place shall it be?"

But the reply from Cariboo Meadows, B. C., the first place she had
thought of, decided her. The member of the school board who replied
held forth the natural beauty of the country as much as he did the
advantages of the position. The thing that perhaps made the strongest
appeal to Hazel was a little kodak print inclosed in the letter,
showing the schoolhouse.

The building itself was primitive enough, of logs, with a pole-and-sod
roof. But it was the huge background, the timbered mountains rising to
snow-clad heights against a cloudless sky, that attracted her. She had
never seen a greater height of land than the rolling hills of Ontario.
Here was a frontier, big and new and raw, holding out to her as she
stared at the print a promise--of what? She did not know. Adventure?
If she desired adventure, it was purely a subconscious desire. But she
had lived in a rut a long time without realizing it more than vaguely,
and there was something in her nature that responded instantly when she
contemplated journeying alone into a far country. She found herself
hungering for change, for a measure of freedom from petty restraints,
for elbow-room in the wide spaces, where one's neighbor might be ten or
forty miles away. She knew nothing whatever of such a life, but she
could feel a certain envy of those who led it.

She sat for a long time looking at the picture, thinking. Here was the
concrete, visible presentment of something that drew her strongly. She
found an atlas, and looked up Cariboo Meadows on the map. It was not
to be found, and Hazel judged it to be a purely local name. But the
letter told her that she would have to stage it a hundred and
sixty-five miles north from Ashcroft, B. C., where the writer would
meet her and drive her to the Meadows. She located the stage-line
terminal on the map, and ran her forefinger over the route. Mountain
and lake and stream lined and dotted and criss-crossed the province
from end to end of its seven-hundred-mile length. Back of where
Cariboo Meadows should be three or four mining camps snuggled high in
the mountains.

"What a country!" she whispered. "It's wild; really, truly wild; and
everything I've ever seen has been tamed and smoothed down, and made
eminently respectable and conventional long ago. That's the place.
That's where I'm going, and I'm going it blind. I'm not going to tell
any one--not even Kitty--until, like a bear, I've gone ov