself for my self-consciousness, I was sharper and firmer than I had any need to be.

"You’re not going to make a spectacle of yourself like that, are you?" he interrogated contemptuously.

"It all depends upon what one calls a spectacle," I retorted, beating my toe angrily upon the floor.

"I should certainly not permit my wife, if I had one, to carry on that way," he declared threateningly.

"I should certainly not permit my husband, if I had one, to substitute his conscience for mine," I snapped back.

"It’s disgustingly unwomanly," McNair insisted.

I felt that I turned pale. "McNair," I said, in a voice that shook, "I cannot permit you to continue your friendship with an unwomanly woman." With a melodramatic sweep of my hand I indicated that the door was convenient.

McNair rose, a red patch burning in each cheek: "You’ll live to rue the day you ordered me out," he prophesied darkly, "and mind, once gone, I’ll not come back in a hurry, and you’ll be gey lonesome." He stamped out noisily.

And I was lonesome. If I had hated the parade before I hated it doubly now, because it had been the means of separating me from McNair. I cannot tell you why I minded that so much, but the sun seemed not to shine any more with his old brilliance, and the chorus of the birds became discordant chirps; and the great strong free wind, that all spring had lifted my spirit on wings of happiness, became only a wind which blew the dust in my teeth and draped my hair in wisps over my collar; and my business associates were patently fools, and it was queer that I had never before noticed that Winnipeg was such an ugly, dull, windy city.

So the week dragged by.

The day of the parade began with a shower in the early morning, but long before noon the clouds had disappeared, and the wind had dried the streets. Conditions were perfect, and a great crowd turned out to watch.

There is something exhilarating in large numbers of people doing the same thing at the same time, so that in some ways I did not mind the parade as much as I had expected. In others I minded it more. It was rather jolly at the beginning with much laughing and calling back and forth as we got into line and raised our banners, at which the wind tugged hard. But afterward, when we were marching along between the rows of spectators, and listening to the sneering remarks the wind blew to us, and when in the crowd we saw the faces of men we met every day in business and they raised eyebrows of unfeigned surprise, but gave no other sign of recognition, that was very disagreeable.

I tried not to see the spectators, but a horrid fascination drew my eyes to the sidewalk against my will. And there, at a certain busy corner, stood a man and a boy right at the edge of the curb. I caught my breath sharply and steered my eyes straight ahead, but when we came opposite I turned, against my will, against all reason, and stole another glance, and was disconcerted to find McNair staring straight into my face. He gravely lifted his hat and Colin waved at me, but with a cool nod I marched on. Yet because McNair had lifted his hat the day grew brighter, and the wind did not bother me as it had done a little while before.

Presently I was aware that among the boys who were following us was Colin. He sidled over and slipped a piece of paper into my hand and sidled away again.

That paper burned my fingers. It made my palm itch to open it. I could scarcely wait while we tramped on block after block, up one street and down another, but at last the order was given for dispersal, and I spread out the crumpled note McNair had scribbled on the leaf of a note book. It read:

You’re looking very bonny in your