l. Now tell me if you have any definite
plans--you know how I always used to advise you?"

I felt I needed sympathy, and Alice was a faithful confidant, so I opened
my heart to her, and she listened with patient interest. It seemed to me
that my cousin had never looked so winsome as she sat close beside me with
a slight flush of color in her usually pale face where the soft lamplight
touched it. So we sat and talked until Martin Lorimer entered unobserved,
and when, on hearing a footstep, I looked up I saw that he was smiling
with what seemed grim approval as his eyes rested on us, and this puzzled
me. Then his daughter started almost guiltily as he said, "I wondered
where you two were. Dinner has been waiting, and you never heard the
bell."

I retired early that night, and, being young, forgot my perplexities in
heavy slumber. The next morning I noticed that Alice's eyes seemed heavy,
and I wondered what could be the reason. In after years I mentioned it
when Grace and I were talking about old times together, but she only
smiled gravely, and said, "I sometimes think your cousin was too good for
this world."

The next day was one of those wet Sundays which it is hard to forget. The
bleak moor was lost in vapor, and a pitiless drizzle came slanting down
the valley, while the raw air seemed filled with falling leaves. A
prosperous man with a good conscience may make light of such things, but
they leave their own impression on the poor and anxious; so, divided
between two courses, I wandered up and down, finding rest nowhere until I
chanced upon a large new atlas in my uncle's library. Martin Lorimer was
proud of his library. He was a well-read man, though like others of his
kind he made no pretense at scholarship, and used the broad, burring
dialect when he spoke in his mill. Here I found occupation studying the
Dominion of Canada, especially the prairie territories, and lost myself in
dreams of half-mile furrows and a day's ride straight as the crow flies
across a cattle run, all of which, though I scarcely dared hope it then,
came true in its own appointed time.

My uncle had ridden out early, for he was to take part in the new mayor's
state visit to church in the manufacturing town, and even Alice seemed out
of spirits, so when I left the library there was the weary afternoon to be
dragged through somehow. It passed very slowly, and then as I stood by the
stables a man from the house at the further end of the valley