nd and
soul. She trembled and hesitated before every cave of mystery which her
daily life with him opened darkly to her abashed eyes. She felt herself
going round and round and round in a circle, not forlorn enough to rebel
or break away, but dazed and wondering and shrinking. She was like one
robbed of will, made mechanical by a stern conformity to imposed rules
of life and conduct. There were women in Askatoon who were sorry for
her and made efforts to get near her; but whether it was the Methodist
Minister or his wife, or the most voluble sister of the prayer-meeting,
none got beyond the threshold of Tralee, as it were.

The girl-wife abashed them. She was as one who automatically spoke
as she was told to speak, did what she was told to do. Yet she always
smiled at the visitors when they came, or when she saw them and others
at the Meeting House. It was, however, not a smile for an individual,
whoever that individual might chance to be. It was only the kindness
of her nature expressing itself. Talking seemed like the exercise of a
foreign language to her, but her smiling was free and unconstrained, and
it belonged to all, without selection.

The Young Doctor, looking at her one day as she sat in a buggy while her
monster-man was inside the chemist's shop, said to himself:

"Sterilized! Absolutely, shamefully sterilized! But suppose she wakes up
suddenly out of that dream between life and death--what will happen?"

He remembered that curious, sudden, delicate catch of his palm on the
day when they first shook hands at the railway-station, and to him it
was like the flutter of life in a thing which seemed dead. How often he
had noticed it in man and animal on the verge of extinction! He had not
mistaken that fluttering appeal of her fingers. He was young enough to
translate it into flattering terms of emotion, but he did not do so.
He was fancy-free himself, and the time would come when he would do a
tremendous thing where a woman was concerned, a woman in something the
same position as this poor girl; but that shaking, thrilling thing was
still far off from him. For this child he only felt the healer's desire
to heal.

He was one of those men who never force an issue; he never put forward
the hands of the clock. He felt that sooner or later Louise Mazarine--he
did not yet know her Christian name--would command his help, as so many
had done in that prairie country, and not necessarily for relief of
physical pain o