l balanced
and singularly just. The strife between his prejudices and his sense of
justice was what made him always interesting in all the great prairie
and foothill country of which Askatoon was the centre.

He had got his shock, indeed, before Mazarine had introduced his wife to
the Mayor. Not for nothing had he studied the human mind in its relation
to the human body, and the expression of that mind speaking through the
body. The instant Joel Mazarine and his wife stepped out of the
train, he knew they were what they were to each other. That was a real
achievement in knowledge, because Mazarine was certainly sixty-five if
he was a day, and his wife was a slim, willowy slip of a girl, not more
than nineteen years of age, with the most wonderful Irish blue eyes and
long dark lashes. There was nothing of the wife or woman about her, save
something in the eyes, which seemed to belong to ages past and gone,
something so solemnly wise, yet so painfully confused, that there
flashed into the Young Doctor's mind at first glance of her the vision
of a young bird caught from its thoughtless, sunbright journeyings, its
reckless freedom of winged life, into the captivity of a cage.

She smiled, this child, as she shook hands with the Mayor, and it had
the appeal of one who had learned the value of smiling--as though it
answered many a question and took the place of words and the trials of
the tongue. It was pitifully mechanical. As the Young Doctor saw, it was
the smile of a captive in a strange uncomprehended world, more a dream
than a reality.

"Mrs. Mazarine, welcome," said the Mayor after an abashed pause. "We're
proud of this town, but we'll be prouder still, now you've come."

The girl-wife smiled again. At the same time it was as though she
glanced apprehensively out of the corner of her eye at the old man by
her side, as she said:

"Thank you. There seems to be plenty of room for us out here, so we
needn't get in each other's way.... I've never been on the prairie
before," she added.

The Young Doctor realized that her reply had meanings which would escape
the understanding of the Mayor, and her apprehensive glance had told him
of the gruesome jealousy of this old man at her side. The Mayor's polite
words had caused the long, clean-shaven upper lip of the old man with
the look of a debauched prophet, to lengthen surlily; and he noticed
that a wide, flat foot in a big knee-boot, inside trousers too short,
tapped the