e wine-glow on their snow-clad peaks. And
while I did my best to shake off the Maud-Muller feeling which was
creeping over me, by studying the tranquillizingly remote
mountain-tops, Duncan confided to me that he had first said: "Fifty
thousand or bu'st!" But two months ago he had amended that to "A
hundred thousand or bu'st!" and now he had his reasons for saying,
with his jaw set: "Just a cool quarter of a million, before I quit
this game!"

It was for us, I told myself as I looked down at my kiddies, that the
Dour Man behind the big mahogany wheel was fighting. This, I felt,
should bring me happiness, and a new sense of security. And it was
only because my stomach was empty, I tried to assure myself, that my
poor old prairie heart felt that way. I should have been happy, for I
was going to a brand-new home--and it was one of those foot-hill late
afternoons that make you think of the same old razor-blade muffled up
in the same old panne-velvet, an evening of softness shot through with
a steely sharpness. There was a Chinook arch of Irish point-lace still
in the sky, very much like the one I had left behind me, and the sky
itself was a canopy of robin-egg blue _crepe de chine_ hemmed with
salmon pink.

But as we whirled up out of the city into the higher ground of some
boulevarded and terraced residential district the evening air seemed
colder and the solemn old Rockies toward the west took on an air of
lonesomeness. It made the thought of home and open fires and quiet
rooms very welcome. The lights came out along the asphalted streets,
spangling the slopes of that sedate new suburb with rectangular lines
of brilliants. Duncan, in answer to the questions of the children,
explained that he was taking the longer way round, so as to give us
the best view of the house as we drove in.

"Here we are!" he exulted as we slowed down and turned into a crescent
lined with baby poplar and Manitoba maple.

I leaned out and saw a big new house of tapestry brick, looking oddly
palatial on its imposing slope of rising ground. My husband stopped,
in fact, midway in a foolishly pillared gate that bisected a long
array of cobble-stone walls, so that we might get a look at the
gardens. They seemed very new gardens, but much of their newness was
lost in that mercifully subduing light in which I saw trim-painted
trellises and sepulchral white flower-urns and pergolas not yet
softened with creepers. There was also a large iron fountain,