for scolding or
reproach, and that saved her much. She was even quietly cheerful, but
it was only the pale reflection of a lost youth which would have been
buoyant and gallant, gay and glad, had it been given the natural thing
in the natural world.

There came a day, however, when the long, unchanging routine, gray with
prison grayness, was broken; when the round of household duties and the
prison discipline were interrupted. It was as sudden as a storm in the
tropics, as final and as fateful as birth or death. That day she was
taken suddenly and acutely ill. It was only a temporary malady, an
agonizing pain which had its origin in a sudden chill. This chill was
due, as the Young Doctor knew when he came, to a vitality which did not
renew itself, which got nothing from the life to which it was sealed,
which for some reason could not absorb energy from the stinging, vital
life of the prairie world in the June-time.

In her sudden anguish, and in the absence of Joel Mazarine, she sent
for the Young Doctor. That in itself was courageous, because it was
impossible to tell what view the master of Tralee would take of her
action, ill though she was. She was not supposed to exercise her will.
If Joel Mazarine had been at home, he would have sent for wheezy,
decrepit old Doctor Gensing, whose practice the Young Doctor had
completely absorbed over a series of years.

But the Young Doctor came. Rada, the half-breed woman, had undressed
Louise and put her to bed; and he found her white as snow at the end of
a paroxysm of pain, her long eyelashes lying on a cheek as smooth as a
piece of Satsuma ware which has had the loving polish of ten thousand
friendly fingers over innumerable years. When he came and stood beside
her bed, she put out her hand slowly towards him. As he took it in his
firm, reassuring grasp, he felt the same fluttering appeal which
had marked their handclasp on the day of their first meeting at the
railway-station. Looking at the huge bed and the rancher-farmer's coarse
clothes hanging on pegs, the big greased boots against the wall, a
sudden savage feeling of disgust and anger took hold of him; but the
spirit of healing at once emerged, and he concentrated himself upon the
duty before him.

For a whole hour he worked with her, and at length subdued the
convulsions of pain which distorted the beautiful face and made the
childlike body writhe. He had a resentment against the crime which had
been committed. Mar