who seemed, from their conversation, to take it all seriously enough.
She had made all allowance for the rougher life in a new and unsettled
country. There was something picturesque and romantic about the
frontiersman which had always appealed to her imagination. She had read
a little of him and had seen a play in London the night she recognized
Reggie from afar, where the scene was laid in the Far West. On returning
to the hotel she had looked with new interest at Eddie's photograph and
tried to picture him in the costume worn by the leading man.

But to find that her own brother, a man of education and refinement,
actually worked with his own hands like a common laborer and--what to
Nora's mind was infinitely more incomprehensible--on a footing of
perfect equality with his hired men, calling them familiarly by their
given names and being called "Ed" in turn, was a distinctly disagreeable
revelation. That they should be familiar with Gertie was quite another
matter. Probably they were acquaintances of long standing dating back to
her old hotel days.

Her sister-in-law, too, was absolutely different from the type she had
imagined. Always she had seen her as one of those vapid, pretty little
creatures who had become old long before her time; peevish, spoiled,
inclined to be flirtatious, refusing to give up her youth, still living
in the recollection of her little day of triumph.

Gertie fulfilled only one of these conditions. She was a small woman,
not nearly so tall as Nora herself. In all else she was as different as
possible from what she had imagined. There could never have been
anything of the 'clinging vine' about Gertie. As a girl she might have
been handsome in an almost masculine way; pretty, in the generally
accepted sense, she could never have been.

Her one coquetry seemed to be in the matter of shoes. Her feet were
unbelievably small. Nora divined that she was inordinately proud of
them. While always scrupulously neat, she was apparently indifferent to
clothes so long as they were clean and not absolutely shabby. But her
high-heeled shoes were the smartest that could be had from Winnipeg.

And as for her being soft and spoiled! Never was there a more tireless
and hard-working creature. From early morning till late at night she was
never idle. She was a perfect human dynamo of force and energy. The
cooking and washing for the 'family' which, now that Nora was here,
consisted of six persons, four of whom w