young woman, gripping
tighter the hand of her little child, the daughter of a young butcher of
twenty-three years of age.

"Poor lamb!" another motherly voice said.

"She ought to be ashamed of herself--money, I suppose," sneered Ellen
Banner, a sour-faced shopkeeper's daughter, who had taught in Sunday
school for twenty years and was still single.

"Beauty and the beast," remarked the Young Doctor to himself, as he saw
the two drive away, Patsy Kernaghan running beside the wagon, evidently
trying to make friends with the mastodon of Tralee.

CHAPTER II. "MY NAME IS LOUISE"

Askatoon never included the Mazarines in its social scheme. Certainly
Tralee was some distance from the town, but, apart from that, the
new-comers remained incongruous, alien and alone. The handsome,
inanimate girl-wife never appeared by herself in the streets of
Askatoon, but always in the company of her morose husband, whose only
human association seemed to be his membership in the Methodist body
so prominent in the town. Every Sunday morning he tied his pair of bay
horses with the covered buggy to the hitching-post in the church-shed
and marched his wife to the very front seat in the Meeting House, having
taken possession of it on his first visit, as though it had no other
claimants. Subsequently he held it in almost solitary control,
because other members of the congregation, feeling his repugnance to
companionship, gave him the isolation he wished. As a rule he and
his wife left the building before the last hymn was sung, so avoiding
conversation. Now and again he stayed to a prayer-meeting and, doing so,
invariably "led in prayer," to a very limited chorus of "Amens." For in
spite of the position which Tralee conferred on its owner, there was
a natural shrinking from "that wild boar," as outspoken Sister Skinner
called him in the presence of the puzzled and troubled Minister.

This was always a time of pained confusion for the girl-wife. She
had never "got religion," and there was something startling to her
undeveloped nature in the thunderous apostrophes, in terms of the oldest
part of the Old Testament, used by her tyrant when he wrestled with the
Lord in prayer.

These were perhaps the only times when her face was the mirror of her
confused, vague and troubled youth. Captive in a world bounded by a
man's will, she simply did not begin to understand this strange and
overpowering creature who had taken possession of her body, mi