answer was sent. She confined herself entirely to
describing the new experience of a Canadian winter. Of her departure
from her brother's roof and of her marriage, she said nothing whatever.

In accordance with her resolution to make the best of things, she set
about making the shack more comfortable and homelike. There were many of
those things which, small in themselves, count for much, that her busy
brain planned to do during the time taken up in the necessary
overhauling. This cleaning-up process had taken several days,
interrupted as it was by the ordinary daily routine.

To her unaccustomed hand, the task of preparing three hearty meals a day
was a matter that consumed a large amount of time, but gradually, day by
day, she found herself systematizing her task and becoming less
inexpert. To be sure she made many mistakes; once, indeed, in a fit of
preoccupation, while occupied in rearranging the bedroom, burning up
the entire dinner.

Upon his return, her husband had found her red-eyed and apologetic.

"Oh, well!" he said. "It ain't worth crying over. What is the saying?
'Hell wasn't built in a day'?"

Nora screamed with laughter. "I think you're mixing two old saws. Rome
wasn't built in a day and Hell is paved with good intentions."

"Well," he laughed good-naturedly, "they both seem to hit the case."

He certainly was unfailingly good-tempered. Not that there were not
times when Nora did not have to remind herself of her new resolution and
he, for his part, exercise all his forbearance. But in the main, things
went more smoothly than either had dared to hope from their inauspicious
beginning.

The thing that Nora found hardest to bear was that he never lost a
certain masterful manner. It was a continual reminder that she had been
defeated. Then, too, he had a maddening way of rewarding her for good
conduct which was equally hard to bear, until she realized that it was
perfectly unconscious on his part.

For example: after she had struggled for a week with her makeshift
kitchen outfit, small in the beginning but greatly reduced by her
destructive outburst on the night of their arrival, he had, without
saying a word to her of his intentions, driven over to Prentice and laid
in an entire new stock of crockery and several badly needed pots and
pans.

Nora had found it hard to thank him. If they had been labeled "For a
Good Child" she could not have felt more humiliated. And what was
equally trying, he se