lf to vague and
brooding discontent.

Ruth Duveen had broken his former tranquillity. In a sense, she had
awakened him, and he imagined she had meant to do so. All the same, to
think she loved him was ridiculous; she was rather experimenting with
fresh material. Yet she was accountable for his discontent. She had
helped him to see that while he labored in the woods he had missed much.
He wanted the society of cultivated women and men with power and
influence; to use control instead of carrying out orders; and to know
something of refinement and beauty. After all, his father was a
cultivated Englishman, although Lister imagined he had inherited
qualities that helped him most from his Canadian mother. It was all he
had inherited, except some debts he had laboriously paid.

He admitted that to realize his ambitions might be hard, but he meant to
try. Canada was for the young and stubborn. If his chiefs did not
promote him, he would make a plunge, and if his new plan did not work,
he would go over and see the Old Country. Then he would come back,
braced and refreshed, and try his luck again.

Putting down his pipe, he got into bed. He was tired and in the morning
the gravel cars must be pulled out of the muskeg. The job was awkward,
and while he thought about it he went to sleep.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TEST

A boisterous wind swept the high plain and round, white-edged clouds
rolled across the sky. The grass that ran back from the horizon was
parched, and in the distance a white streak of blowing dust marked a
dried alkali lake. Dust of dark color drove along the row of wooden
stores and houses that fronted the railroad track, across which three
grain elevators rose like castles. The telegraph posts along the track
melted into the level waste, and behind the spot where they vanished the
tops of a larger group of elevators cut the edge of the plain.

The street was not paved, and the soil was deeply ploughed by wheels.
The soil was the black gumbo in which the wheat plant thrives, but the
town occupied the fringe of a dry belt and farming had not made much
progress. Now, however, a company was going to irrigate the land with
water from a river fed by the Rockies' snow. The town was square, and
although it looked much smaller than real-estate agents' maps indicated,
it was ornamented by four wooden churches, a Y.M.C.A. like a temple, and
an ambitious public hall.

The Tecumseh Hotel occupied a corner lot at the end