e she went West to give her perforated lung to the healing air of
the plains, and to live out-doors with the men--a man's life. Then she had
never put a curb on her tongue, or greatly on her actions, except that,
though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in their own minds, about her,
no one had ever had any _right_ to quarrel about her. With a tongue which
made men gasp with laughter, with as comic a gift as ever woman had, and
as equally comic a face, she had been a good-natured little tyrant in her
way. She had given a kiss here and there, and had taken one, but always
there had been before her mind the picture of a careworn woman who
struggled to bring up her three children honestly, and without the help of
charity, and, with a sigh of content and weariness, had died as Cassy made
her first hit on the stage and her name became a household word. And
Cassy, garish, gay, freckled, witty, and whimsical, had never forgotten
those days when her mother prayed and worked her heart out to do her duty
by her children. Cassy Mavor had made her following, had won her place,
was the idol of "the gallery"; and yet she was "of the people," as she had
always been, until her first sickness came, and she had gone out to
Lumley's, out along the foothills of the Rockies.

What had made her fall in love with George Baragar? She could not have
told, if she had been asked. He was wayward, given to drink at times,
given also to card-playing and racing; but he had a way with him which few
women could resist and that made men his friends; and he had a sense of
humor akin to her own. In any case, one day she let him catch her up in
his arms, and there was the end of it. But no, not the end, after all. It
was only the beginning of real life for her. All that had gone before
seemed but playing on the threshold, though it had meant hard, bitter
hard, work, and temptation, and patience, and endurance of many kinds. And
now George was gone forever. But George's little boy lay there on the bed
in a soft sleep, with all his life before him.

She turned from the warm window and the buoyant, inspiring scene to the
bed. Stooping over, she kissed the sleeping boy with an abrupt eagerness,
and made a little awkward, hungry gesture of love over him, and her face
flushed hot with the passion of motherhood in her.

"All I've got now," she murmured. "Nothing else left--nothing else at
all."

She heard the door open behind her, and she turned round. Aunt K