ves along the sidewalk, and the dome of the
cathedral bulked huge and shadowy across the square. Downhill, toward
St. James's, rose towering buildings, with the rough-hewn front of the
Canadian Pacific station prominent among them, and the air was filled
with the clanging of street-cars and the tolling of locomotive bells.
Once or twice, however, when the throb of the traffic momentarily
subsided, music rose faint and sweet from the cathedral, and Mrs. Keith
turned to listen. She had heard the uplifted voices before, through
her open window in the early morning when the city was silent and its
busy toilers slept, and now it seemed to her appropriate that they
could not be wholly drowned by its hoarse commercial clamor.

The square served as a cool retreat for the inhabitants of crowded
tenements and those who had nowhere else to go, but Margaret Keith was
not fastidious about her company. She was interested in the unkempt
immigrants who, waiting for a west-bound train, lay upon the grass,
surrounded by their tired children; and she had sent Millicent down the
street to buy fruit to distribute among the travelers. She liked to
watch the French Canadian girls who slipped quietly up the broad
cathedral steps. They were the daughters of the rank and file, but
their movements were graceful and they were tastefully dressed. Then
the blue-shirted, sinewy men, who strolled past, smoking, roused her
curiosity. They had not acquired their free, springy stride in the
cities; these were adventurers who had met with strange experiences in
the frozen North and the lonely West. Some of them had hard faces and
a predatory air, but that added to their interest. Margaret Keith
liked to watch them all, and speculate about their mode of life; that
pleasure could still be enjoyed, though, as she sometimes told herself
with humorous resignation, she could no longer take a very active part
in things.

Presently, however, something that appealed to her in a more direct and
personal way occurred, for a man came down the steps of the Windsor and
crossed the well-lighted street with a very pretty English girl. He
carried himself well, and had the look of a soldier; his figure was
finely proportioned; but his handsome face suggested sensibility rather
than decision of character, and his eyes were dreamy. His companion,
so far as Mrs. Keith could judge by her smiling glance as she laid her
hand upon his arm when they left the sidewalk,