try
with a better heart, knowing that Kitty Brooks would put a swift
quietus on any gossip that came her way.

So that Hazel went down to the dining-room light-heartedly, and when
the meal was finished came back and fell to reading her papers. The
first of the Western papers was a Vancouver _World_. In a real-estate
man's half-page she found a diminutive sketch plan of the city on the
shores of Burrard Inlet, Canada's principal outpost on the far Pacific.

"It's quite a big place," she murmured absently. "One would be far
enough away there, goodness knows."

Then she turned to the "Help Wanted" advertisements. The thing which
impressed her quickly and most vividly was the dearth of demand for
clerks and stenographers, and the repeated calls for domestic help and
such. Domestic service she shrank from except as a last resort. And
down near the bottom of the column she happened on an inquiry for a
school-teacher, female preferred, in an out-of-the-way district in the
interior of the province.

"Now, that--" Hazel thought.

She had a second-class certificate tucked away among her belongings.
Originally it had been her intention to teach, and she had done so one
term in a backwoods school when she was eighteen. With the ending of
the term she had returned to Granville, studied that winter, and got
her second certificate; but at the same time she had taken a
business-college course, and the following June found her clacking a
typewriter at nine dollars a week. And her teacher's diploma had
remained in the bottom of her trunk ever since.

"I could teach, I suppose, by rubbing up a little on one or two
subjects as I went along," she reflected. "I wonder now--"

What she wondered was how much salary she could expect, and she took up
the paper again, and looked carefully for other advertisements calling
for teachers. In the _World_ and in a Winnipeg paper she found one or
two vacancies to fill out the fall term, and gathered that Western
schools paid from fifty to sixty dollars a month for "schoolma'ams"
with certificates such as she held.

"Why not?" she asked herself. "I've got two resources. If I can't get
office work I can teach. I can do _anything_ if I have to. And it's
far enough away, in all conscience--all of twenty-five hundred miles."

Unaccountably, since Kitty Brooks' visit, she found herself itching to
turn her back on Granville and its unpleasant associations. She did
not attempt to analy