for great things, then to
discover that they had over-estimated him was irritating, it told
against their discernment, it was unflattering, and they thought
him inconsiderate.

So, in addition to his failure, Cragstone had to face the fact that
he had made himself unpopular among his kin.

As a boy he had been the pride of his family, as a youth, its hope
of fame and fortune; he was clever, handsome, inventive, original,
everything that society and his kind admired, but he criminally
fooled them and their expectation, and they never forgave him for
it.

He had dabbled in music, literature, law, everything--always with
semi-success and brilliant promise; he had even tried the stage,
playing the Provinces for an entire season; then, ultimately
sinking into mediocrity in all these occupations, he returned to
London, a hopelessly useless, a pitiably gifted man. His chilly
little aristocratic mother always spoke of him as "poor, dear
Charles." His brothers, clubmen all, graciously alluded to him
with, "deuced hard luck, poor Charlie." His father never mentioned
his name.

Then he went into "The Church," sailed for Canada, idled about for
a few weeks, when one of the great colonial bishops, not knowing
what else to do with him, packed him off north as a missionary to
the Indians.

And, after four years of disheartening labor amongst a
semi-civilized people, came this girl Lydia into his life. This
girl of the mixed parentage, the English father, who had been swept
northward with the rush of lumber trading, the Chippewa mother, who
had been tossed to his arms by the tide of circumstances. The girl
was a strange composition of both, a type of mixed blood, pale,
dark, slender, with the slim hands, the marvellously beautiful
teeth of her mother's people, the ambition, the small tender
mouth, the utter fearlessness of the English race. But the
strange, laughless eyes, the silent step, the hard sense of honor,
proclaimed her far more the daughter of red blood than of white.

And, with the perversity of his kind, Cragstone loved her; he
meant to marry her because he knew that he should not. What a
monstrous thing it would be if he did! He, the shepherd of this
half-civilized flock, the modern John Baptist; he, the voice of the
great Anglican Church crying in this wilderness, how could he wed
with this Indian girl who had been a common serving-maid in a house
in Penetanguishene, and been dismissed therefrom with an accusati