s hand to
Millicent as she rose.

"Now," he said, "you can go to rest with a clear conscience."

She left him with a word of thanks, wondering whether she had been
indiscreet, and why she had told him so much. She knew nothing to his
advantage except one chivalrous action, and she had not desired to
arouse his pity, but he had an honest face and had shown an
understanding sympathy which touched her, because she had seldom
experienced it. He had left the army with a stain upon his name, but
she shrank from judging harshly and felt that he had not merited his
disgrace. Then she forgot him and went to sleep.

Blake stayed on deck some time, thinking about her, but presently
decided that this was an unprofitable occupation. He was a marked man,
with a lonely road to travel, and, though he found some amusement by
the way it led him apart from the society of women of the kind he most
cared for.

CHAPTER III

THE COUSINS

Dinner was over at the _Windsor_ in Montreal, and Mrs. Keith, who found
the big hotel rather noisy and uncomfortably warm, was sitting with
Mrs. Ashborne in the square between it and St. Catharine's Street. A
cool air blew uphill from the river and the patch of grass with its
fringe of small, dusty trees had a certain picturesqueness in the
twilight. Above it the wooded crest of the mountain rose darkly
against the evening sky; lights glittered behind the network of thin
branches and fluttering leaves along the sidewalk, and the dome of the
cathedral bulked huge and shadowy across the square. Down hill,
towards St. James's, rose towering buildings, with the rough-hewn front
of the Canadian Pacific depot prominent among them, and the air was
filled with the clanging of street cars and the tolling of locomotive
bells. Once or twice, however, when the throb of the traffic
momentarily subsided, music rose faint and sweet from the cathedral,
and Mrs. Keith, who heard the uplifted voices and knew what they sang,
turned to listen. She had heard them before, through her open window
in the early morning when the city was silent and its busy toilers
slept, and now it seemed to her appropriate that the voices could not
be wholly drowned by its hoarse commercial clamour.

The square served as a cool retreat for the inhabitants of crowded
tenements and those who had nowhere else to go, but Margaret Keith was
not fastidious about her company. She was interested in the unkempt
emigrants who, waitin