ered race.

Then the cleared land came to a stop against heavy timber. The car
whipped a curve and drove into what the fat man from Calgary facetiously
remarked upon as the tall uncut. Miss Benton sighted up these noble
columns to where a breeze droned in the tops, two hundred feet above.
Through a gap in the timber she saw mountains, peaks that stood bold as
the Rockies, capped with snow. For two days she had been groping for a
word to define, to sum up the feeling which had grown upon her, had been
growing upon her steadily, as the amazing scroll of that four-day
journey unrolled. She found it now, a simple word, one of the simplest
in our mother tongue--bigness. Bigness in its most ample sense,--that
was the dominant note. Immensities of distance, vastness of rolling
plain, sheer bulk of mountain, rivers that one crossed, and after a
day's journey crossed again, still far from source or confluence. And
now this unending sweep of colossal trees!

At first she had been overpowered with a sense of insignificance utterly
foreign to her previous experience. But now she discovered with an
agreeable sensation of surprise she could vibrate to such a keynote. And
while she communed with this pleasant discovery the car sped down a
straight stretch and around a corner and stopped short to unload sacks
of mail at a weather-beaten yellow edifice, its windows displaying
indiscriminately Indian baskets, groceries, and hardware. Northward
opened a broad scope of lake level, girt about with tremendous peaks
whose lower slopes were banked with thick forest.

Somewhere distant along that lake shore was to be her home. As the car
rolled over the four hundred yards between store and white-and-green St.
Allwoods, she wondered if Charlie would be there to meet her. She was
weary of seeing strange faces, of being directed, of being hustled
about.

But he was not there, and she recalled that he never had been notable
for punctuality. Five years is a long time. She expected to find him
changed--for the better, in certain directions. He had promised to be
there; but, in this respect, time evidently had wrought no appreciable
transformation.

She registered, was assigned a room, and ate luncheon to the melancholy
accompaniment of a three-man orchestra struggling vainly with Bach in an
alcove off the dining room. After that she began to make inquiries.
Neither clerk nor manager knew aught of Charlie Benton. They were both
in their first se