on forgotten. That, however, was a matter that
depended largely on one's point of view, and she could not regard him
as a failure.

There was in Ida Stirling a vein of wholesome simplicity which made
for clearness of vision, and she seldom shrank from looking even an
unwelcome truth squarely in the face. That Clarence Weston was
probably shoveling railroad gravel did not count with her, but she was
reasonably sure that the fact that she was a young woman with
extensive possessions would have a deterrent effect on him. She once
or twice had felt a curious compelling tenderness for him when in his
presence, but reflection had come later, and she could not be sure
that she loved him well enough to marry him, should he offer her the
opportunity. During the last few months she had become more uncertain
on this point, for her English visit was having an effect on her that
she had not expected.

In the meanwhile the insistent clamor of the city was forcing itself
on her attention, until at length she became engrossed by it. The
theaters had just been closed, and the streets resounded with the
humming of motors, the drumming of hoofs and the rattle of wheels.
They also were flooded with what seemed to her garish light, for she
had swept through many a wooden town lying wrapped in darkness beside
its railroad track. The hansoms and motors came up in battalions, and
in most of them she could see men of leisure in conventional white and
black and lavishly dressed women, while the sidewalks streamed with a
further host of pleasure-seekers. She wondered when these people
slept, or when they worked, if indeed in one sense some of them worked
at all. Even in the winter they had nothing like this in Montreal, and
the contrast between it and the strenuous, grimly practical activity
of the Canadian railroad camp or the lonely western ranch was more
striking still. There men rose to toil with the dawn, and slept when
the soft dusk crept up across solemn pines or silent prairie. These
men, however, saw and handled the results of their toil, great
freight-trains speeding over the trestles they had built, vast bands
of cattle, and leagues of splendid wheat. After all, the genius of
London is administrative and not constructive, and it is the latter
that appeals most directly to the Colonial. One can see the forests go
down or the great rocks rent, but the results that merely figure in
the balance-sheet are less apparent.

There was anoth